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Why Adam Neumann still gets money for a startup that cannot even fully define what he is trying to build after running we work to the ground is exactly why most

• rnk 3y ago
  I think it's because he seems like that God,-like man who is going to lead you to the promised land! He's like a TV preacher, he's got that charisma and you went to follow him! And give him a billion dollars.
  • Keegs 3y ago
    To paraphrase Matt Levine: the fact that you lost a billion dollars means someone else trusted you with a billion dollars, and that’s reason enough for financiers to trust you with yet another billion, thinking surely you’ll get it right this time.
    • steveBK123 3y ago
      Yup, you see this pattern elsewhere whenever it comes to credentials. Oh they went to __ school, they must be good. Oh they worked at __ co, they must be good. Oh they worked under __ [team/manager], they must be good. Oh they launched a [fund/startup] before, they must be good. Once you get the foot in the door once, it's easier to get your foot in the next 10 doors.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • lisper 3y ago
        This is true, but it's a two-edged sword. If you don't continually open new doors it becomes, "Oh, they haven't done anything new in N years, they must be bad."
        • noisy_boy 3y ago
          That would perfectly explain why such people pursue short-term gains over everything else and once things start to look bad, take the golden parachute and start another initiative to repeat all of it again while being lauded as "serial entrepreneur".
    • darkerside 3y ago
      Reminds me of the story about not firing the programmer who just caused a million dollar bug in production. Why would I fire him? I just spent a million dollars training him.
      • throw__away7391 3y ago
        You really do learn a lot with these big mistakes though. I mean you can read all the books you want, until you’ve actually lived through a major outage on a high traffic system I think there’s certain things that are just really hard to understand.
        • ClumsyPilot 3y ago
          programming dies not have the element of chance that incesting does. Its a bit like conoaring exact science and gambling
    • rchaud 3y ago
      That's the public-facing reason. The real reason is that dropping him after the first big losses would make it clear that you f'd up by backing him in the first place.
  • hotpotamus 3y ago
    The article says basically the same thing (though I suppose messiah is a bit of a demotion from god). > because he has the resemblance of the kind of messianic white guy that is able to take a product and sell it
    • paul_grisham 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • dmurray 3y ago
        So was the Messiah!
      • hef19898 3y ago
        Judaism is a religion so, not a ethinicity. The last time enough people thought it was the latter, it didn't end well.
        • _dain_ 3y ago
          Ashkenazi jews are a distinct ethnic group. You can easily distinguish them from other Euro and Levantine populations with whole-genome sequencing.
          • hef19898 3y ago
            You can also distinguish Chinese Catholics from Caucasian ones genetically, doesn't make a religion a genetic trait. This casual form of anti-semitism displayed here, is somewhat bothering me. Edit: Out of curiosity, since you seem very knowledgable, what's the exact gene sequence identified as being "Jewish" between those groups you mentioned? Honestly, I really thought actual genetics would be the end of that stupid eugenics crap, and not be used to sell the same shitty ideas in new disguise.
            • _dain_ 3y ago
              > doesn't make a religion a genetic trait Yeah and I never said the religion was a genetic trait. There are ethnic Jews who don't practice the Jewish religion, and there are practicing Jews who aren't part of the "classical" Jewish ethnic groups (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and so on). "Who is a Jew" is a big and complicated enough question that it has its own Wikipedia article. "Jewish" does not just mean religion. I don't see how knowing these basic things has anything to do with "antisemitism". > what's the exact gene sequence identified as being "Jewish" between those groups you mentioned? There's no exact gene that is dispositive. Human ethnic groups aren't genetically divergent enough for that. But there are alleles that are more or less common across groups. You might have some SNP that's 70% prevalent in group A, and 40% prevalent in group B, and 10% prevalent in group C. That SNP alone isn't enough to tell you what group someone belongs to. But there are millions of SNPs, each of which has its own frequency distribution. There is structure within all that variation. When you aggregate that information you get a pretty strong signal, enough to reliably cluster the genotypes, and those clusters correspond with identifiable ethnic groups. You can estimate how much Jewish ancestry someone has, or indeed how much ancestry from any ethnic group that we have enough data for. So, there is no "Jewish gene" (or "Chinese gene" or "Scottish gene"), but ethnic Jews are nevertheless genetically identifiable, from having higher or lower probabilities of having many different genetic variants. And this is not some academic matter, it is very important for human health. There are a few genetic disorders that, while not exclusively found in Jews, are unusually common among them. For example, Tay-Sachs disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay%E2%80%93Sachs_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay%E2%80%93Sachs_disease For decades now, there have been Tay-Sachs genetic screening programmes among Jewish communities. This reduces the probability of two recessive carriers marrying one another. It has been very successful: >Screening for Tay–Sachs carriers was one of the first great successes of the emerging field of genetic counseling and diagnosis. Proactive testing has been quite effective in eliminating Tay–Sachs occurrence among Ashkenazi Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora.[13] In 2000, Michael Kaback reported that in the United States and Canada, the incidence of TSD in the Jewish population had declined by more than 90% since the advent of genetic screening.[14] On January 18, 2005, the Israeli English language daily Haaretz reported that as a "Jewish disease" Tay–Sachs had almost been eradicated. Of the 10 babies born with Tay–Sachs in North America in 2003, none had been born to Jewish families. In Israel, only one child was born with Tay–Sachs in 2003, and preliminary results from early 2005 indicated that none were born with the disease in 2004.[15] Would you describe this as "stupid eugenics crap"?
