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Critics say WeWork is an overvalued real-estate play
- Mankhool 9y agoPaywall . . .
- gnicholas 9y agoCan access via social media (just do a search on twitter for the article) or via the Read Across The Aisle app/Chrome extension, which is free and includes a free pass to the WSJ (disclosure: I am the founder).
- jbob2000 9y agoUgh no. I just want to click a link and have it work, I am tired of workarounds. I know the hacker news guidelines allow paywall sites to be submitted, but it's getting a bit much when every third link is a paywall. And now you want me to download an app to read this? Which will probably scrape my phone for analytics? UGGGHHH dude!
- jannes 9y agoHere is a link: http://archive.is/Fb1D4 http://archive.is/Fb1D4
- greatartiste 9y agoThat works - Many thanks
- jbob2000 9y agoProxy services blocked by corporate firewall. Oh well.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agohttp://www.cetusnews.com/business/WeWork--A-%2420-Billion-Startup-Fueled-by-Silicon-Valley-Pixie-Dust.SklaC04IT-.html http://www.cetusnews.com/business/WeWork--A-%2420-Billion-St...
- greatartiste 9y agoI did that and am trying to access via Twitter but just hit the same paywall.
- kornish 9y agoCould be a browser cache thing. Try accessing from Twitter in incognito.
- jannes 9y agoArchived copy: http://archive.is/Fb1D4 http://archive.is/Fb1D4
- Mankhool 9y agoThank you.
- oregondan 9y agoI forget where I got it from, but I have this JS snippet saved as a bookmark--it gets around the WSJ paywall by 'redirecting' from Facebook. javascript:window.location.href='https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);
- Animats 9y agoPut article title into Facebook search. Facebook and the WSJ apparently have a deal on the paywall.
- feelin_googley 9y agos,com,&/amp, https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/wework-a-20-billion-startup-fueled-by-silicon-valley-pixie-dust-1508424483 https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/wework-a-20-billion-startup... Then view in "Reader" mode. Most of the major browsers have it. Alternatively, extract the text from the page and leave the Javascript behind. The Javascript is not needed to read the text.
- erikb 9y agoall of your links are walling again, AND deactivating reader mode in my browser.
- feelin_googley 9y agoRetrieve the page with a small http client instead of a large browser. e.g., wget, curl, fetch, etc. Save it. wget -o savedpage.htm https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/wework-a-20-billion-startup-fueled-by-silicon-valley-pixie-dust-1508424483 Delete the Javascript. sed -i '/<p>/,/<\/p>/!d' savedpage.htm Open savedpage.htm in a browser.
- erikb 9y agoLoving your sed skills!
- neaden 9y ago"Boston Properties Inc., the country’s largest publicly traded office landlord, owns five times the square footage that WeWork manages and has a market capitalization of $19 billion." This seems to me to be a pretty big warning sign that the company is overvalued.
- eddieplan9 9y agoComparing WeWork to traditional office landlord is like comparing Starbucks to Dunkin' Donut. Please don't go to Starbucks because its coffee is better or cheaper (it's neither), but as a lifestyle choice. Similarly, people don't go to WeWork because they need a desk.
- neaden 9y agoYour metaphor is ridiculous. Plenty of people prefer Starbucks coffee to DD, claiming that going to Starbucks is a "lifestyle choice" in 2017 is absurd. People go to Starbucks because it has products they like, primarily a variety of coffee drinks that include milk, cream, sugar, or other flavorings. Comparing Starbucks to DD is a perfectly appropriate thing to do, as is comparing WeWork to Boston Properties is a reasonable thing to do.
- optimuspaul 9y agoCoffee in general is a lifestyle choice. Not disagreeing with you just saying that in my opinion everything about coffee is lifestyle.
- j4p3 9y agoMany people, including the author, skip the more interesting point in favor of the lazy critique: WeWork is not being valued by its investors as an office rental company. It's made the case that it is a business services marketplace, selling vendors' insurance and HR and legal and servers to as large as swath of the small business sector as it can grab with its fancy offices. It wants to own the app store for enterprise services. It hasn't fulfilled that promise yet, not even close, but it's not an unreasonable proposition. Is it possible to capture a big, fragmented market with kitschy decor? Will the services marketplace be as fruitful as it thinks? These would be interesting questions to explore.
- dmode 9y agoHonestly, as someone dealing with small businesses, selling insurance and HR services to tiny startups is not a $20B business. Selling those to large companies is, but that market is already saturated.
- lnanek2 9y agoThe WeWork claim is that some of their startups will become huge and they'll already have their foot in the door, so to speak, for selling those huge companies more real estate and services. Having a 5 person startup as a renter is not a big win, but if that startup becomes Twitter size...
