16 ms·

How Adam Neumann’s Over-the-Top Style Built WeWork

105 points by ericzawo 7y ago

jonknee 7y ago
Highlights: > After the group landed in Israel and left the plane, the flight crew found a sizable chunk of the drug stuffed in a cereal box for the return flight, according to people familiar with the incident. The jet’s owner, upset and fearing repercussions of trans-border marijuana transport, recalled the plane, leaving Mr. Neumann to find his own way back to New York, these people said. > Many former employees said they didn’t always know how seriously to take some of Mr. Neumann’s pronouncements. Early on, he would throw out seemingly random ideas, like adding a pool in the basement of the company’s headquarters or starting an airline. > He told at least one person directly that his ambitions included becoming Israel’s prime minister. More recently, he said that if he ran for anything, it would be president of the world, according to another person who spoke with him. > One day, he proposed, the company could “solve the problem of children without parents,” and from there go onto other causes such as eradicating world hunger. > In a 2015 investment round, Mr. Neumann sold tens of millions of dollars of shares. Soon after, the company launched a buyback program offering to purchase employees’ shares too. But the company gave employees a different arrangement, giving them a payout per share worth substantially less than what Mr. Neumann was paid > A few weeks after Mr. Neumann fired 7% of the staff in 2016, he somberly addressed the issue at an evening all-hands meeting at headquarters, telling attendees the move was tough but necessary to cut costs, and the company would be better because of it. Then employees carrying trays of plastic shot glasses filled with tequila came into the room, followed by toasts and drinks. > Both Neumanns could be impulsive at times, former executives say. Ms. Neumann has ordered multiple employees fired after meeting them for just minutes, telling staff she didn’t like their energy.
- save_ferris 7y ago
  This all reads like an episode of Silicon Valley. Unbelievable.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    People want adventure, and nobody has bigger adventures than people who are manic. I think there are some pretty clear signs of manic-depressive episodes in Russ Hanneman's story arc.
  - oh_sigh 7y ago
    Too bad TJ Miller went insane - next season would surely be We heavy. Now there probably won't even be another season - and I'm okay with that considering the last one.
- leesec 7y ago
  You left out: >He previously has instructed staff to fire 20% of employees a year, bemoaning the number of “B” players hired amid rapid growth. Managers were unable to hit the target even when they included attrition.
  - cududa 7y ago
    Also that when the tequila was served after the people got fired, Run DMC popped out and started singing It’s Tricky
    - cpeterso 7y ago
      I downvoted you for making a non sequitur joke... but then I actually read the article! (I've removed my downvote.)
      - mrosett 7y ago
        Truth that you wouldn't believe if someone made it up...
    - jonknee 7y ago
      That was in the second to last quote I had, but really the whole thing was quotable, what a mess of a company.
    - randycupertino 7y ago
      This company is my cash cow, Let's have some shots and hash now We Work's my pitch, make me so rich I'm Sketchy is the title, here we go I'm Sketchy to buy a place, split up the space Rent it out to tech Co.s DJs, shots, parties w/ bros I'm Sketchy, I'm Sketchy (Sketchy) Sketchy (Sketchy) It's Sketchy to trademark "We" Sell it back to my company That's $6 mill in my bank account I'm sketchy sketchy Sketchy Sketchy I met this little girlie, her cuz Gwyneth was kinda Goopy Put her on my board The VCs forced her out, We had to transfer my voting shares real early These VCs are really sleazy, All they just say is please me with solid financials Or spend some time to actually make some profit, I said "It's not that easy"
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Seems he and his wife would be excellent dictators. Keeping people on their toes by doing random stuff is one main skill in dictatorship.
  - randycupertino 7y ago
    ^ sounds like Trump
  - dbuder 7y ago
    I bet he likes Stalin's style.
- cde-v 7y ago
  We as a society have failed and I don't think we can recover. Every single one of our systems not only enables those with sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies, but literally promotes them.
  - onemoresoop 7y ago
    This is deep problem and extremely hard to fix.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
sharadov 7y ago
Sounds like another Elizabeth Holmes to me. What's surprising is that these snake oil sellers have made it so far? Are investors so stupid? Are they so detached from reality? Whatever happened to due financial diligence?
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  Rich people have too much money and not enough places to put it.
- hinkley 7y ago
  What happens when your hiring policy favors folks with little to no practical life experience? A maniac surrounded by yes-men can be a terrifying thing. As leader of We Work he can only get up to so much mischief. Definitely wouldn't want him as 'President of the World'.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  When you read the book about Theranos it’s mind boggling how unwilling these bigshot investors and board members are to question their own decisions even while seeing very clear warning signals. Instead they shoot the messenger. I remember similar stuff happening during Enron or the housing bubble in 2008. There were plenty of people with real concerns backed up by concrete data but they just got ignored and ridiculed. And then later “no one saw it coming”.
  - mrnobody_67 7y ago
