7 ms·

Not sure why people are negative about the core idea of WeWork. You get free beer, free coffee, bathrooms, an office, meeting rooms, phone booths with doors th

Not sure why people are negative about the core idea of WeWork. You get free beer, free coffee, bathrooms, an office, meeting rooms, phone booths with doors that close that you can also go work in whenever you want to be isolated, you can be there 24 hours a day, you have a keycard that works at all hours, and best of all, you're surrounded by startups and companies doing the same things as you. Meaning you can chat up your neighbors and meet some interesting people. Chance encounters like that are rare at a traditional office. People also throw events on the upper floors all the time, which gets you free lunch at a minimum. The above experience costs $2,200/mo to get you an office with plenty of room for four people. I don't know. I hope they never go out of business. It's the best environment I've ever been in. Did I mention you're surrounded by empty rooms with doors that close? I mean hello, you get a door! It closes! When you have the option to go work someplace with a door that shuts, it removes all the stress of not having it, even if you never actually use it.

rezistik 9y ago
It's not free beer and free coffee, it's X% of $2,200 a month beer and Y% of $2,200 a month coffee.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Sure, but your corporate overlord^W^Wfounder pays for that. From your POV, it's all you can drink coffee. Also $2200 is on the high end for four people. You can probably talk them down to $2k or less. You'd be surprised how valuable it is to have a pot of coffee ready to go all the time, next to a mini fridge that's always stocked with half and half. Sweetner's on the counter. It ends up taking like 30 seconds to grab coffee. The janitors are surprisingly cool people, and they're fastidious about making sure the trash is taken out, doing the dishes (yes, you get a kitchen + fridge!), and making sure everything is stocked. It's so effective to pool resources like that. Everyone gets those benefits just by being in the same place. And it's remarkable how un-cramped it all feels. Your office even has beautiful floor to ceiling windows that gives you a nice view of downtown and sunsets.
  - eric_h 9y ago
    > Your office even has beautiful floor to ceiling windows that gives you a nice view of downtown and sunsets. s/Your office/some offices My company currently has an office in the middle of the floor of a WeWork building, it's cramped for 4 people, and the only "views" I have are of the walls of neighboring buildings in the windows that I can see through ~4 other offices and are ~80-100ft away (but, times are a bit tough right now and I think we're getting a pretty good deal for an NYC WeWork office). In general though, WeWork is pretty solid; their coffee is acceptable, and the beer is usually pretty good.
    - spurcell93 9y ago
      Are you in the Dumbo office? I found that one to be pretty cramped - I liked Montague St a lot more. And better subway access, IMO.
      - eric_h 9y ago
        No, and we had a much less cramped office in this same building before we were forced to downsize for financial reasons - most of the WeWorks I've been to have the whole spectrum of office sizes, from cramped to spacious - it's just about what you can afford.
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    > It ends up taking like 30 seconds to grab coffee Try this stuff: http://www.nestle.co.uk/brands/coffee/superpremium/azera http://www.nestle.co.uk/brands/coffee/superpremium/azera Just mix with hot water, it's surprisingly good.
  - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
    Why does that need a startup, though? Sounds like the perfect opportunity for a small-companies' cooperative.
- infinii 9y ago
  Let's do some conservative costing here. 4 people, consume 10 cups (total) of coffee each day, 20 work days in a month. At $3 a cup, that's $600. Now I'm not even going to guesstimate the beer but let's just say the team consume $100 of beer in a month. That leaves $1.5k for rent. Find a better deal.
neaden 9y ago
Speaking for myself I'm not negative about the core idea. I just think sometimes someone comes out with a good idea and investors act like it is the greatest deal of all time!!!!
cratermoon 9y ago
It's a reasonable office services model -- every company would like to have (at least) fresh coffee, internet, print/copy services, meetings rooms, janitorial service, etc. All the unsexy things that make a workspace into a place to get stuff done. Depending on the size, the companies may do it themselves, or may contract with one of the many vendors for that. With WeWork, though, the sweet spot is for companies that are in between the solo entrepreneur (or the 2-3 friends) and about say 20-25 people. There is a good value for the hot desk or reserved desk for individuals. At least in the locations I'm familiar with, once the number of people in a company gets too big then costs per square foot soar above regular office real estate in the same area. We found that having a meeting for 3-4 people couldn't happen on a whim, you had to book a room and if none were available you had to delay the meeting. Also, our meetings could never run long because inevitably someone else had booked the room afterwards and needed us out. A lot of small things that might matter for some sorts of companies never really gave us much value like printer and copier services. While there's no true paperless office, the amount of printed stuff we generated (not counting marketing materials, which went to a graphic print service anyway) was negligible.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  FWIW, the WeWork I'm at has been trying to lease a massive 40+ person office for the last 6 months or so. That monster of a room occupies ~1/5th of the whole floor. In that situation you'd be able to set up a roundtable in a corner for meetings like that. (Sounds kind of miserable, being an open office and such. But again, almost nobody uses the phone booths, so you're always free to peace out and shut yourself in for ~2h to power through a task.) No idea how much it costs though, so you're probably right that the numbers might not make sense.
- pentae 9y ago
  I find printing/scanning to be one of those things that I almost never do, and desperately try to avoid - but when I need to do it it's usually super important paperwork that has to be done right away. And having to go hunt down a print and scan place is a lot of friction. So reluctantly, we have an all in one at my office.
tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
All of those things are either what you'd expect when you rent a normal office space or aren't the amazing extra perk you make them out to be. The meeting rooms you had to pay to use. The coffee and beer are included in the total price and aren't really that valuable anyway. And the beer and toilet paper frequently ran out. And the phone booths didn't even have doors, they had curtains. It was nice, especially since I was an employee, not the company renting the space, but the only real benefit was there would be occasional free meals and not having to leave the building to go to the occasional meetup.com style meetup that happened there. I'm guessing the price per square foot isn't that amazing compared to what you could get at other places, though.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  And the phone booths didn't even have doors, they had curtains. Yikes. The doors on our booths are a killer feature. The booth becomes mostly soundproof when it's closed.
