Levine is skeptical/amused by the nonsensical valuations but takes a more neutral stance, probably because he was never truly invested in/familiar with/cared that much about new technology and what people promise it can do. Galloway is more idealistic and Levine is more practical taking things at face value and breaking them down. They're both very knowledgeable and worth reading.
We are current WeWork tenants. WeWork can’t even provide us an interface to manage and view who used WeWork credits in our org. We asked for a report and got a pdf after 2 days.
Tech my foot. The printer software is an abomination.
It's a cornerstone of their brand relative to other office space leasing companies, and tech investors are how/where they got a lot of their funding. Check out their S-1, they mention "technology" 110 times:
"Technology is at the foundation of our global platform. Our purpose-built technology and operational expertise has allowed us to scale our core WeWork space-as-a-service offering quickly, while improving the quality of our solutions and decreasing the cost to find, build, fill and run our spaces. We have approximately 1,000 engineers, product designers and machine learning scientists that are dedicated to building, integrating and automating the complex systems we use to operate our business. As a result, we are able to deliver a premium experience to our members at a lower price relative to traditional alternatives."
It’s “tech theatre,” not tech. It’s how they got their funding, but reading what even the happy users on HN have had to say, the technology isn’t core to why people rent from them.
As a former WeWork tenant, their value proposition to customers is that they provide office space quickly and without any long term obligation in convenient, trendy locations. They're also very eager to beat competitors on price in my personal experience.
Since it's very easy to set up a competitor (at least in my area, since numerous knockoffs have been created in the last few years) their margins are low at best, and they have almost no customer lock-in, I have no idea what their value proposition is for investors.
A few days ago I moved into a WeWork clone called JustCo. The spaces are much larger, look virtually identical and are in a neighbouring building. Price difference per month was $2300 vs $1600 + a month free. WeWork's best offer was 5% off if we signed for 12 months. No free beer here, but I've got a beer budget of $700 a month with the savings.
It seems WeWork's sales guys here in Sydney have very little freedom to discount.
Maintaining internal frameworks, delivery pipelines, infrastructure, instrumentation and product roadmaps. Transitioning to new organizational structures. Internal hackathons and lunch ‘n learns. What am I forgetting?