    Anybody counting on investors or startup boards to exercise proper oversight of management is dreaming. Short of the CEO being accused of sexual harassment or assault by an employee or being caught red-handed stealing from the company, they will keep the job -- especially if the company is growing revenue and continuing to raise money at ever high valuations that VCs/board members can use to mark-up their stock, take back to LPs and raise new funds to grow their assets under management that they can collect 2-3% on every year.
    - 7y ago
vincent-toups 7y ago
Can't say that this is surprising, given the startup types I have worked with in the past. [EDIT] I want to elaborate on this, actually. Rewards are good incentives until they become so large that they eclipse the value of the thing one is working on. At that point, you no longer attract people who want to accomplish things for their own sake or who even think they know how. With a large enough reward, what you attract are assholes who want rewards. I hope we figure this problem out before people like this drive our whole civilization/planet off a cliff because they want to be rich. You'd think it would be obvious, and I think it is to many of us. But there are enough of these reward seekers and the rewards are big enough that they dominate the scene.
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  Further elaboration: a financial award is a great way to tempt an innovator out of their risk adverseness: it says, you can quit your job or whatever and not risk much if your innovation is valuable. The ideal startup person is someone who already has the idea and knows its good but doesn't want to take the risk without some kind of reward to justify it. But if the rewards get big enough, you get reward seekers without any fundamental idea who are just going to sit around trying to come up with them until they find one someone is going to bite on. These two populations of people are totally different and only one of them actually cares about the product or making the world a better place.
  - tryitnow 7y ago
    I am actually pretty skeptical of financial rewards, I think after a certain point they are far better at attracting the wrong type of person. Of course, that leaves us with the question of how to attract productive innovators. I don't know. I'd probably lean toward some combination of restrained capitalism + massive subsidies to talented technical people + prizes for innovation.
tempsy 7y ago
As crazy as it sounds, after having worked at a few high-profile startups/tech cos it's not as easy as it looks to find a co where the CEO/founder is not an eccentric billionaire or multi-millionaire.
- filmgirlcw 7y ago
  For high-profile places, you're not wrong. And it isn't just tech (though I think tech has its own special set of eccentricities), finance, Hollywood, fashion, media, transportation, the restaurant industry, food and beverage -- the places that become high-profile (which is not the same thing as successful), are usually helmed early on or during that success by someone eccentric. Most of the time, the person isn't even a millionaire or billionaire when the company starts/grows -- but even at the very early stages, there is something different and slightly batshit about them. And speaking from personal experience as someone who has also worked at high-profile startups (some very early stage), that's kind of part of the appeal. An audacious leader can be charismatic and compelling. And then once you're "in it" you start to normalize the increasingly batshit stuff you see, writing it off as "that's just X being X" -- which can often be unhealthy because with no accountability, things can go from "eccentric/audacious but ultimately helpful" to "this is insanity and is harming more than it is helping."
  - camjohnson26 7y ago
    It’s the same thing that causes people to follow cult leaders, we’re drawn to extreme people who display confidence and we project our own insecurities into them.
  - rlucas 7y ago
    I call it "weird results require weird behavior." Two problems tend to arise from it: 1. Ex ante, people who don't understand it think that just by being weird, they will have exceptional (weirdly good) results. So they are libertine or uncivil and that alone doesn't drive anything useful. 2. Ex post, people who achieved highly attribute the success to the weirdness, and take it as extra license to let the id flow free. In fact, my belief is that a good bit of weirdness both causes and is the effect of some other qualities that in turn correlate with success: obsessive knowledge of a domain, obsessive levels of effort, single-mindedness, manic level charisma, inordinate confidence (itself charismatic), and willingness to be contrarian / unorthodox. But man is it annoying when people are just assholes and wave it off blithely as coming with the territory.
jonas21 7y ago
Naming your company "We" sure leads to some grammatically awkward and confusing sentences: We now expects an IPO valuation far lower than the $47 billion price it got in a January funding round. We said the new structure was created in part to make it easier to expand into new businesses beyond co-working, according to IPO filings. He relishes trips in private jets. Last year, We bought one for more than $60 million...
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  This is why in a lot of writing names of organizations and publications often get contrasting style in the text. Name in italicized text is romanized, or the opposite. eg: > We now expects... or > We now expects... Because... yes. It can produce some ridiculous results
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    First, click on your My Computer...
    - 52-6F-62 7y ago
      You got me there. I'd put something like that in quotes! I actually ran into that last week with a publication. Didn't have rights to a certain font's italics. Too much deliberation with design and edit. Solution ended up being single quotes. ex: > click on ‘My Computer’