tptacek 9y ago
In a lot of markets, WeWork is a great deal. We just moved from Chicago West Loop WeWork to our first real office; we got what I think is a pretty amazing deal on our new office and it is still very difficult to beat the package WeWork puts together. But that's not the critique being leveled at WeWork here; the critique is, WeWork can't in the long run be profitable at these rates. In a lot of their spaces --- maybe all of them? --- they're overstaffed. They're premium-everything (I wanted the couches from the first floor at WeWork West Loop and asked where they got them; they were custom-designed!). Free beer on every floor (this turns out not to be a win, but it's still part of their cost basis). Most importantly: they site these things in marquee locations that they have to be paying a mint to lease. I'm happy to take full advantage of the largesse of Investor Storytime Economics, but unless you're Amazon, the music has to stop playing at some point. WeWork is not Amazon.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Do you think they can figure out a way to still be around in ten years? It's so much better than traditional offices that it'd be a shame to lose it. Hopefully there's a sustainable business model. What would you say are the pros/cons of moving to your new office? The West Loop WeWork is nice because it's about a 3 minute walk from the redline subway to the front door. That matters during winter -- Chicago winters blow. So I was wondering if you managed to get a spot close to public transit too. (And if so, how'd it end up ~cheaper than WeWork? Prime locations tend to come at a premium.)
  - tptacek 9y ago
    We're still in Fulton Market, on May and Hubbard, a short walk from the Blue Line on Grand. I'm not entirely sure how we got this office in this specific location, but I think it had to do with the building itself being on the market. I should be clear: it's hard to compete with WeWork for the 4 people we have in this office (I think we pay slightly less here than we'd pay for 4x WeWork berths) --- but having our own office is a phenomenally better deal as we hire more people, since we'll be paying the same amount of money in rent but can easily park another 10 people in this space comfortably. So I should clarify that I think WeWork is an amazing deal for very small companies and, in particular, for solo worker locations. Part of the problem with WeWork is that it's precipitously less of a good deal as your company grows.
potatolicious 9y ago
I don't think it's a case of people being negative about the idea of WeWork - the issue is is that WeWork's product is/will be commoditized, and as such will be subject to intense price competition. This is good for people who enjoy WeWork's product, since there are (and will be more) competitors that offer a similar experience for less money. But it's bad for WeWork's valuation - and that's the core thing being brought up. WeWork's valuation is based on the idea that they can charge a premium for their product (relative to more traditional office rentals or other coworking providers), and/or that they can sell significant ancillary services on top of the base rental fees. I don't think either of those expectations have played out, and IMO there are lots of reasons to believe that they won't play out at all. WeWork isn't the only one - SV is full of startups that expected to exist in a premium marketplace that isn't as sensitive to price competition, but found themselves instead running a well-executed, but extremely commoditized product.
- lloyd-christmas 9y ago
  General Assembly's bootcamp program probably isn't the best out there, but the company is worth a hell of a lot more than the rest of the bootcamp industry. Just because a business is easy to imitate doesn't mean it's easy to compete at scale. There are plenty of similar set ups to wework in NYC, but they don't have offices in countless other countries and cities. They simply don't have the scale that the wework network already has. Why would I join one of the other NYC ones for a discount on office space when I can gain business from all around the world just by signing into the member network and checking my messages?
  - incendiary 9y ago
    The main difference is that General Assembly has product differentiation, and where you studied has signalling value. Where you rent your office space, much less so. Hence, WeWork produces a highly commoditized product, which will continually be subject to competitive pressure.
untog 9y ago
> Did I mention you're surrounded by empty rooms with doors that close? I mean hello, you get a door! It closes! That doesn't scale though. If everyone who worked in a WeWork space wanted to occupy an empty room with a door that closes you'd discover pretty quickly what a hot commodity the are. And that can change entirely out of your control - I've worked at a relatively empty WeWork, only for a large company to come in and take over a lot of space on my floor. Suddenly all the fantastic facilities aren't available any more. All in all, WeWork is fine, but not in any way worth the money.
nodamage 9y ago
> Did I mention you're surrounded by empty rooms with doors that close? I mean hello, you get a door! It closes! Not sure if this is the case for all of their locations, but the doors (and walls) were made of glass at the WeWork we rented from in Seattle, which meant there was zero soundproofing and I was constantly hearing conversations from the people in adjacent offices. It was incredibly distracting and we only lasted a month before returning back to our home office.
- techsupporter 9y ago
  This seems to be the case at all of the "rent a small workspace"-type places I've tried in Seattle, with or without regular doors. Ballard Studioworks has virtually no insulation and has a lot of noisy businesses or just people who like to blast music at concert levels. Activspace in Lake City was a little better but the floors shook every time someone moved a piece of furniture. Wework Holyoke was like working in a fishbowl with really nice furniture. I dunno, maybe I'm just too picky. I don't want a community or all of that. I just want a place that isn't where I live that's quiet, has Internet access and bathrooms, and the rent doesn't have a comma in the dollar amount.
aorloff 9y ago
A door to your office that closes. Not exactly a $19B moat IMO.
jeirje88382hj 9y ago
The meeting rooms are not all you can eat for your monthly spend. They give credits based upon spend. Once you burn them up (and you will cause it's a pittance in credits) you gouged after that.
Dwolb 9y ago
Just a note - while you can be at the offices 24 hours a day, they officially shut off all climate features starting at 6PM. This means any sun-facing office get HOT. 6PM for ending a work day is silly IMO and I emailed our office managers who took the issue to the city manager. Still no change (they asked us to pay $120/hr to keep climate management on outside of 6PM).