- pcsanwald 9y agoDo they seriously claim this? It sounds like a pretty far-fetched thing for them to say. I've opened several offices and moved my company around a fair bit, and I don't know how WeWork or anyone else would have their "foot in the door". Any company approaching the size of twitter is going to contract those services out and either beat them down to very thin margins or manage the services themselves. very little upside in that.
- readhn 9y agohaha. seeing that most start ups will fail - good luck with waiting for that unicorn! it might never come in their space. https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/01/16/90-of-startups-will-fail-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-10/&refURL=https://www.google.com/&referrer=https://www.google.com/ https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.for...
- Moseman23 9y agoThe main difference is not amenities or marketing but the fact that a large percentage of WeWork's customers (my company included) are paying rent with VC money. Up to 90% of their customers will go out of business. Not a super stable customer base.
- abhinavkulkarni 9y agoThe companies will keep coming and going. As long as there is a steady stream of startups being funded in SV, WeWork should do fine. In fact, they make it much easier for the startups to bootstrap and focus on their business problem, rather than worrying about the logistics.
- lloyd-christmas 9y agoReady to have your mind blown? SV is not the only place where businesses exist. WeWork has 14 locations in the SF area and 44 locations in NYC. I work in one in NYC, and I bet only a handful of the businesses in the building are VC funded. They'll do just fine because tech isn't their only source of income.
- whipoodle 9y agoEveryone wants to strike startup gold, so selling shovels seems like a decent idea to me. True, the customer base isn’t stable... but there’s a founder born every second, if you know what I mean.
- aaroninsf 9y agoNo asset valuation bubble driven by years of cheap money and privately held closed books, folks! This time it's different... If you've lived in the area or industry more than 10 years, you know how this story ends, especially regionally where real estate commercial and otherwise is in a cojoined overvaluation. EDIT: next in my browse list, today... https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/18/blue-apron-is-laying-off-6-of-its-staff/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/18/blue-apron-is-laying-off-6... https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/stockton_ubi_basic_income/543036/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/stock... etc... When tech crashes, the soft recovery is going to a lot uglier to a lot more people...
- dmode 9y agoWeWork needs to go prove itself by surviving the next downturn. I believe most of WeWork's customers are other startups who valuations are fueled by large rounds of VC investment. This capital tends to dry out during a downturn, however WeWork will still be saddled with long term leases during this period. I wonder what their strategy is to ride out a period of low capital raise for startups.
- sarreph 9y agoThis will indeed be very interesting to watch out for. Speaking from experience, WeWork has a high turnover rate — VC-money-hungry startups line the hallways, coming and going accordingly. I don't think the established, boutique firms and agencies constitute a large enough chunk of their business to support them in a recession. Their rent is just too high to capture the frugal companies who'll be the survivors of a poor market; lowering prices might save them, but I don't know how well their model accounts for this.
- username223 9y agoYep. Webvan was awesome at stocking our fridge during the last tech bubble, but ran out of customers and money really fast when it burst. According to Wikipedia, > Webvan was an online grocery business that went bankrupt in 2001 after 3 years of operation and was later folded into Amazon.com. Hmmm... Maybe Amazon will buy WeWork for cheap, then use it to push their other services?
- rawrmaan 9y agoWeWork's achilles heel IMO is that they disincentivize non-VC funded companies from staying for more than a year due to their 70% first-year rent discount. We at Habitat are moving out of the WeWork Philly office after just a year because of this. It's just too expensive to stay.
- fossuser 9y agoA little off topic, but I think it'd be cool if you could pay someone (a hotel chain? Airbnb?) a monthly 'rent' to live in any of their locations. The locations are guaranteed to have highspeed internet and some easy standardized way to move between them. This would be really cool for remote work since you could live everywhere and nowhere without having the overhead of having to do all the planning yourself.
- srmatto 9y agoAirbnb does have monthly rates. But no guaranteed internet afaik.
- linkregister 9y agoYou can add WiFi in your filters when searching.
- fossuser 9y agoTo clarify - not just rent one place for a month, but pay the organization a monthly rate and then move to any of the places whenever you want.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoPutting up work crews in cheap motels is not uncommon. You generally have to do it a lot before the hotel will be willing to consider the kind of bulk discounts that make it profitable.
- pram 9y agoWeWork actually has this, believe it or not. https://www.welive.com/ https://www.welive.com/
- nwah1 9y agoFor some reason, this strikes me as creepy. Like joining some sort of corporate cult, where you get to live inside an office 24/7.
