[filmgirlcw]

Well, although many now understand WeWork isn’t a tech company (and some of us were saying this YEARS ago — I personally said this at least twice on CNBC as far back as 2014), WeWork raised money and did it’s IPO roadshow and achieved the valuation it has achieved by positioning itself as a tech company, even tho it is just a real estate company with slightly complicated owning/leasing structures.

Soft Bank invested what if has invested, expecting to get the return it would get on a tech company — not real estate.

The reckoning that is happening now is much deserved, but if WeWork got the benefit of being called a tech company when it was flying high (and it did — including here on HN), I’m not going to give the company or its investors an “out” now that it’s all falling apart.

This was a decidedly non-tech company that convinced its investors it was tech. And now that the rouse is up, the bloodbath that follows begins in earnest.

[roymurdock]

investors don't really care what "tech" truly means in the classical sense (using/selling computers or apps as a central part of the business). investors care about what kind of return they can expect from a certain class of company. "Tech" has come to mean a company with high revenue/user growth, low marginal cost of production, big moats, not necessarily profitable, but on track to IPO and with large institutional/public demand for investment.

WeWork is obviously not a tech company like Microsoft or Apple are tech companies and nobody is arguing or should really even care about that, investors surely don't. But it also fails to check some of the boxes of new class of "tech" companies and that is being reflected in the current valuation battle. or maybe the underwrites just really overshot the mark after SoftBank pressured them with its own high valuation estimate.