- mitchtbaum 7y ago
  We'll be good.
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  Are Adam's pronouns we/we?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
ArtWomb 7y ago
On the off chance that some WeWorkers are reading this. My #1 request is for 24/7 hot desk availability. The 9am-6pm hours aren't working for me. Something like one credit per six hour block would be ideal. Often I don't even get started on deep work until after five o'clock ;) I love the culture. And anecdotally at least, the method clearly attracts talented designers and developers outside the pale. Concentrating creative folks together. Fomenting spontaneous frissons at the various bagel breakfasts. Or around the tap at quitting time. I find it a welcome antidote to pre-packaged and polished corporatism ;)
- frabbit 7y ago
  On the off-chance that some WeWorkers are reading this, the only way I could be persuaded to share a space with someone who foments spontaneous frissons at bagel breakfasts is if you also supply high-powered Nerf guns.
- tempsy 7y ago
  Might have something to do with the fact that you can get 1-year of WeWork included as part of the American Express Business Platinum card right now ($595 annual fee). Would love to see the cost share agreement on that one.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  > pre-packaged and polished corporatism Is literally WeWork's business proposition to customers.
yalogin 7y ago
Looks like this guy is the new Travis Kalanick. I don't know anything about WeWork or the CEO but its interesting that the personality of the CEO is what is causing grief for the company which the individual was instrumental in building.
- alephnan 7y ago
  Was Travis Kalanick involved in these kinds of self-dealing?
- ummonk 7y ago
  He makes Travis Kalanick seem sane.
- philwelch 7y ago
  I think that comparison is very unfair to Travis Kalanick.
evanwarfel 7y ago
> One day, he proposed, the company could “solve the problem of children without parents,” and from there go onto other causes such as eradicating world hunger. >Mr. Neumann has told several people over the past two years that a personal goal is to become the world’s first trillionaire. Am I the only person to think these two ambitions may be somewhat at odds? Or rather, they both seem to be egomaniacal in nature, and being an egomaniac doesn't seem to lend itself to solving nearly impossibly hard problems. Maybe after he has his exit, he'll put his money with his mouth is and start working full time on a foundation like Bill Gates.
- xkcd-sucks 7y ago
  Maybe he wants to grind up all the orphans in the world and tirn their blood serum into an elixir of youth, thereby solving the problem of their existence
  - fanpuns 7y ago
    A Modest Proposal for the internet age
mrnobody_67 7y ago
I want to learn more about the WeWork Summer Camps and what happened there....
- anonweworker 7y ago
  I just re-posted my account of Summer Camp 2018 to the comments for this article.
alephnan 7y ago
> The two have committed giving $1 billion to charity over the next decade.
- rchaud 7y ago
  Introducing "WeGive", controlled and operated by Neumann and family.
anonweworker 7y ago
Can I just point out that I called this a year ago? BTW, I quit not long after posting this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18018942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18018942 > (regular HNer here, posting anonymously for obvious reasons). I work for WeWork, and you don't know the half of it. In mid-August WeWork had their "Summer Camp" event, which was a three day all-hands company meeting in England. About 5500 of 7000 WeWork employees were flown into Heathrow and shipped out to a campground in Tunbridge Wells. Everyone was required to sleep in a tent, generally with four or five other tent mates, on air mattresses on the ground with thin mattresses. Because of the vegetarianism thing, everyone was forced to eat WeWork-provided food, sans meat (though fish is okay!). This totally broke my ketogenic diet, which made me quite mad. See other comments about this being a form of group control. For the first day and a half, we were subjected to a number of corporate "talks" which largely revolved around the cult of personalities of Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey. Adam Neumann particularly styles himself a televangelis or Jesus-wannabe and walks out into the audience, asking people about their deepest fears, delivering some ersatz corprorate sermon on the mount. There is no "me", only "we". See also the time when Rebecca Neumann commands the gathered WeWorkers to hold hands, close their eyes, and pray. Or the time that Deepak Chopra comes out and shows a disturbing video about childbirth (people were like, "is this an anti-abortion video?) and talks about how evolution and child development are intimately related, and how we should take our shoes off to let the ions flow, and leads a meditation session. A fish rots from the head down, and this is one crazy fish.
- javierrincon 7y ago
  So interested in watching a video of one of those internal events. Sounds like Herbalife cult.
- mattmar96 7y ago
  Glad you made it out
VladimirIvanov 7y ago
"Both Neumanns could be impulsive at times, former executives say. Ms. Neumann has ordered multiple employees fired after meeting them for just minutes, telling staff she didn’t like their energy. She and Mr. Neumann have sent maintenance and IT staff to their homes to fix various items." This really bothers me. I know that if I was at WeWork I would probably be fired for "bad energy" because it would be obvious that I was just working at a job and not part of the WeWork cult.
perseusprime11 7y ago
"In a videoconference with the whole company Tuesday, Mr. Neumann, dressed uncharacteristically in a gray suit and a white button-down shirt, told the staff it has “played the private market game to perfection,” listeners said." He is living in la-la land...

