To do what? I'm not too familiar with them but what more do they have other than a website to look at potential spaces with some photos and a description and sign up for one? Maybe process payments as well?
The biggest tech challenge they have is figuring out how many conferences rooms to build out per X number of offices.
Not enough, and you have a huge queue to use them, too many and you have lost office space rental.
Outside of that there isn't much tech to go around.
We used them before they were WeWork, when they were still GreenDesk in Dumbo.
Overall it was great, and it's a great product given the flexibility and move in ready amenities that it provides and if you ever step foot inside of Regus you will immediately notice the difference.
Though now there is a lot of competition from smaller companies and of course I'm sure Regus has stepped up their game in response.
Their growth is amazing, but ultimately it's still a real estate holding company. The same is true for E-commerce. Though their volume is immense, they trade no where near their multiples for revenue as other tech companies given the different margins they have, cyclical sales cycles, and many other factors that make that sector much less attractive than a pure software play in the B2B space.
But looks like we will see how this all plays out.
Really the exposure that Softbank has here is the real worrying issue. It's a massive stake, at a massive valuation, and if this IPO doesn't perform well (and most people think it won't), this maybe a real red blot on their performance.
> The biggest tech challenge they have is figuring out how many conferences rooms to build out per X number of offices.
How is that a tech challenge?
The only actual tech they have is their swipe card access and room/desk booking systems
They might use some tech internally to optimise certain aspects of their business, but that would be like calling a coffee shop that does their finances in Excel a tech company
I'll see if I can dig up the article, but I think they're planning on tracking everything that workers do in their buildings and giving that data to employers.
>WeWork's latest acquisition is a small software company with 24 employees. Euclid is a spatial analytics platform...Euclid's website says the company is "focused on redefining the workplace experience of the future." Translation: optimizing every aspect of the physical workplace so workers are their most productive. Euclid does this by tracking how people move around physical spaces. Its technology can track how many people showed up to a meeting or to that after-work happy hour. The company can see where employees tend to congregate and for how long. It's all done over Wi-Fi.
There are a couple of issues with this. It's a well-known effect in management theory that workers behave differently when they know they're being observed. Also, presumably most of their tenants employ knowledge workers not factory floor workers, and so data about how often they go to the bathroom or how many steps they take in an hour is probably a lot less relevant than tracking what they're doing on their computers.
Measuring every single second of how it gets spent- That's idiotic. Knowing that everything you do can be easily checked and measured- sometimes it works miracles.
Especially at their scale. A team of 20 could run a Facebook-like experience for 1 million people. Things get much harder after that, but Wework isn't close to the scale where you need more people because things are harder.
Not enough, and you have a huge queue to use them, too many and you have lost office space rental.
Outside of that there isn't much tech to go around.
We used them before they were WeWork, when they were still GreenDesk in Dumbo.
Overall it was great, and it's a great product given the flexibility and move in ready amenities that it provides and if you ever step foot inside of Regus you will immediately notice the difference.
Though now there is a lot of competition from smaller companies and of course I'm sure Regus has stepped up their game in response.
Their growth is amazing, but ultimately it's still a real estate holding company. The same is true for E-commerce. Though their volume is immense, they trade no where near their multiples for revenue as other tech companies given the different margins they have, cyclical sales cycles, and many other factors that make that sector much less attractive than a pure software play in the B2B space.
But looks like we will see how this all plays out.
Really the exposure that Softbank has here is the real worrying issue. It's a massive stake, at a massive valuation, and if this IPO doesn't perform well (and most people think it won't), this maybe a real red blot on their performance.