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I wonder if this is true. My one startup experience sure involved the management spending a lot of time scouting, negotiating for and renovating space rather th
by v77 7y ago
I wonder if this is true. My one startup experience sure involved the management spending a lot of time scouting, negotiating for and renovating space rather than doing things that actually made the company successful.
Is the WeWork moat as big as AWS, probably not, but dealing with local real estate regulations and contractors in hundreds of jurisdictions around the world is not nothing.
- chasely 7y agoI can definitely see the benefit for a team working remotely, which may (hopefully) become more common. I think WeWork still has a "local" business model: you rent out space at a specific location for defined periods of time. If this switched to global, as I'm sure it is for enterprise accounts, I could see it being very valuable. If the variable cost of adding a desk in an office anywhere in the globe is, say, $500/seat that is so much easier than having to deal with setting up offices wherever you find talent. That all being said, I have serious problems with the design of WeWork offices. Their horrible sound design means you· better hope you don't have an office neighbor that is making calls all day. The office I worked at had a private equity firm that rented out a corner of the building for a few of its remote employees. They then also rented the neighboring offices for those employees, which remained empty, so they could have privacy.
- mrosett 7y agoI've seen the same phenomenon where CEOs spend way too much time thinking about the physical office space. I suspect, though, that they enjoy doing that - it plays pretty directly to vanity - and invest that time because they want to, not because they need to.