I think part of the misunderstanding of WeWork even within Silicon Valley/tech is what a diminishing part of their business the "coworking spaces" actually were. WeWork gets a lot of hate both inside and outside Silicon Valley, but I worked a lot with their team before the failed IPO and my strong sense is most of the blame for the process that lead to today rests entirely with senior management and not even the core business.
I'd be curious to know how this trajectory played out past the IPO blunder, but at the time they were already focused on the "enterprise" model of being the best place for a large firm to go to source/spin-up offices around the world (where in some sense you could understand the coworking spaces as dogfooding their own systems of vendor/space management for quickly spinning up and operating office space around the world). I.e. rather than either having to maintain profitability at a global network of coworking spaces or whatever franchise model you become the outsourced office team for the world's largest/high growth firms, who want to focus on their core competence not sourcing furniture vendors in China.
Rather than partaking in the joy of mocking WeWork's obvious hubris leading to their downfall, I think the interesting question, especially in this time of high interest rates, is what this bankruptcy signals for the future of "tech-accelerated" firms that want to primarily focus on the real world not software (ie without marginal cost of 0) -- who want to achieve the exponential scale of software yet who have to operate with the margin/cost structure constraint of a traditional firm. Tesla/SpaceX are of course the big success here, but I doubt we'll see anything equivalent until interest rates are back to 0...
The problem is more fundamental. As with Uber, WeWork is an evolution of a simple and well understood business model… but layered with some high-tech fantasy about being able to change the fundamentals of the universe.
WeWork could have succeeded with the franchise model you describe or the focus on being a flexible leasing option for enterprise… but we wouldn’t have heard of them, that wouldn’t be the WeWork we ever knew. WeWork only became big because of the mythology, otherwise it would just be a nicer Regus… which existed before WeWork and will exist long after.
WeWork’s core business was mythology, like Uber, and every other “technology” business from the 2010s. You can peel back all the bullshit and say that their “core business” was good but it was all the bullshit that made WeWork, WeWork.
> Tesla/SpaceX are of course the big success here, but I doubt we'll see anything equivalent until interest rates are back to 0...
I guess it's all about where and when you draw the boundaries, Mush has just managed to lose $20bn on "X" so the Tesla/SpaceX empire may not be counted as a big success for ever.
I'd be curious to know how this trajectory played out past the IPO blunder, but at the time they were already focused on the "enterprise" model of being the best place for a large firm to go to source/spin-up offices around the world (where in some sense you could understand the coworking spaces as dogfooding their own systems of vendor/space management for quickly spinning up and operating office space around the world). I.e. rather than either having to maintain profitability at a global network of coworking spaces or whatever franchise model you become the outsourced office team for the world's largest/high growth firms, who want to focus on their core competence not sourcing furniture vendors in China.
Rather than partaking in the joy of mocking WeWork's obvious hubris leading to their downfall, I think the interesting question, especially in this time of high interest rates, is what this bankruptcy signals for the future of "tech-accelerated" firms that want to primarily focus on the real world not software (ie without marginal cost of 0) -- who want to achieve the exponential scale of software yet who have to operate with the margin/cost structure constraint of a traditional firm. Tesla/SpaceX are of course the big success here, but I doubt we'll see anything equivalent until interest rates are back to 0...