{"id":8303,"date":"2020-10-22T07:52:44","date_gmt":"2020-10-22T13:52:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=8303"},"modified":"2020-10-22T07:52:44","modified_gmt":"2020-10-22T13:52:44","slug":"the-wework-arc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=8303","title":{"rendered":"The WeWork Arc"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Diff<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

WeWork is an ideal company for a business book. Per my <\/span>general theory of business books<\/a><\/u>, the ideal recipe for a satisfying narrative about business is:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    \n
  1. \n

    \n

    A classic Greek tragedy, where the hero is undone by his own hubris, and<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n

  2. \n

    \n

    Lots of people with free time to talk to an author, who have a vested interest in telling their side of the story.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \n

    WeWork has both. The company\u2019s financial history sounds like an extended roulette session: every year, the company doubled in size, until 2019, when it shrank to almost zero. And the story is tied to the ambition of a single founder, Adam Neumann, whose sales ability and indifference to risk propelled the company to a $47bn valuation and then led to its near-collapse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    \n

    WeWork got a lot of media coverage, slowly on the way up and then much more frequently on the way down, and now the story has been told in the just-published <\/span>Billion Dollar Loser<\/a><\/u><\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    \n

    One thing the book\u2019s narrative makes clear is that WeWork was not just a creation of the venture capital market of the late 2010s. It was also a creation of the labor and real estate markets of the early 2010s. WeWork\u2019s founders, Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey, started a predecessor company called Green Desk in early 2008, leasing office space in a building in Brooklyn and subleasing smaller units. (In a memorable exchange, Neumann pitched this idea as a way for his landlord to get some use out of vacant space. The landlord said \u201cYou know nothing about real estate,\u201d and Neumann replied \u201cYour building is empty. What do <\/span>you<\/em> <\/span>know about real estate.\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The Diff: WeWork is an ideal company for a business book. Per my general theory of business books, the ideal recipe for a satisfying narrative about business is: A classic Greek tragedy, where the hero is undone by his own hubris, and Lots of people with free time to talk to an author, who have a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8303"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8303"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8304,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8303\/revisions\/8304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}