[chadash]

> Adam Neumann is basically Elizabeth Holmes...

With one big difference. I've worked in a WeWork. I know many people who have. The product is real and it did fundamentally change the idea of coworking (you ever heard of Regus before WeWork came along?). And I'd work at a WeWork again. It was a great experience.

[wil421]

When I did catering 15+ years ago I went to a quite a few coworking offices. It was nothing new then. Some were sterile offices and others were like WeWork and had a bartender/helpers doing things. The 2 places I remember are still around while the WeWork signs have been removed and offices closed.

[pwinnski]

> you ever heard of Regus before WeWork came along?

Yes? Maybe I'm just old, but I remember them in the 1990s.

Pre-crash articles[0] suggest that WeWork introduced "community" to coworking spaces, which... okay. I guess time will tell whether that fundamentally changed the idea of coworking.

It's no big new discovery that people by and large prefer new things to old things. If WeWork had lasted long enough to become an old thing before imploding, perhaps we would have seen that the difference was mostly that. Or perhaps something actually new did happen, in which case it might now be lost under the clouds of grift and fraud.

0. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/06/14/ho...

[thematrixturtle]

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. WeWork is a real business with a real business model that's been making real money, especially now that many companies are downsizing their office space because of COVID. Yes, Neumann is a clown who blew a lot of VC cash on weird shit and made out like a bandit before the party ended, but unlike Theranos, the customers of WeWork did receive exactly what they paid for: flexible office space.

[pclmulqdq]

If you start a business that spends $22 billion and then starts to bring in a few hundred million a year, that's not a great business. That is a bad business.

[pclmulqdq]

Elizabeth Holmes was not convicted of defrauding patients, only of defrauding investors. Adam Neumann has done much the same to his investors.

I would work at a WeWork too. WeWork spaces are great, especially when you compare them to competitors, who didn't burn massive piles of VC cash to make their spaces nice and rent them to me at a loss. That has nothing to do with Adam Neumann, only the money he extracted from investors under false pretenses.