• Due to ongoing issues caused by Search, it has been temporarily disabled
  • Please excuse the mess, we're moving the furniture and restructuring the forum categories
  • You may need to edit your signatures.

    When we moved to Xenfora some of the signature options didn't come over. In the old software signatures were limited by a character limit, on Xenfora there are more options and there is a character number and number of lines limit. I've set maximum number of lines to 4 and unlimited characters.

WeWork: overhyped, overvalued

Only tangentially related to WeWork, but it doesn't really merit its own thread:

SoftBank bails on $300 million investment in dog-sitting company Wag

Just that headline made me chuckle. A dog-sitting company? $300 million?

SoftBank Vision Fund is bailing on Wag, the dog-walking and dog-sitting company in which it invested $300 million in early 2018.

What's happening: SVF will sell its shares back to the company for an undisclosed amount, and give up its board seat.

The big picture: This is just the latest black eye for SVF, but isn't quite as dark when viewed in the context of traditional VC portfolio management. The Wag investment represents 0.3% of SVF's committed capital.

I wonder how much a person can earn as a dog sitter/walker? Even if it's just minimum wage, some people might prefer that to flipping burgers at McDonald's.

ETA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_(company)
 
Last edited:
I wonder how much a person can earn as a dog sitter/walker? Even if it's just minimum wage, some people might prefer that to flipping burgers at McDonald's.

Many of my coworkers do, yeah. The remuneration can be several times minimum wage if you're organized, but there are risks and overhead costs that eat into gross profits that vary regionally.

Just for example, I have a coworker who works weekend shifts, so she's free M-F all day and walks dogs and does some pet sitting in the city (Vancouver). She hikes the trails daily anyway, and now takes along an average of 5 dogs at a time. Her overhead costs are incorporation, insurance (dangers include animal getting hit by a car, stolen, attacked by other dogs, lost off leash, inexplicable sudden death, &c), some equipment like spare leads and muzzles and toys and treats, plus part of the costs associated with owning a van. She estimates it's about $4k/mo at the moment, four hours a day M-F, mostly outdoors, and pretty physical, which she likes. She's a triathlete.

She knows some of her competitors have expanded and have staff, so this can potentially scale and she can stay in the biz even if her physical abilities diminish and she can't do the walking anymore. It's her post-retirement plan.


ETA: one of the post-retirement income ideas I have for myself is kennelling cats at my recreational property where I have acreage. It's incompatible with the bylaws for my primary residence in Vancouver, unfortunately.
 
Last edited:
My understanding of the SoftBank fund strategy is that it is a moonshot fund. They fully expect many of their investments to fail, but hope that the few that do succeed will succeed at such scale to still generate a net gain for the whole fund. They believe by having enough money, they can invest in enough of these startups that they have a high chance of success. By having enough money, they hope they can be in on the ground floor of the next Facebook or Uber or whatever.

My view is that pumping such vast sums of cash into the tech industry is creating a huge incentive for fraudsters, such as Neumann and others, to start up companies that only exist to bilk investors for high salaries and perks before they invariably go bankrupt.

From Neumann's perspective, WeWork was a success. He got paid big bucks while it lasted and only the investors and employees will get screwed when it goes bust.
 
Last edited:
Many of my coworkers do, yeah. The remuneration can be several times minimum wage if you're organized, but there are risks and overhead costs that eat into gross profits that vary regionally.

Just for example, I have a coworker who works weekend shifts, so she's free M-F all day and walks dogs and does some pet sitting in the city (Vancouver). She hikes the trails daily anyway, and now takes along an average of 5 dogs at a time. Her overhead costs are incorporation, insurance (dangers include animal getting hit by a car, stolen, attacked by other dogs, lost off leash, inexplicable sudden death, &c), some equipment like spare leads and muzzles and toys and treats, plus part of the costs associated with owning a van. She estimates it's about $4k/mo at the moment, four hours a day M-F, mostly outdoors, and pretty physical, which she likes. She's a triathlete.

Wow. I had no idea.
 
UpDate:

WeWork, once a $47bn firm, files for bankruptcy after accruing $2.9bn debt

WeWork filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday in New Jersey, according to a statement from the company.

The beleaguered company, once valued at $47bn on the private market, endured a 98% decline in its share price this year, leaving it with a market capitalization of less than $50m. In August, it raised “substantial doubt” that it could continue to operate as it grappled with $2.9bn in net long-term debt and more than $13bn in long-term leases. The company said in a statement it had entered into a restructuring support agreement and would deal with the debt by “addressing our legacy leases and dramatically improving our balance sheet”.

Company leadership also asserted that most WeWorks would remain open for the foreseeable future.

Fortunately the company's former CEO seems to have landed on his feet:
Neumann, 44, has already started a new venture. Flow, which raised $350m from the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz last year, is focused on residential real estate.
 
Absolutely unsurprising. The whole WeWork concept was a rather obvious disaster from the start.

Anyone want mug of t-shirt?
 
In addition, they have a pretty decent Human Resource system called Workday. That line of business may actually be profitable for the company.

Oddly I'm currently in a presentation by someone from Workday.

To be clear, it seems Workday and WeWork are completely unrelated businesses. Workday is a financial and human resources management software--as-a-service, that was founded in 2005 by some folks from ERP software company PeopleSoft after it was bought by Oracle.

WeWork was founded in 2010, by two dudes completely unrelated to the Workday folks.
 
Absolutely unsurprising. The whole WeWork concept was a rather obvious disaster from the start.

Anyone want mug of t-shirt?

It's a lot more obviously disastrous to me in hindsight than it was beforehand. Probably because I wasn't looking at it closely enough. One thing that was made abundantly clear during the pandemic, though, was that if people needed a pseudo-temporary office space, their living room worked just fine.