rezistik 9y ago

It's not free beer and free coffee, it's X% of $2,200 a month beer and Y% of $2,200 a month coffee.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
Sure, but your corporate overlord^W^Wfounder pays for that. From your POV, it's all you can drink coffee. Also $2200 is on the high end for four people. You can probably talk them down to $2k or less. You'd be surprised how valuable it is to have a pot of coffee ready to go all the time, next to a mini fridge that's always stocked with half and half. Sweetner's on the counter. It ends up taking like 30 seconds to grab coffee. The janitors are surprisingly cool people, and they're fastidious about making sure the trash is taken out, doing the dishes (yes, you get a kitchen + fridge!), and making sure everything is stocked. It's so effective to pool resources like that. Everyone gets those benefits just by being in the same place. And it's remarkable how un-cramped it all feels. Your office even has beautiful floor to ceiling windows that gives you a nice view of downtown and sunsets.
- eric_h 9y ago
  > Your office even has beautiful floor to ceiling windows that gives you a nice view of downtown and sunsets. s/Your office/some offices My company currently has an office in the middle of the floor of a WeWork building, it's cramped for 4 people, and the only "views" I have are of the walls of neighboring buildings in the windows that I can see through ~4 other offices and are ~80-100ft away (but, times are a bit tough right now and I think we're getting a pretty good deal for an NYC WeWork office). In general though, WeWork is pretty solid; their coffee is acceptable, and the beer is usually pretty good.
  - spurcell93 9y ago
    Are you in the Dumbo office? I found that one to be pretty cramped - I liked Montague St a lot more. And better subway access, IMO.
    - eric_h 9y ago
      No, and we had a much less cramped office in this same building before we were forced to downsize for financial reasons - most of the WeWorks I've been to have the whole spectrum of office sizes, from cramped to spacious - it's just about what you can afford.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  > It ends up taking like 30 seconds to grab coffee Try this stuff: http://www.nestle.co.uk/brands/coffee/superpremium/azera http://www.nestle.co.uk/brands/coffee/superpremium/azera Just mix with hot water, it's surprisingly good.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  Why does that need a startup, though? Sounds like the perfect opportunity for a small-companies' cooperative.
infinii 9y ago
Let's do some conservative costing here. 4 people, consume 10 cups (total) of coffee each day, 20 work days in a month. At $3 a cup, that's $600. Now I'm not even going to guesstimate the beer but let's just say the team consume $100 of beer in a month. That leaves $1.5k for rent. Find a better deal.

