Is This the Office of the Future or a $5B Waste of Space?

&gt;Many traditional real estate investors are perplexed by WeWork’s $5 billion valuation. With that kind of money, you could build the world’s most expensive skyscraper—One World Trade Center, which at 3 million square feet has roughly the same cumulative amount of office space as WeWork—and still have $1 billion left over.<p>I&#x27;m as dismissive of ridiculous startup valuations as anyone, but this seemed like a weird way to evaluate whether their value was justified.<p>For reference, here are a couple of other similar statistics:<p>* There are about 250M Apple devices in use (100M&#x2F;yr * 2.5 yr lifespan). At 750B market cap, they&#x27;re worth $3000 per i____ out there, or enough to buy every one of their users an iPhone and still have $500B left over.<p>* There are about 200,000 active Uber drivers, and they&#x27;re valued at $50B. That&#x27;s $300,000 per driver, or enough to buy every one of their drivers a Tesla and still have $40B left over.

I work from home... Its much nicer then that place, I dont have noisy people running around and talking on the phones all day, unlimited food and drinks all day, and i get to keep my stuff laying out on the desk without fear of it getting stolen or messed with!<p>I never understood why people who can choose to work from anywhere, choose to pay a monthly commitment to go to a co working space, instead of choosing to work in a low cost area where there money can go SO much farther.<p>As a mobile startup, you can opt to live outside of a major city being able to leech talent from the talent hub, and make your money go SO much farther.

The thing that struck me about the first picture was how uncomfortable the chairs looked. Why would they spend so much on decorative lighting and neglect the parts that are essential for prolonged productivity?

I can&#x27;t be the only one who&#x27;s tired of the USA&#x27;s alcohol-drenched startup culture.<p>In the first four paragraphs:<p>keg, keg, beer, bar, tap, bar, pub, microbrews, tap, happy hour, tequila, margaritas, &quot;90,000 glasses of beer&quot;.

I think there is space for everything and they will be one of the kinds of office solutions, but not the solution.<p>Neither everyone nor every job is optimized for close proximity with others. Nor does everyone want to extend the dormitory study room culture indefinitely into adulthood. I think this kind of space works for some job types and industries, but definitely I do not see it as the one future for all office spaces.<p>But congratulations on trying to make this popular and succeeding so far. The more choice the better.

At first, WeWork really did sound like little more than a large, consolidated chain of coworking spaces. The way the article is laid out, you first read that description and then read the founder&#x27;s breathless claims of how they&#x27;re not just another real estate firm. But with a crazy valuation!<p>So you take all that with a grain of salt. Founders are always talking about how they&#x27;re doing something completely novel and groundbreaking, even if they&#x27;re not.<p>And then you hit some <i>little details</i>: &quot;…valuable benefits like access to a group health insurance plan…&quot;. In the US that is a <i>big thing</i>. If they&#x27;re offering group health insurance, they really aren&#x27;t just another real estate company!<p>In fact, I&#x27;m pretty enthusiastic about the idea now. I&#x27;ve always thought that many of the benefits offered by large corporations did not have to be tied to a single monolithic entity. Nothing about well-managed office space, group health insurance and shared infrastructure is inexorably tied to having a top down autocratic organization, but historically it has been.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be cool if somebody supplied the same infrastructure not to business teams in a rigid hierarchy but to a loosely federated network of startups and freelancers?<p>Looks like exactly what WeWork is offering.

I work in WeWork and love it. It&#x27;s a great atmosphere and can be inspiring to look around and feel the young, vibrant energy. That&#x27;s a bad title though; it certainly isn&#x27;t a waste of space and the article never even seemed to allude to it being a waste of space.

I want my 8x8 cube back...<p>The current 5x5 feet of open office space I have has led me to mostly work from home.

However, I do think the small studio + co-located coworking space is a winning concept. Bundle in things like laundry service and perhaps catering (everyone needs food, not everyone needs alcohol) or even just Soylent&#x2F;Jakeshake, and it&#x27;s starting to be a pretty useful value-add, editing out all of the generic day to day tasks that suck up one&#x27;s only nonrenewable resource.

I think this was a fine article with a terrible title.<p>I worked out of WeWork’s SoHo office in NYC for a while and was pleased with the details they got right to make themselves attractive to startups (no pesky sales team, short notice to cancel, no nickel and diming on Wi-Fi, printers, etc.).<p>Before WeWork, I also worked in a Regus office (their competitor mentioned in the article) and they managed to get all the same things wrong. Perhaps they have adapted since. I’m unaffiliated with either company but wish WeWork well. It was a fun vibe they cultivated and everyone seemed to enjoy working there.

Despite being (at the time of writing) 2 hours old with 26 points, this story has crashed from the front page to position 103? An intriguingly fast fall..

WeWank™ CoWanking™ spaces inbetween the mostly empty airbnb housing projects that you shuffle between with uber, all coming to a city near you.

Did anyone else find the article illegible? I struggled to read the white-on-black text for several minutes. After closing the article I struggled to be able to read HN.

| Neumann says, while jettisoning the socialist part. “On the one hand, community. On the other hand, you eat what you kill.”<p>Neumann doesn&#x27;t understand what socialism is.