105 points by ericzawo 7y ago

Highlights: > After the group landed in Israel and left the plane, the flight crew found a sizable chunk of the drug stuffed in a cereal box for the return flight, according to people familiar with the incident. The jet’s owner, upset and fearing repercussions of trans-border marijuana transport, recalled the plane, leaving Mr. Neumann to find his own way back to New York, these people said. > Many former employees said they didn’t always know how seriously to take some of Mr. Neumann’s pronouncements. Early on, he would throw out seemingly random ideas, like adding a pool in the basement of the company’s headquarters or starting an airline. > He told at least one person directly that his ambitions included becoming Israel’s prime minister. More recently, he said that if he ran for anything, it would be president of the world, according to another person who spoke with him. > One day, he proposed, the company could “solve the problem of children without parents,” and from there go onto other causes such as eradicating world hunger. > In a 2015 investment round, Mr. Neumann sold tens of millions of dollars of shares. Soon after, the company launched a buyback program offering to purchase employees’ shares too. But the company gave employees a different arrangement, giving them a payout per share worth substantially less than what Mr. Neumann was paid > A few weeks after Mr. Neumann fired 7% of the staff in 2016, he somberly addressed the issue at an evening all-hands meeting at headquarters, telling attendees the move was tough but necessary to cut costs, and the company would be better because of it. Then employees carrying trays of plastic shot glasses filled with tequila came into the room, followed by toasts and drinks. > Both Neumanns could be impulsive at times, former executives say. Ms. Neumann has ordered multiple employees fired after meeting them for just minutes, telling staff she didn’t like their energy.

