4 ms·

I would like to understand this better because WeWork has a lot of open positions right now. Is it all a front? Much of this article seems to focus on it not ha

I would like to understand this better because WeWork has a lot of open positions right now. Is it all a front? Much of this article seems to focus on it not having the margins and network effects of Apple, Facebook, etc. Devil’s advocate: Amazon has dinky margins and was unprofitable for many of its early years. Physical servers have “wear and tear”. But they are a winner because they have developed competencies and efficiencies that let them rent out infrastructure that fast growing companies would rather not own and manage. Could WeWork be like AWS for office space? Looking at their open positions they have teams around evaluating, visualizing and instrumenting spaces. In addition to the flexibility to scale up and down. There’s a lot that’s sketch about their company structure but if companies are going to outsource say payments to 3rd parties like Stripe, why wouldn’t they do it for office space which is a huge PITA?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sytelus 7y ago
You don't want to look at margins by subtracting expenses from revenue. For a growing company, this can be zero or even negative. The key thing is this: Are customers paying top dollars for the space they sell then elsewhere? That answer seems to be yes which means they have better margin than competitors given their brand and amnesties. However, they might decide to reinvest all that money to build assets in other markets which will put their balancesheet in red.