I think I might be the only person on HN optimistic about WeWork.
Remote work is on the rise here in the US. Startups and entrepreneurship continue to grow. Finding traditional office space sucks and is a massive waste of money, and probably always will. Co-working spaces make sense, and it’s baffling to me that it wasn’t the default way to work in 2010, when I started programming, let alone 2019.
I feel like if somehow fast food hadn’t been invented til now, and MacDonalds just got started, we’d be reading pessimistic threads about how it’s a real estate business masquerading as a food business and is destined for collapse.
But like, it actually does work, as a business, to provide some necessary service (office space, food) at scale with a big central marketing apparatus. The fundamentals here seem sensible to me.
Coworking will grow and prosper. WeWork, I don't know. I don't know how long any company can survive the egregious investor-fleecing WeWork's founder seems to wantonly engage in. Perhaps if a clear stop is put to that, and if every other part of the business plan goes flawlessly, then it has a future.
But coworking is about alot more than WeWork, and the industry will do fine whatever WeWork's shenanigans imply for the latter's future. There are currently around 20,000+ coworking spaces worldwide, of which less than 5% are WeWork's:
Only if by fundamentals you mean the fundamental idea behind coworking spaces. Sure, that makes sense. But the WeWork company fundamentals are out of whack. Nobody is arguing that coworking spaces are a bad idea. WeWork is a company that turns 2$ into 1$.
The professor that wrote the analysis distinctly says WeWork as a business has value (worth maybe $2b). The issue is with the valuation of the company that is 26 times the revenue, and priced as a tech company even though it has no tech. It’s a real-estate company (these trade at x3 revenue).
If McDonalds lost money on their restaurants and their executives profited from multiple conflicts of interest, McDonalds wouldn’t have become a successful business.
If the corporate history is to be believed, McDonald's created a profitable system for running a single restaurant and then scaled it. That concept seems quaint today, when people scale without any idea of profitability.
I think most people here think the value of WeWork is definitely not $0, but believe it’s well well well south of their last private valuation, and certainly well below what they’ll try to dump it on the market at.
Remote work is on the rise here in the US. Startups and entrepreneurship continue to grow. Finding traditional office space sucks and is a massive waste of money, and probably always will. Co-working spaces make sense, and it’s baffling to me that it wasn’t the default way to work in 2010, when I started programming, let alone 2019.
I feel like if somehow fast food hadn’t been invented til now, and MacDonalds just got started, we’d be reading pessimistic threads about how it’s a real estate business masquerading as a food business and is destined for collapse.
But like, it actually does work, as a business, to provide some necessary service (office space, food) at scale with a big central marketing apparatus. The fundamentals here seem sensible to me.