save_ferris 7y ago
This all reads like an episode of Silicon Valley. Unbelievable.
- hinkley 7y ago
  People want adventure, and nobody has bigger adventures than people who are manic. I think there are some pretty clear signs of manic-depressive episodes in Russ Hanneman's story arc.
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  Too bad TJ Miller went insane - next season would surely be We heavy. Now there probably won't even be another season - and I'm okay with that considering the last one.
leesec 7y ago
You left out: >He previously has instructed staff to fire 20% of employees a year, bemoaning the number of “B” players hired amid rapid growth. Managers were unable to hit the target even when they included attrition.
- cududa 7y ago
  Also that when the tequila was served after the people got fired, Run DMC popped out and started singing It’s Tricky
  - cpeterso 7y ago
    I downvoted you for making a non sequitur joke... but then I actually read the article! (I've removed my downvote.)
    - mrosett 7y ago
      Truth that you wouldn't believe if someone made it up...
  - jonknee 7y ago
    That was in the second to last quote I had, but really the whole thing was quotable, what a mess of a company.
  - randycupertino 7y ago
    This company is my cash cow, Let's have some shots and hash now We Work's my pitch, make me so rich I'm Sketchy is the title, here we go I'm Sketchy to buy a place, split up the space Rent it out to tech Co.s DJs, shots, parties w/ bros I'm Sketchy, I'm Sketchy (Sketchy) Sketchy (Sketchy) It's Sketchy to trademark "We" Sell it back to my company That's $6 mill in my bank account I'm sketchy sketchy Sketchy Sketchy I met this little girlie, her cuz Gwyneth was kinda Goopy Put her on my board The VCs forced her out, We had to transfer my voting shares real early These VCs are really sleazy, All they just say is please me with solid financials Or spend some time to actually make some profit, I said "It's not that easy"
Ididntdothis 7y ago
Seems he and his wife would be excellent dictators. Keeping people on their toes by doing random stuff is one main skill in dictatorship.
- randycupertino 7y ago
  ^ sounds like Trump
- dbuder 7y ago
  I bet he likes Stalin's style.
cde-v 7y ago
We as a society have failed and I don't think we can recover. Every single one of our systems not only enables those with sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies, but literally promotes them.
- onemoresoop 7y ago
  This is deep problem and extremely hard to fix.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

sharadov 7y ago

Sounds like another Elizabeth Holmes to me. What's surprising is that these snake oil sellers have made it so far? Are investors so stupid? Are they so detached from reality? Whatever happened to due financial diligence?

vincent-toups 7y ago
Rich people have too much money and not enough places to put it.
hinkley 7y ago
What happens when your hiring policy favors folks with little to no practical life experience? A maniac surrounded by yes-men can be a terrifying thing. As leader of We Work he can only get up to so much mischief. Definitely wouldn't want him as 'President of the World'.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
When you read the book about Theranos it’s mind boggling how unwilling these bigshot investors and board members are to question their own decisions even while seeing very clear warning signals. Instead they shoot the messenger. I remember similar stuff happening during Enron or the housing bubble in 2008. There were plenty of people with real concerns backed up by concrete data but they just got ignored and ridiculed. And then later “no one saw it coming”.
- mrnobody_67 7y ago
  Anybody counting on investors or startup boards to exercise proper oversight of management is dreaming. Short of the CEO being accused of sexual harassment or assault by an employee or being caught red-handed stealing from the company, they will keep the job -- especially if the company is growing revenue and continuing to raise money at ever high valuations that VCs/board members can use to mark-up their stock, take back to LPs and raise new funds to grow their assets under management that they can collect 2-3% on every year.
  - 7y ago

vincent-toups 7y ago

Can't say that this is surprising, given the startup types I have worked with in the past. [EDIT] I want to elaborate on this, actually. Rewards are good incentives until they become so large that they eclipse the value of the thing one is working on. At that point, you no longer attract people who want to accomplish things for their own sake or who even think they know how. With a large enough reward, what you attract are assholes who want rewards. I hope we figure this problem out before people like this drive our whole civilization/planet off a cliff because they want to be rich. You'd think it would be obvious, and I think it is to many of us. But there are enough of these reward seekers and the rewards are big enough that they dominate the scene.