neaden 9y ago

Speaking for myself I'm not negative about the core idea. I just think sometimes someone comes out with a good idea and investors act like it is the greatest deal of all time!!!!

cratermoon 9y ago

It's a reasonable office services model -- every company would like to have (at least) fresh coffee, internet, print/copy services, meetings rooms, janitorial service, etc. All the unsexy things that make a workspace into a place to get stuff done. Depending on the size, the companies may do it themselves, or may contract with one of the many vendors for that. With WeWork, though, the sweet spot is for companies that are in between the solo entrepreneur (or the 2-3 friends) and about say 20-25 people. There is a good value for the hot desk or reserved desk for individuals. At least in the locations I'm familiar with, once the number of people in a company gets too big then costs per square foot soar above regular office real estate in the same area. We found that having a meeting for 3-4 people couldn't happen on a whim, you had to book a room and if none were available you had to delay the meeting. Also, our meetings could never run long because inevitably someone else had booked the room afterwards and needed us out. A lot of small things that might matter for some sorts of companies never really gave us much value like printer and copier services. While there's no true paperless office, the amount of printed stuff we generated (not counting marketing materials, which went to a graphic print service anyway) was negligible.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sillysaurus3 9y ago
FWIW, the WeWork I'm at has been trying to lease a massive 40+ person office for the last 6 months or so. That monster of a room occupies ~1/5th of the whole floor. In that situation you'd be able to set up a roundtable in a corner for meetings like that. (Sounds kind of miserable, being an open office and such. But again, almost nobody uses the phone booths, so you're always free to peace out and shut yourself in for ~2h to power through a task.) No idea how much it costs though, so you're probably right that the numbers might not make sense.
pentae 9y ago
I find printing/scanning to be one of those things that I almost never do, and desperately try to avoid - but when I need to do it it's usually super important paperwork that has to be done right away. And having to go hunt down a print and scan place is a lot of friction. So reluctantly, we have an all in one at my office.

tytytytytytytyt 9y ago

All of those things are either what you'd expect when you rent a normal office space or aren't the amazing extra perk you make them out to be. The meeting rooms you had to pay to use. The coffee and beer are included in the total price and aren't really that valuable anyway. And the beer and toilet paper frequently ran out. And the phone booths didn't even have doors, they had curtains. It was nice, especially since I was an employee, not the company renting the space, but the only real benefit was there would be occasional free meals and not having to leave the building to go to the occasional meetup.com style meetup that happened there. I'm guessing the price per square foot isn't that amazing compared to what you could get at other places, though.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
And the phone booths didn't even have doors, they had curtains. Yikes. The doors on our booths are a killer feature. The booth becomes mostly soundproof when it's closed.

tptacek 9y ago

In a lot of markets, WeWork is a great deal. We just moved from Chicago West Loop WeWork to our first real office; we got what I think is a pretty amazing deal on our new office and it is still very difficult to beat the package WeWork puts together. But that's not the critique being leveled at WeWork here; the critique is, WeWork can't in the long run be profitable at these rates. In a lot of their spaces --- maybe all of them? --- they're overstaffed. They're premium-everything (I wanted the couches from the first floor at WeWork West Loop and asked where they got them; they were custom-designed!). Free beer on every floor (this turns out not to be a win, but it's still part of their cost basis). Most importantly: they site these things in marquee locations that they have to be paying a mint to lease. I'm happy to take full advantage of the largesse of Investor Storytime Economics, but unless you're Amazon, the music has to stop playing at some point. WeWork is not Amazon.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
Do you think they can figure out a way to still be around in ten years? It's so much better than traditional offices that it'd be a shame to lose it. Hopefully there's a sustainable business model. What would you say are the pros/cons of moving to your new office? The West Loop WeWork is nice because it's about a 3 minute walk from the redline subway to the front door. That matters during winter -- Chicago winters blow. So I was wondering if you managed to get a spot close to public transit too. (And if so, how'd it end up ~cheaper than WeWork? Prime locations tend to come at a premium.)
- tptacek 9y ago
  We're still in Fulton Market, on May and Hubbard, a short walk from the Blue Line on Grand. I'm not entirely sure how we got this office in this specific location, but I think it had to do with the building itself being on the market. I should be clear: it's hard to compete with WeWork for the 4 people we have in this office (I think we pay slightly less here than we'd pay for 4x WeWork berths) --- but having our own office is a phenomenally better deal as we hire more people, since we'll be paying the same amount of money in rent but can easily park another 10 people in this space comfortably. So I should clarify that I think WeWork is an amazing deal for very small companies and, in particular, for solo worker locations. Part of the problem with WeWork is that it's precipitously less of a good deal as your company grows.

