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As someone living in SF, I don’t think anyone in SF or SV would ever consider WeWork to be a “Silicon Valley” company in the same way that Uber or Twitter or Sl
by tempsy 7y ago
As someone living in SF, I don’t think anyone in SF or SV would ever consider WeWork to be a “Silicon Valley” company in the same way that Uber or Twitter or Slack is.
The company has 0 tech brand among employees (how many ex-FB or ex-Google engineers work there?) and outside of Benchmark’s early round none of the VCs are SV-based.
Point is the media is making this out to be an indictment on some SV tech bubble but people in SV are looking at this from the outside like everyone else.
- saagarjha 7y ago> how many ex-FB or ex-Google engineers work there? This sounds like an awful metric.
- tempsy 7y agoIt really isn’t. FB/Goog compensation is still the benchmark as far as industry comp goes, so a private co really needs to be convincingly successful to attract smart, high paid engineers at top tech companies. If they can’t then it’s a completely valid signal that something is up - either comp is well below market, growth story is fishy, management is weak, or something else.
- robjan 7y agoAssumption: smart engineers only care about money.
- chrischen 7y agoHis assumption is actually that smart engineers would chase good tech, high stock price increase potential. They already have good compensation being Facebook/Google engineers.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- echelon 7y agoWould you work for less if you only had to work Monday through Thursday? Or if you could take sabbaticals at will?
- bakuninsbart 7y agoWork environment makes a huge difference. My current job is pretty harmonious among the coworkers, the bosses and team-leaders are all engineers themselves or at least tech-literate. They are also very preoccupied with the welfare of employees and even kept a completely unproductive (bad fit) employee on for half a year to help him score a new job first. The customers are almost always happy with what we produce, and while it is certainly not fast growing, the company is steadily progressing in a good direction. This environment is worth a lot of money to me.
- hef19898 7y agoStay as long as it remains like this, these places are few and far between!
- C1sc0cat 7y agoProbably true for most people, people often Lie about motivations on surveys.
- rhizome 7y agoAssumption #2: Google/FB development practices will fit in.
- ummonk 7y agoIt's a useful proxy metric, but not a metric to optimize for. I wouldn't want to work for a startup that focused on hiring ex-FB or ex-Google engineers, but given that a large fraction of talented engineers have worked at FB or Google, you'd expect to find plenty of them at any reputable large startup.
- chrisweekly 7y ago>a large fraction of talented engineers have worked at FB or Google citation needed
- untog 7y ago> large fraction of talented engineers have worked at FB or Google I'd actually dispute that. The tech world is really, really big. There are a great many extremely talented engineers that have never worked at FB or Google, but they're also the kind of engineers that don't write blog posts or attend conferences, so they're less visible.
- gumby 7y agoYour point is quite reasonable in general but the discussion was for Silicon Valley and San Francisco. My GF has worked for Microsoft, Amazon, FB and now Google (and some startups over the years). How? Well they all have big tech offices close to Palo Alto. When she worked for various startups she was an ex-MS, ex-FB etc person. If she'd stayed in Chicago (Northwestern grad), that's unlikely. Of course those companies have outposts there, but fewer tech roles by an order of magnitude or two.
- paxys 7y agoIt is a great metric if you are trying to measure software innovation happening at a company. San Francisco/SV is still a relatively tight-knit community, and engineers move around a lot. A company has to pay top dollar AND have enough interesting work going on to retain top talent, or they will move on.
- autokad 7y ago> "Point is the media is making this out to be an indictment on some SV tech bubble" Its not the media, I think its just true. Had WeWork IPO'ed under the same conditions a year ago, I think it would have been 'fine'. but the glut of SV unicorns losing money, hating investors, and slowing growth has got people highly concerned. This list of companies (slack, lyft, Uber, Pinterest, beyond meat, crowdstrike, tesla, spotify, Pinduoduo, Dropbox, Snap, Domo, Blue Apron, Box, Shopify, Zillow) has 310 billion in market cap and -18.67 billion $ in revenue (back of the envelope calculation). If I missed anyone or made a typeo/mistake, let me know how I came up with the numbers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L2ElCY853kgWACC3Q48QS9Cdlc3kuczLdkbEESjLILA/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L2ElCY853kgWACC3Q48Q... EDIT: I am not saying all these companies are bad; I am invested in some of them! Just that the sheer size of these companies and their total losses are unnerving lots of people to such a point that the market had no appetite for WeWork.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoMaybe you need to flip that envelope around because I don't know how you get that much negative revenue.
- autokad 7y agoadded link above
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoRevenue and earnings are not the same thing.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- brennebeck 7y agoNot to be flip, but pretty sure the gp is referring to losses, I.e. burning vc money and not earning enough revenue to break even.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hobofan 7y ago> Point is the media is making this out to be an indictment on some SV tech bubble It is (too some degree) an indictment on the Softbank and/or blitzscaling strategy that a lot of SV startups follow.
- GCA10 7y agoOn the merits, yes, We is not a tech company. But bear in mind that the company has gone to extraordinary lengths to cloak itself in the unicorn-tech narrative. It masquerades as a platform for other services; it ascribes its losses to a work-setting variant of the Uber fast-growth strategy; it draws parallels to Airbnb's disruption of the hotel business, etc. Yes, Silicon Valley's smartest minds may see through it all. But in routine media coverage, the company's own version of its story (OVOIS) gets much of the ink. It takes a while for more investigative reporters to call BS and defy the company's OVOIS.