vincent-toups 7y ago
Further elaboration: a financial award is a great way to tempt an innovator out of their risk adverseness: it says, you can quit your job or whatever and not risk much if your innovation is valuable. The ideal startup person is someone who already has the idea and knows its good but doesn't want to take the risk without some kind of reward to justify it. But if the rewards get big enough, you get reward seekers without any fundamental idea who are just going to sit around trying to come up with them until they find one someone is going to bite on. These two populations of people are totally different and only one of them actually cares about the product or making the world a better place.
- tryitnow 7y ago
  I am actually pretty skeptical of financial rewards, I think after a certain point they are far better at attracting the wrong type of person. Of course, that leaves us with the question of how to attract productive innovators. I don't know. I'd probably lean toward some combination of restrained capitalism + massive subsidies to talented technical people + prizes for innovation.

tempsy 7y ago

As crazy as it sounds, after having worked at a few high-profile startups/tech cos it's not as easy as it looks to find a co where the CEO/founder is not an eccentric billionaire or multi-millionaire.

filmgirlcw 7y ago
For high-profile places, you're not wrong. And it isn't just tech (though I think tech has its own special set of eccentricities), finance, Hollywood, fashion, media, transportation, the restaurant industry, food and beverage -- the places that become high-profile (which is not the same thing as successful), are usually helmed early on or during that success by someone eccentric. Most of the time, the person isn't even a millionaire or billionaire when the company starts/grows -- but even at the very early stages, there is something different and slightly batshit about them. And speaking from personal experience as someone who has also worked at high-profile startups (some very early stage), that's kind of part of the appeal. An audacious leader can be charismatic and compelling. And then once you're "in it" you start to normalize the increasingly batshit stuff you see, writing it off as "that's just X being X" -- which can often be unhealthy because with no accountability, things can go from "eccentric/audacious but ultimately helpful" to "this is insanity and is harming more than it is helping."
- camjohnson26 7y ago
  It’s the same thing that causes people to follow cult leaders, we’re drawn to extreme people who display confidence and we project our own insecurities into them.
- rlucas 7y ago
  I call it "weird results require weird behavior." Two problems tend to arise from it: 1. Ex ante, people who don't understand it think that just by being weird, they will have exceptional (weirdly good) results. So they are libertine or uncivil and that alone doesn't drive anything useful. 2. Ex post, people who achieved highly attribute the success to the weirdness, and take it as extra license to let the id flow free. In fact, my belief is that a good bit of weirdness both causes and is the effect of some other qualities that in turn correlate with success: obsessive knowledge of a domain, obsessive levels of effort, single-mindedness, manic level charisma, inordinate confidence (itself charismatic), and willingness to be contrarian / unorthodox. But man is it annoying when people are just assholes and wave it off blithely as coming with the territory.

jonas21 7y ago

Naming your company "We" sure leads to some grammatically awkward and confusing sentences: We now expects an IPO valuation far lower than the $47 billion price it got in a January funding round. We said the new structure was created in part to make it easier to expand into new businesses beyond co-working, according to IPO filings. He relishes trips in private jets. Last year, We bought one for more than $60 million...

52-6F-62 7y ago
This is why in a lot of writing names of organizations and publications often get contrasting style in the text. Name in italicized text is romanized, or the opposite. eg: > We now expects... or > We now expects... Because... yes. It can produce some ridiculous results
- perl4ever 7y ago
  First, click on your My Computer...
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
    You got me there. I'd put something like that in quotes! I actually ran into that last week with a publication. Didn't have rights to a certain font's italics. Too much deliberation with design and edit. Solution ended up being single quotes. ex: > click on ‘My Computer’
mitchtbaum 7y ago
We'll be good.
oh_sigh 7y ago
Are Adam's pronouns we/we?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

ArtWomb 7y ago

On the off chance that some WeWorkers are reading this. My #1 request is for 24/7 hot desk availability. The 9am-6pm hours aren't working for me. Something like one credit per six hour block would be ideal. Often I don't even get started on deep work until after five o'clock ;) I love the culture. And anecdotally at least, the method clearly attracts talented designers and developers outside the pale. Concentrating creative folks together. Fomenting spontaneous frissons at the various bagel breakfasts. Or around the tap at quitting time. I find it a welcome antidote to pre-packaged and polished corporatism ;)

frabbit 7y ago
On the off-chance that some WeWorkers are reading this, the only way I could be persuaded to share a space with someone who foments spontaneous frissons at bagel breakfasts is if you also supply high-powered Nerf guns.
tempsy 7y ago
Might have something to do with the fact that you can get 1-year of WeWork included as part of the American Express Business Platinum card right now ($595 annual fee). Would love to see the cost share agreement on that one.
lonelappde 7y ago
> pre-packaged and polished corporatism Is literally WeWork's business proposition to customers.