potatolicious 9y ago

I don't think it's a case of people being negative about the idea of WeWork - the issue is is that WeWork's product is/will be commoditized, and as such will be subject to intense price competition. This is good for people who enjoy WeWork's product, since there are (and will be more) competitors that offer a similar experience for less money. But it's bad for WeWork's valuation - and that's the core thing being brought up. WeWork's valuation is based on the idea that they can charge a premium for their product (relative to more traditional office rentals or other coworking providers), and/or that they can sell significant ancillary services on top of the base rental fees. I don't think either of those expectations have played out, and IMO there are lots of reasons to believe that they won't play out at all. WeWork isn't the only one - SV is full of startups that expected to exist in a premium marketplace that isn't as sensitive to price competition, but found themselves instead running a well-executed, but extremely commoditized product.

lloyd-christmas 9y ago
General Assembly's bootcamp program probably isn't the best out there, but the company is worth a hell of a lot more than the rest of the bootcamp industry. Just because a business is easy to imitate doesn't mean it's easy to compete at scale. There are plenty of similar set ups to wework in NYC, but they don't have offices in countless other countries and cities. They simply don't have the scale that the wework network already has. Why would I join one of the other NYC ones for a discount on office space when I can gain business from all around the world just by signing into the member network and checking my messages?
- incendiary 9y ago
  The main difference is that General Assembly has product differentiation, and where you studied has signalling value. Where you rent your office space, much less so. Hence, WeWork produces a highly commoditized product, which will continually be subject to competitive pressure.

untog 9y ago

> Did I mention you're surrounded by empty rooms with doors that close? I mean hello, you get a door! It closes! That doesn't scale though. If everyone who worked in a WeWork space wanted to occupy an empty room with a door that closes you'd discover pretty quickly what a hot commodity the are. And that can change entirely out of your control - I've worked at a relatively empty WeWork, only for a large company to come in and take over a lot of space on my floor. Suddenly all the fantastic facilities aren't available any more. All in all, WeWork is fine, but not in any way worth the money.

nodamage 9y ago

> Did I mention you're surrounded by empty rooms with doors that close? I mean hello, you get a door! It closes! Not sure if this is the case for all of their locations, but the doors (and walls) were made of glass at the WeWork we rented from in Seattle, which meant there was zero soundproofing and I was constantly hearing conversations from the people in adjacent offices. It was incredibly distracting and we only lasted a month before returning back to our home office.

techsupporter 9y ago
This seems to be the case at all of the "rent a small workspace"-type places I've tried in Seattle, with or without regular doors. Ballard Studioworks has virtually no insulation and has a lot of noisy businesses or just people who like to blast music at concert levels. Activspace in Lake City was a little better but the floors shook every time someone moved a piece of furniture. Wework Holyoke was like working in a fishbowl with really nice furniture. I dunno, maybe I'm just too picky. I don't want a community or all of that. I just want a place that isn't where I live that's quiet, has Internet access and bathrooms, and the rent doesn't have a comma in the dollar amount.

aorloff 9y ago

A door to your office that closes. Not exactly a $19B moat IMO.

jeirje88382hj 9y ago

The meeting rooms are not all you can eat for your monthly spend. They give credits based upon spend. Once you burn them up (and you will cause it's a pittance in credits) you gouged after that.

Dwolb 9y ago

Just a note - while you can be at the offices 24 hours a day, they officially shut off all climate features starting at 6PM. This means any sun-facing office get HOT. 6PM for ending a work day is silly IMO and I emailed our office managers who took the issue to the city manager. Still no change (they asked us to pay $120/hr to keep climate management on outside of 6PM).