- kelnos 7y agoThe general public's impression of WeWork isn't really relevant here, though. It's mainly the opinion of institutional investors that matters. And if they've had the wool pulled over their eyes and believe We to be a tech company, then... well, I'm even more worried than I thought for our financial system. Actually, my feeling here is that institutional investors have realized that We isn't a tech company. That's why the IPO would probably only have fetched them at most a $20B valuation, rather than the higher valuation they've been awarded from the private markets as a supposed tech company. So this may not be an indictment of "Silicon Valley IPOs" in particular, just investors saying "no" to a clearly overvalued non-tech company, and that company then deciding that it won't accept a likely more-reasonable valuation. (Not saying there aren't plenty of overvalued tech companies! But this might not really have anything to do with that.)
- GCA10 7y agoAll good points. At the same time, there's a bit of "No True Scotsman" going on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
- perl4ever 7y agoNot every time when someone says "X is not an example of Y" is the "No True Scotsman fallacy". Now you may accuse me of the "No true 'No True Scotsman fallacy' fallacy".
- ping_pong 7y agoI have a friend who joined there last year. He said that the interview process wasn't very hard and they focused on communication. He also said that the engineers there aren't impressive but he likes his coworkers and the job is okay, but the tech definitely isn't impressive at all.
- _pmf_ 7y agoLiterally hell.
- CriticalCathed 7y agoHonestly, who cares about facebook or google employees? They don't actually represent the bulk of software engineers -- instead, a vanishingly small minority.
- ganitarashid 7y agoThe only people I know who work at WeWork are NYC people who think WeWork is a tech company
- buboard 7y agoIs that true? Then why does it repeatedly end up in the frontpage here?
- nkoren 7y agoIt's not "Silicon Valley", it's Silicon Valley. As in the show. My wife just started a contract at a new WeWork office in London. The lobby features a giant but non-functional as skateboard ramp, and two DJ booths, both manned (at 9am on a Monday). The bathrooms feature the very latest in digital toilets, but they aren't flushing, and nobody can figure out how to reboot them. At an aesthetic level, this couldn't be more Silicon Valley if Mike Judge were in charge of the service design. In this context, the media pile-on may be annoying -- but it's inevitable, and basically deserved.
- cameronbrown 7y agoCompany with an identity crisis by any chance?
- orbifold 7y agoSeems like a perfect place for people who like to pretend to work.
- ethbro 7y agoWeWork's new motto: "No, really, we do work!"
- blaser-waffle 7y agoLifestyle branding for the IT crowd
- cs02rm0 7y agoI think I've heard about that skateboard ramp - they put desks in the middle of it or something?
- nkoren 7y agoDesks would be too work-y. They've got half-sofa, half-bed thingies, which nobody can figure out how to use in a dignified fashion in public.
- Sholmesy 7y ago
- navigatesol 7y ago>Point is the media is making this out to be an indictment on some SV tech bubble but people in SV are looking at this from the outside like everyone else. Question: How do you think this company got a $40B+ valuation? Answer: By renting office space to "Silicon Valley" companies with equally silly ideas and terrible financials. It epitomizes SV.
- H8crilA 7y agoWhy would it matter if it's "tech" or not? Being "tech" somehow makes companies magically better than being "not tech"? If so, that's a bubble right there - your valuation depends on whether or not you're considered "tech", rather than what the financial performance data says. Here's a news headline: "Tech company" brand value damaged by WeWork; WeWork not in the club key investors say
- Slartie 7y agoPeople work with prejudice, if they are aware of it or not. A bunch of companies from the tech sector have managed to earn absurdly high valuations in a short timespan by successfully monopolizing a winner-takes-all market for a service with high initial cost but very low additional cost per customer. This situation is pretty uniquely found only for a certain subset of digital services, but people have already generalized this kind of approach into the word "tech company" - even though far from all tech companies operate in such kind of markets. What we see now is the second stage of this: companies which have a marginal involvement of technology in their core business (which is true for basically all companies today) try to paint themselves as "tech companies", with the goal being that investors put them in the same box as Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Salesforce et cetera. And since investors are just as stupid as anyone else and just as susceptible to fall for herd-like behavior as anybody, this strategy works to a certain degree.
- H8crilA 7y agoPrecisely my point. Buy high because "OMG look at those past returns". Perfectly fits George Soros' concepts of fallibility ("tech" as a good label) and reflexivity (past returns drive shit ton of new money). I reckon I should play this like Soros would: first add fuel to the fire, and then short the shit out of the dumpster fire once it becomes clear that it really is a dumpster. And the end is nigh, so keep within reach shortlists of things to short. Too bad our salaries will suffer too. Nothing one can do about that.
- _bxg1 7y agoYeah, I'm not in the valley but I'm worried about a coming bubble-burst. The worst thing is it'll probably affect even those of us who don't work for vapid startups; "tech" will become a bad word instead of a good word, new initiatives even by established companies may dry up, etc. Trying to figure out if there's anything that can be done to prepare.
- pastor_elm 7y ago>I don’t think anyone in SF or SV would ever consider WeWork to be a “Silicon Valley” company Well it is based in New York, so it really isn't a Silicon Valley company. It's a NYC one.
- KoftaBob 7y agoI mean, the company is based in NYC, so it's literally not a SV company.
- warp_factor 7y agoI already think that Uber and Slack are not really Silicon Valley: those are businessy companies but not really tech companies. WeWork is even taking it one level further. They still have close to thousands software engineers to build... Things though.