yalogin 7y ago

Looks like this guy is the new Travis Kalanick. I don't know anything about WeWork or the CEO but its interesting that the personality of the CEO is what is causing grief for the company which the individual was instrumental in building.

alephnan 7y ago
Was Travis Kalanick involved in these kinds of self-dealing?
ummonk 7y ago
He makes Travis Kalanick seem sane.
philwelch 7y ago
I think that comparison is very unfair to Travis Kalanick.

evanwarfel 7y ago

> One day, he proposed, the company could “solve the problem of children without parents,” and from there go onto other causes such as eradicating world hunger. >Mr. Neumann has told several people over the past two years that a personal goal is to become the world’s first trillionaire. Am I the only person to think these two ambitions may be somewhat at odds? Or rather, they both seem to be egomaniacal in nature, and being an egomaniac doesn't seem to lend itself to solving nearly impossibly hard problems. Maybe after he has his exit, he'll put his money with his mouth is and start working full time on a foundation like Bill Gates.

xkcd-sucks 7y ago
Maybe he wants to grind up all the orphans in the world and tirn their blood serum into an elixir of youth, thereby solving the problem of their existence
- fanpuns 7y ago
  A Modest Proposal for the internet age

mrnobody_67 7y ago

I want to learn more about the WeWork Summer Camps and what happened there....

anonweworker 7y ago
I just re-posted my account of Summer Camp 2018 to the comments for this article.

alephnan 7y ago

> The two have committed giving $1 billion to charity over the next decade.

rchaud 7y ago
Introducing "WeGive", controlled and operated by Neumann and family.

anonweworker 7y ago

Can I just point out that I called this a year ago? BTW, I quit not long after posting this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18018942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18018942 > (regular HNer here, posting anonymously for obvious reasons). I work for WeWork, and you don't know the half of it. In mid-August WeWork had their "Summer Camp" event, which was a three day all-hands company meeting in England. About 5500 of 7000 WeWork employees were flown into Heathrow and shipped out to a campground in Tunbridge Wells. Everyone was required to sleep in a tent, generally with four or five other tent mates, on air mattresses on the ground with thin mattresses. Because of the vegetarianism thing, everyone was forced to eat WeWork-provided food, sans meat (though fish is okay!). This totally broke my ketogenic diet, which made me quite mad. See other comments about this being a form of group control. For the first day and a half, we were subjected to a number of corporate "talks" which largely revolved around the cult of personalities of Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey. Adam Neumann particularly styles himself a televangelis or Jesus-wannabe and walks out into the audience, asking people about their deepest fears, delivering some ersatz corprorate sermon on the mount. There is no "me", only "we". See also the time when Rebecca Neumann commands the gathered WeWorkers to hold hands, close their eyes, and pray. Or the time that Deepak Chopra comes out and shows a disturbing video about childbirth (people were like, "is this an anti-abortion video?) and talks about how evolution and child development are intimately related, and how we should take our shoes off to let the ions flow, and leads a meditation session. A fish rots from the head down, and this is one crazy fish.

javierrincon 7y ago
So interested in watching a video of one of those internal events. Sounds like Herbalife cult.
mattmar96 7y ago
Glad you made it out

VladimirIvanov 7y ago

"Both Neumanns could be impulsive at times, former executives say. Ms. Neumann has ordered multiple employees fired after meeting them for just minutes, telling staff she didn’t like their energy. She and Mr. Neumann have sent maintenance and IT staff to their homes to fix various items." This really bothers me. I know that if I was at WeWork I would probably be fired for "bad energy" because it would be obvious that I was just working at a job and not part of the WeWork cult.

perseusprime11 7y ago

"In a videoconference with the whole company Tuesday, Mr. Neumann, dressed uncharacteristically in a gray suit and a white button-down shirt, told the staff it has “played the private market game to perfection,” listeners said." He is living in la-la land...