[CPLX]

I will preface this by saying I am not a fan of this guy, like at all. I would never want to be in business with him.

With that said it doesn’t actually seem as crazy as everyone is making out. It’s worth starting with the premise that WeWork is actually a pretty great product. Making office space flexible is in fact something that needed doing and yes some people were banging around on the edges of it but it used to be kind of miserable and now it’s different. I’m a current WeWork member and I use it constantly when I travel and it’s just a pretty well thought out and executed product that fills a need.

The same issue still exists in the rental market. Getting an apartment is also a bit of a nightmare. Yes property managers exist but if I could go through some kind of centralized process or membership and then live in Miami for 4 months and then Los Angeles for 4 months or whatever I could see a lot of value in that.

The proposition here seems pretty straightforward. Again I think the guy is a bullshit artist but it’s not like it’s impossible to see how this could be a favorable investment.

[pclmulqdq]

WeWork is a great product because it is a subsidized offering in a competitive market. The piles of VC cash that were thrown into WeWork spaces are things that Regus and other competitors cannot do, because they have to make money.

Competing with WeWork in office space is like competing with Saudi Arabia in oil production: the Saudis have slave labor keeping oil prices down, and WeWork has VC cash keeping their office prices down. However, this doesn't mean that WeWork will ever turn the corner to repay investors the billions they have lost on it.

[mbg721]

This feels like online businesses around 2000, where people have identified the problem and know the tech they can use to solve it, but the companies trying to do it aren't the ones that can make the business side stick.

[notahacker]

Feels more like a classic late 2010s bubble "tech" business.

A business model that's been around for years, is minimally affected by tech, the guy proposing to build a "tech company" out of it is a self-dealing conman and the VC's exit strategy is presumably to achieve rapid growth by selling below cost price before offloading to greater fools who think the advantage over incumbents is a tech moat, not VCs underwriting losses

[mbg721]

Being in the business of extracting oil from snakes is one way to fail, but that doesn't mean there isn't a viable market there.

[CPLX]

Exactly. I was around back then too. It is pretty hard to make a user experience seamless and there’s a lot of industries where the user experience is needlessly complex and inflexible. The fact that it hasn’t been fixed yet doesn’t really prove it’s impossible.

The rental apartment market is just obviously one of those industries.

[lnxg33k1]

I mean but how is it practically different from airbnb?

[CPLX]

Because Airbnb is not a platform for long term rentals.

They’re trying of course but it’s a different product.