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I think it is really interesting that their is a strong consensus that WeWork is less admirable because it was burning capital for the founder's benefit, while

I think it is really interesting that their is a strong consensus that WeWork is less admirable because it was burning capital for the founder's benefit, while Uber is OK because it burnt capital* for the benefit of the VCs that were able to sell it off to the public market. In the first case the VCs were burned, in the second case Joe Public (and his insurance fund/ his retirement fund) was burned. * Uber is a valuable company, but I think it is safe to say it will never be profitable enough to justify an $82b valuation in 2019. Some day it will make FASBY profits purely from operations without having to sell a subsidiary that they built or invested in with the huge amount of capital they received.

SilverBirch 4y ago
The big difference is that WeWork spent a bunch of time arguing that you shouldn't value them based on the actual financials of their business. Whereas Uber pursued a risky but honest strategy of winning market share with the intention of recovering margins once they were the incumbent. The whole community EBITDA thing was just a transparent attempt to trick people into thinking there was financial value in the business when there wasn't. And to be clear, Neumann's new start up is trying exactly the same thing, waving his hands in the air about how fulfilling his tenants are going to be plunging their own toilets and how that will create financial value.