- Brendinooo 9y agoWhat are people looking for in a coworking space? What does your space provide you beyond a desk, Wi-Fi, and coffee? Whenever I've researched spaces nearby, I've treated proximity, price, and hours as the three biggest selling points for a small business, work-from-home type like myself. But I guess that's only a small segment of the overall market. I guess if you're a bigger business maybe you'd get comfortable with a brand name - WeWork in SF should be roughly similar to WeWork in NYC, and they already have your credit card on file.
- kimsk112 9y agoAnother thing is lease flexibility as well as multiple locations. Our company has different teams at multiple WeWork locations. We have to travel to different locations sometime, and be able to just walk 24/7 into WeWork space which mostly located in the city with good public transport is very convenient. Conference room, mail handling, coffee, beer and other things help too.
- Rainymood 9y agoNetworking? Social interaction with other entrepreneurs? A separation of home/work?
- baxtr 9y agoI worked in a wework Office for about a year. At first I thought the environment was great, I loved the free beer and the community. However, once we moved out, I realized how much more productive we were in our own office. We had - more space - less noise, in terms of sound and visually (you see everybody passing by through the glass and have to force yourself not to look at them. For a while we had some posters up, but we had to remove them since wework’s company policy doesn’t like that) - less distractions: in the end, the community was nice, but it didn’t help us that much, since it was quite random, there were a lot events, almost every day, the place was always busy - climate service: we had so many issues with heating/cooling, either it was too hot or too cold, it never got really fixed - cost: their meeting room system is a total rip-off, even though basic rents are okish, the meeting rooms were a real cost sucker, in many months we’d pay almost as much for meeting rooms as the basic rent We liked the culture and the spirit, but we’re much happier in our own space now, we don’t pay for meeting rooms and we can meet our relevant community whenever we want, distractions went down, productivity up.
- tbarbugli 9y agoSame exact experience for me (in NL). I have to say that compared to all other co-working spaces I used (6 so far), WeWork is the only one that really nailed it in terms of operations. (WiFi/Internet, delivery, key-cards, ...)
- zaidf 9y agoless noise, in terms of sound and visually (you see everybody passing by through the glass and have to force yourself not to look at them. For a while we had some posters up, but we had to remove them since wework’s company policy doesn’t like that) This has been by number one issue with WeWork and I've always been surprised that more devs who work at WeWork aren't bothered by this.
- kafkaesq 9y agoThat's what the free beer is for - to anesthetize yourself from the negative working conditions, at the end of the day.
- NN88 9y agoPaywall: http://archive.is/Fb1D4 http://archive.is/Fb1D4
- NN88 9y agoThis article lays out a company thats a parody of every stereotype known to man. Jesus.
- NN88 9y ago>A decade ago, Mr. Neumann was a small-time entrepreneur in his 20s living with his sister, a model, in her Tribeca apartment. Mr. Neumann, who was raised on a kibbutz in Israel, was struggling with his first startup idea—women’s shoes with collapsible heels—which failed to take off. His next venture was baby clothes with knee pads called Krawlers. Who didn't see this coming?
- hedora 9y agoTrump’s recent attempt to torpedo obamacare by allowing multi-company group plans seems like an opportunity here. WeWork should offer a group plan to tenants. It creates lockin, and most tenants are young+healthy, so this would be a great deal all around (cheap premiums, low barrier to entry for older workers).
- EGreg 9y agoI think WeWork is great. But I think commutes are a time suck. How about the new trend of Officeless (TM) companies, connecting entirely online, working asynchronously and taking breaks to go to the beach and socialize with friends instead of random people. Your talent pool can suddenly come from all over the world, and costs cheaper while making employees happier.
- JamesAdir 9y agoSelling $100M of shares sums up the entire story. No matter how WeWork will end, the founder has done his exit + salary in all the years. The last investor will be the one to pay the bills - probably the public via an IPO.
- G2kyd7 9y agoThe advantage of the WeWork system is the convenience of quickly getting office space on a monthly-basis without dealing with internet for as well for example. What I have noticed that they do not cater to remote workers small start ups any longer, instead they are renting out whole floors to fortune 500 companies. I agree with others, the meeting room system is a rip-off, which is why no one is using it and people are simply squatting in those rooms. Overall it works for me after 2 years in three different locations, there are certainly a few issues: - cooling (Miami) is either way too cold or not working at all and often comes with deafening noise - their employees are often not trained well enough, presumably due to rapid expansion - coffee is absolutely awful (maybe acceptable for American standards) - annoying tech bros sponsored by their parents - events that are geared towards the above (beer pong, really?) - getting spammed by people who think networking means sending everyone unsolicited messages offering their services - noise from people who apparently don't have to work and aggregate in the hallways instead