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To be fair, you can actually give money to WeWork and get some office space. They seem massively over-valued, and investors seem weirdly OK with Neumanns using

To be fair, you can actually give money to WeWork and get some office space. They seem massively over-valued, and investors seem weirdly OK with Neumanns using self-dealing to feather his own nest, but its, like a real company with an actual business model, and so far as I can tell, they aren't really making objective lies to investors to get them to hand over crazy amounts of cash. On the other hand, no could ever actually buy an "Edison" blood test machine from Theranos. They were purely a fraud. I guess its sort of an interesting question about wheter it looks worse to lose money investing in a billion dollar product that would legitimately be worth billions but doesn't exist, or one that does exist but isn't worth billions.

Analemma_ 7y ago
> and investors seem weirdly OK with Neumanns using self-dealing to feather his own nest Well, sort of. The fact that this IPO has apparently attracted so little interest that it's getting pushed back or canned entirely tells me investors aren't OK with it. It's more like "SoftBank seems weirdly OK with it", and this fiasco is going to cost them so much money that I have a feeling they won't be so lenient with the next set of founders.
- jazzyk 7y ago
  The poster above is talking about the people who had invested in the company so far: The We Company has raised a total of $12.8B in funding over 14 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jan 9, 2019 from a Secondary Market round. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wework https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wework
- ToFundorNot 7y ago
  Even Softbank wasn't okay, they did one round, but they then reduced their most recent round from 14b to 2b source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/07/for-softbank-no-majority-stake-in-wework-as-it-scales-down-talks-from-a-new-16-billion-investment-to-2-billion/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/07/for-softbank-no-majority-s...
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    I know the Vision Fund is massive but the fact that SoftBank was even considering having one fund make a $16 billion investment in one company is insanity to me.
- sharadov 7y ago
  SoftBank does not seem so smart to me, I just think between the two Vision funds - 200B, they have so much money to play with, they don't seem to give a shit. And Masayoshi Son, can just go back to the Saudis and get more money if he needs to.
sharadov 7y ago
Am not talking about the service that "WeWork" provides, unquestionably there is a market need for it and the success of the model shows. But all the red flags - with the self-serving CEO, I don't give a shit about his immaturity either, you have the money you can screw around plenty.

Analemma_ 7y ago

> and investors seem weirdly OK with Neumanns using self-dealing to feather his own nest Well, sort of. The fact that this IPO has apparently attracted so little interest that it's getting pushed back or canned entirely tells me investors aren't OK with it. It's more like "SoftBank seems weirdly OK with it", and this fiasco is going to cost them so much money that I have a feeling they won't be so lenient with the next set of founders.

jazzyk 7y ago
The poster above is talking about the people who had invested in the company so far: The We Company has raised a total of $12.8B in funding over 14 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jan 9, 2019 from a Secondary Market round. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wework https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wework
ToFundorNot 7y ago
Even Softbank wasn't okay, they did one round, but they then reduced their most recent round from 14b to 2b source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/07/for-softbank-no-majority-stake-in-wework-as-it-scales-down-talks-from-a-new-16-billion-investment-to-2-billion/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/07/for-softbank-no-majority-s...
- elliekelly 7y ago
  I know the Vision Fund is massive but the fact that SoftBank was even considering having one fund make a $16 billion investment in one company is insanity to me.
sharadov 7y ago
SoftBank does not seem so smart to me, I just think between the two Vision funds - 200B, they have so much money to play with, they don't seem to give a shit. And Masayoshi Son, can just go back to the Saudis and get more money if he needs to.

sharadov 7y ago

Am not talking about the service that "WeWork" provides, unquestionably there is a market need for it and the success of the model shows. But all the red flags - with the self-serving CEO, I don't give a shit about his immaturity either, you have the money you can screw around plenty.