As someone living in SF, I don’t think anyone in SF or SV would ever consider WeWork to be a “Silicon Valley” company in the same way that Uber or Twitter or Slack is.<p>The company has 0 tech brand among employees (how many ex-FB or ex-Google engineers work there?) and outside of Benchmark’s early round none of the VCs are SV-based.<p>Point is the media is making this out to be an indictment on some SV tech bubble but people in SV are looking at this from the outside like everyone else.
We Co isn't a tech company. Its a landlord subleasing commercial realestate as short term month to month leases with snazzy furniture. They happen to have a mobile app. Its functionality is so poor they removed the pay snack bar in my SF WeWork because no one could pay through the app.<p>CloudFlare... Now there's a proper tech company.
The Matt Levine saga on this for the past week or so has been fantastic. If you're vaguely interested in corporate / bank finance, I'd encourage subscribing to his newsletter. It's free.
Semi related but Blue Apron will forever be my favorite IPO.<p>5 stock splits and 3 CEOs later, day one investors will receive roughly 2 pennies back for every dollar invested just 2 years ago.<p>Only people who won were those who dumped free shares on the market (insiders), and maybe consumers for getting subsidized food of questionable quality.<p>Once valued at 2 billion USD, a paltry 150 million will get the job done now.
WeWork is a real estate company and not a software company. They don't have any worthy propriety tech and their business model is collecting rent. How they were once valued at 47 billion just straight up doesn't make any sense.
> This target is tied to a $6 billion credit line We Company secured from banks last month, that calls for an IPO to take place by the end of the year and raise at least $3 billion, one of the sources said.<p>> Were the New York-based company to fail to meet this target by the end of the year, it would need to secure alternative funding.<p>Does this mean, its now a ticking time bomb?
WeWork is a huge success...for its founders. Neumann reportedly sold over 700 million worth of shares ahead of the IPO.<p>For some reason every startup nowadays is the next Amazon or Facebook. Poised to become the market leader in their field of expertise.
Most of the IPOs are losing big money yearly but the market is happy to support them with billions of dollars. Actions that would make Warren Buffet cringe but could make money if you're lucky.<p>This invites startups to take advantage of the situation. To me this is one of the dark sides of our society because the ones at the bottom of the pyramid losing their money are you and me saving for our pensions.
> The WeWork brand is strongly tied to Neumann, a freewheeling 40-year-old Israeli-born entrepreneur who has said that We Company’s mission is “to elevate the world’s consciousness”.<p>"Elevate the world's consciousness" --> Dont mean to be negative but what the hell does that even mean? Imagine your landlord told you that.<p>Been following this story closely and Adam Neumann is such a crook, from the outset he just wanted to take advantage of public shareholders. His intentions were to screw them. Don't forget that lot of the shareholders for big IPO's are pension and mutual funds and hard working middle class families indirectly or directly own a bulk of these. This is how they get screwed.<p>I am so glad the market called his bluff.
IPO is back on. Not surprising when you look at their burn rate vs cash on hand. Or the fact that they entered into a $6B line of credit last month that is contingent on them raising at least $3B in an IPO by end of year. Beyond Adam and Softbank wanting to cash out eventually, the company needs this funding to continue to operate.
sorry, all the talk about comedic <i>Silicon Valley</i> (whether WeWork is 'tech' or not or whatever) and then I see this:<p><i>"My friend’s entire company is locked out of their WeWork office because an umbrella fell, jamming the door. No one can figure it out. It’s been like this for 2 days."</i> --<a href="https://twitter.com/NeerajKA/status/1173997679363407872" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/NeerajKA/status/1173997679363407872</a><p>Too good.
I hope it's now painfully obvious why Silicon Valley is getting behind the Long-Term Stock Exchange: they need to be able to pass these duds onto the uneducated public.
Is it true that WeWork is now the largest single lessee of commercial real estate in the US? Seems like a bad bankruptcy could have some broad ripple effects.
We should now question the valuation of the other companies that have recently gone public. I understand WeWork was unusually tumultuous, but many of these talking points equally apply to recent IPOs.<p>A couple quarterly filings have already begun to bring some of these companies closer to reality.
It's a shame WeWork is run by such scummy characters, the concept itself has the potential to make people's commutes much more flexible and shorter.<p>When on-boarding a new employee, companies would be able to automatically provision them a desk/office at the closest WeWork to them. This allows companies to have access to a much bigger pool of talent, and allows employees to have access to a bigger pool of companies.<p>On top of that, the flexibility means commutes are much shorter, as co-working spaces can be efficiently distributed across a city and its suburbs. Even when an employee moves to a new company, they could theoretically stay at the same WeWork site, rather than have to deal with a new commute.
This reminds me of the startups selling dog food that IPO'd during the first dot com bubble. At least collective sense seems to have prevailed this time around.
Does anyone know what happens to the liqPref (and hence the subordinated equity shares of early employees) if they IPO below their $12bn liquidation pref?
Financial Twitter on fleek (h/t Financial Times front page)<p><a href="https://www.twitter.com/nickatfp/status/1171613239580516352" rel="nofollow">https://www.twitter.com/nickatfp/status/1171613239580516352</a>
If We does IPO, I'm going to buy some IWG shares. The only way We can justify their sky high valuation is buying out the bigger competitor who is way undervalued by the markets.
I started at Arm last week on an R&D project around eUICC HSMs<p>I don’t know enough about how SoftBank manages it’s children to know if I should be worried...