| I've worked for CEOs like Adam, tho with way less access to cash. Ambition is good only if you can pull it off, otherwise like like the greatest warrior poet of our generation Dominic Toretto would say: it don't matter if it's by an inch or a mile, losing's losing. This dude had a plan, had big energy, earned trust, spent like a king, and came up short some miles and inches. He was building We to be a holdings company since the late-2010's-era, a la Zuck with late-2010's-era Facebook or a la Mayer with mid-2010-era Yahoo. This is what a WeWork tech stack would have been: For construction:
* Case - property development management software
* Fieldlens ($12.6MM raised) - construction site management software For space management:
* Euclid ($43.6MM raised) - space tracking software
* Welkio - lobby digital sign-in software
* Waltz - digital lock software
* SpaceIQ - office management software
* Teem ($100MM buyout) - room booking software
* Manage by Q - office vendor solution management software
* Spacious ($9MM raised) - restaurant downtime For business management:
* Conductor - digital ads spam software
* Unomy - sales marketing spam software For training management:
* Meetup ($200MM buyout) - event and group management software
* Flatiron School - coding school
* MissionU - fake college For expansion:
* Naked Hub ($400MM buyout) - Chinese wework clone
* Spacemob - Singapore wework clone
* The Wing ($32MM investment) - Women wework clone For fun:
* Wavegarden ($12MM investment) All of this prob has been a $2B spend. But Steve Jobs he ain't with the integration so it's all loosely organized and disjointed. But Adam's at least Steve Job's esque enough to convince Ashton Kutcher to call all this pile of parts a tech behemoth. Divesting all this will be a mistake. Find a better CEO, get it all done. |
Firstly, a successful office rental company is valued at no where near the multiple that WeWork claimed to be. So if this strategy is successful, what you're left with is likely a company that is significantly less valuable than the amount that's been invested.
Secondly, it's not entirely clear that all these things put together actually would be a significant competitive advantage in the office rental space, where the bread and butter issues are what dominates the running of the business.
Thirdly, let's assume this is a good strategy. Buying up these companies and integrating them into a single purpose business is a difficult task that most companies struggle with, it's much more common for these strategies to result in massive acquisitions followed by write-downs. Even a good CEO would struggle with it, but WeWork has already bought these companies, so a new CEO doesn't just need to slowly fold each company into the core business, the new CEO has to handle the fact they already own these business and need to integrate all of them, all at once, as fast as possible, before they go bankrupt in a way that looks good for the IPO.