I am a very conservative person financially so the way WeWorks and other SoftBank-run companies are run doesn't resonate with me personally, but I totally get i

I am a very conservative person financially so the way WeWorks and other SoftBank-run companies are run doesn't resonate with me personally, but I totally get it. I actually worked at an SB-funded company for over a year (I had a non-compete so it was a good time to branch out and try crazy stuff) and the way the company was run was explicitly poised to bet on high growth with acknowledgement that it was a very risky bet that had a high chance of blowing up. We were one of the first notable companies to do the "we over-hired and now that the world is changing, we need to lay off" thing in this cycle, and got a tremendous amount of negative press for what is now just basically expected behavior across industries. But anyway, neither company management nor SB were dumb. Everyone understood that we were playing a high-risk high-reward strategy and recognized that "high risk" means the company blows up if things don't go right. It's just a choice that people make about: where to invest their money, what kind of company to start, and where to work. Like, for some people working at the DMV makes sense (very steady, no growth or significant upside) and for some people working at a crazy startup does (not steady at all, some chance of hitting it big.) The company I was in was very sensitive to rates. We bet that if capital remained cheap, we'd power our way to real scale and profitability. It was a reasonable bet. History showed that we bet wrong and paid the price (I doubt the investors will recoup their money, and my equity is likely to be worth nothing although the company itself still exists.) But that's OK. My company made a bet at revolutionizing its industry (and to some extent, it did) as did We. If these companies completely die, well - that's the nature of the game we chose to play. If luck worked out the other way, it would be glorious. My main point is you can't apply the same lens to an explicitly high growth/high risk company that looks to change the world (or die trying) as you would to a self-funded bootstrapped business that is looking to slowly grow (and avoid death at all costs) by taking only small incremental bets. As long as everyone knows who is playing which game (and I guarantee you that management, employees and the investors like SoftBank knows which game they are playing) it's all good.