[WJW]

Working space. You can rent a single desk or multiple, and they charge you money every month. Bog standard stuff, has been done a million times all over the world.

The problem for WeWork is that they chose to grow incredibly fast, positioned themselves a a very high-end premium type of service, and funded it all with lots of debt and VC (mostly SoftBank) investments, despite nearly every financial professional warning them that they were over-exposed and any small disruption to their earnings would cause huge troubles for the company.

Then COVID happened, interest rates started rising and the demand for expensive rented offices dried up. Now they have a ton of bills and not enough paying customers to cover them all.

[dschuetz]

Ah, essentially they are selling office desks to start-ups who don't need them anymore post-covid. Sounds bulletproof to me /s.

I think that many fast-growing start-ups have decided that it's cheaper and safer to work from home, so maybe WeWork needs to start working and look for other sources of revenue. or do nothing and implode.

[HWR_14]

No, you're misunderstanding. First, they sold a lot to established companies who would get a whole office in the building to seem cool. I believe that's where most of the profits came from. The startup/hotdesking was there as well, but I don't believe it was as profitable. Otherwise, WFH would be a boon to them. Companies have paid for WeWork desks for their WFH employees/meetings to avoid needing office space. They would be doing great now.

The problem is their business model was to sign long-term leases with buildings and short-term leases with their customers. So they are paying 2018-2020 rates on office space, but leasing out at spot rates of 2023 office space.