• spicyusername 3y ago
  Can't agree more.
• throwawayout 3y ago
  [flagged]
• fallingfrog 3y ago
  No, no, you don’t understand, it was all those darned gays ruining everything! Sounds like a farce but Fox really did try to blame “woke banking” for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
  • datavirtue 3y ago
    Those grifters at Fox are geniuses. They know their audience very well and how to take an uninformed mind down any path they wish.
    • Aerbil313 3y ago
      I strongly dislike this kind of take. They believe what they are saying themselves. Try talking with a person you deem as a right wing nutcase.
      • rchaud 3y ago
        They absolutely don't believe what they're saying, they know it's political kayfabe. That was one of the findings during the deposition phase of the Dominion Voting Systems legal case.
        • Aerbil313 3y ago
          Okay, maybe their bullshit doesn’t make sense even to them, but I believe fully in my ideology which you’d deem the most backwards and right-wing of them all: Islam. Sorry, my mistake to generalize my experience to American conservatives. Still I’d say a great percentage of them believe in what they are saying, maybe not Fox but their audience.
          • rchaud 3y ago
            What does that have to do with anything? This was a court case brought on by repeated lying from Fox News anchors about the validity of election machines and thereby the 2020 election itself. Islam is nowhere is the picture. Fox News doesn't care about other flavours of right-wing politics unless it directly helps their preferred candidates get elected.
• Fomite 3y ago
  Whenever I want to get really angry, I convert the funding the latest Uber But For Pets On The Blockchain Using LLMs into "R01s" - the standard $1.250 million dollar NIH grants that are considered career making in the biological sciences. You could change the world with the amount of money he's been given to...do whatever it is he can't even articulate.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    Yeah, but you can change the world, and it doesn't necessarily mean you'll make a lot of money, and that's all anyone cares about, so what are you gonna do?
    • asimpletune 3y ago
      I think one of the problems is there are ludicrous amounts of money to be made changing the world, enough to make whatever's happening for 99% of most hype-fueld ventures today look like drops in an ocean. So if what I'm saying is to be believed then why doesn't the market optimize for it? Like, if there's so much money to make why doesn't it happen? I think the answer is in two parts. One, there is a political environment that is very much interested in preserving itself regardless of whatever so-called benefits could come from actually changing the world, and two the market isn't really some kind of god like oracle that always does the "right" thing. I'll give you an example to better explain what I mean to say. The Roman Empire had a lot of good things going for it. They had many of the necessary ingredients for an Industrial Revolution to take place more than a thousand years earlier. So why didn't it? Clearly there was a lot of money to be made in hindsight, but in their political environment it was never going to happen. Rome, as impressive as it was, had a small political class of movers and shakers who owned most of the wealth, and to those people if given more money they'd just buy more farmland. That's it. Literally, to them, the Roman political elite, the only way to invest money was buy farms. I think in today's day and age we're in a similar conundrum. Obviously it's more nuanced and sophisticated than where the Romans were at, but most of the people who have power today can't understand or imagine the benefit of improving the world. The market isn't magically selecting for those things because they are a large part of the market.
• zakki 3y ago
  Well from the article he gets the money from A16Z. I will say both of them are in the same boat on using other people money.
• fbdab103 3y ago
  >...he is trying to build after running we work to the ground... I do not disagree with your thesis, but Adam Neumann got paid close to $1 billion to leave WeWork. Sounds like he ran it in the most personally profitable way possible. Although, still well short of his trillionaire goal.
  • praptak 3y ago
    This makes the main point stronger, not weaker. The main point was that no rational person would ever found his business.
  • rchaud 3y ago
    The overarching point is that the way market capitalism is structured today increasingly incentivizes these kinds of decisions. That is not to say that Softbank completely dropped the ball on monitoring and oversight. Under no circumstances should Neumann have been allowed to self-deal by purchasing buildings with WeWork share collateral and leasing them back to the company.
• astrange 3y ago
  > Banks can shut down and the executives can keep their millions in bonuses, while you who put your money in, should’ve known better about FDIC insurance limits. Man you just made this up. They do lose their equity and nobody lost their bank accounts.
• spaceman_2020 3y ago
  It helps to remember that there are apparently $120B in “stablecoins” that are used by real people to trade memecoins like SHIB. All is well with capitalism /s
  • automatic6131 3y ago
    At least, we can be confident that no one put anything like 120B into those stablecoins. Sadly, the real underlying amount is probably greater than 10% and even THAT'S a very depressing number
• RandomLensman 3y ago
  How do you propose to regulate what investors can and cannot do? That seems to be at the core of it.
• mikub 3y ago
  Oh man thank you for that. Just the other day I was thinking about this stuff, I mean you can literally make no mistakes for years, but it only takes one weak moment and your life can be ruined. For example I am currently unemployed and teaching myself programming after a few bad years I turned my life around, but last year I had a weak moment and I bought some stuff that I couldn't really afford and also don't really needed (it was a Nintendo Switch, so I could relax a little after learning all day), it was something around 1000 Euro. Was it my fault that I bought it?, of course, but man, resisting is so hard when you can buy this stuff everywhere, even when you're sitting on the toilet you can buy it, I mean that's crazy. Like I said, it only takes one weak moment.
  • lukas099 3y ago
    Did buying a Switch ruin your life??