Ms TP and I live in a tiny studio, which we would not have done had we known it was going to be the primary office space for both of us for several years - indefinitely, now. But it's working for us. We still haven't seen any reason to rent workspace at one of the two or three providers within walking distance. They're probably all struggling, too.
 
"Oh noes something somehow went wrong with our cunning business strategy of renting out 1/40th of an office."
 

Oliver's a twat. I love that his criterion for affordability is that someone working a minimum wage job should be able to afford a "modest" two-bedroom home. Seriously? So a pimple-faced teenager working at Burger King?

It's not landlords who are making housing unaffordable, it's NIMBY homeowners not wanting multifamily in their neighborhood, it's planning boards that demand X, Y and Z and can't see that those costs must be passed on to the renters.
 
Oliver's a twat. I love that his criterion for affordability is that someone working a minimum wage job should be able to afford a "modest" two-bedroom home. Seriously? So a pimple-faced teenager working at Burger King?

It's not landlords who are making housing unaffordable, it's NIMBY homeowners not wanting multifamily in their neighborhood, it's planning boards that demand X, Y and Z and can't see that those costs must be passed on to the renters.

why do you hate Traditional America?
In the idyllic view of the MAGA crowd, that is exactly what a minimum wage job worker could afford, with the ability to marry, have a secure job with promotions that allowed for children and two cars.
And if average and minimum wages had kept pace with productivity, it still would be.


It's fascinating that what used to be the promise of the American Dream everyone was entitled to is now an unreasonable demand.
 
Brainster presents us with the capitalist lie about what constitutes prices, whereas Last Week Tonight (the 'twat' has a whole team of fact-finders) documents how prices actually work: People need houses or flats to live in. So if the market allows them to do so, and landlords will try to extort them by threatening them with homelessness.

This is one of the ways in which prices are inflated: Landlords get more money out of the renters even though no more actual value has been added to the product. And since houses as capital, as investment opportunities, bring in more money, i.e. become more profitable the more money the landlords can squeeze out of the renters, they can then be sold to other capitalists at increasing prices even though no more actual value has been added to those houses. The houses have just become more expensive for both the renters and the buyers.

At some point, the renters will no longer be able to pay the rent, the buyers lose money when the houses they bought turn out not to give them the profit they expected, so they can't pay back the money (+ interests) they borrowed to buy the houses, and pretty soon Goldman Sachs discovers that the value was imaginary. The houses they financed weren't worth the money invested in them, and since most of the money was borrowed, that money also isn't worth what they thought it was worth, which is the point when they ask the government to bail them out.

We have had a similar discussion before when Brainster blamed the homeless for a murder that turned out to have been committed by a venture capitalist or something similar.

I have no idea what this has to do with teenagers or their pimples, but it is obvious that Brainster thinks that some people just aren't entitled to a roof over their heads when the truth is that the entitled landlords need to be put out of business.

Brainster seems to be fine with the wages of ordinary renters having to be passed on to landlords until the renters can no longer afford it and have to give up and live in the street while the landlords and Brainster pretend that it is all about "costs (that) must be passed on to the renters."


ETA: It's all very similar to office space: A company based on renting out office space at a higher price than the one demanded by the owner, i.e. without anything of value being added to the product, goes bankrupt when nobody wants to pay the higher price. This is exacerbated by people discovering that they can work from home. It's not difficult to see why Brainster thinks that the government (local or federal) needs to interfere on the landlords' behalf and use force to remove all those homeless people from the street because they are guilty of lowering property values.

Shush! Don't mention the pandemic! People might think it had something to do with people staying at home instead of commuting to downtown ...
 
Last edited:
as always, actual capitalist will spend a great deal of effort and money to undermine the marketplace.
The vilification of and lobbying against Public Housing, which would bring some competition into the housing market, is a case in point.
 
Sarah Silverman covers RFK Jr.'s three-way race with Biden and Trump, orcas sinking another yacht, and Ronny Chieng chimes in on WeWork's bankruptcy.
RFK Jr.'s Surprising Poll Numbers & WeWork Files for Bankruptcy (The Daily Show on YouTube, Nov, 8, 2023)
At 03:53:
 
Housing is not a human right though.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 25: Right to a standard of living adequate for your health and well-being. We all have the right to enough food, clothing, housing and healthcare for ourselves and our families. We should have access to support if we are out of work, ill, elderly, disabled, widowed, or can’t earn a living for reasons outside of our control. An expectant mother and her baby should both receive extra care and support. All children should have the same rights when they are born.
 
Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 25: Right to a standard of living adequate for your health and well-being. We all have the right to enough food, clothing, housing and healthcare for ourselves and our families. We should have access to support if we are out of work, ill, elderly, disabled, widowed, or can’t earn a living for reasons outside of our control. An expectant mother and her baby should both receive extra care and support. All children should have the same rights when they are born.

I don't believe in positive rights. I do believe the Universe has the right to declare anything it wants, though.
 
I don't know why, but it really pisses me off when companies like WeWork are called "tech companies". Like, they didn't break out any sort of technological innovation or use technology in some new way. They were subletting office space. Just because they had an app doesn't make them a technology company.

Also, I've been saying for several years now that we need to declare a moratorium on words like "disruption". Having a business that lives within the margins of an industry is not a disruption.
 
I don't know why, but it really pisses me off when companies like WeWork are called "tech companies". Like, they didn't break out any sort of technological innovation or use technology in some new way. They were subletting office space. Just because they had an app doesn't make them a technology company.

Also, I've been saying for several years now that we need to declare a moratorium on words like "disruption". Having a business that lives within the margins of an industry is not a disruption.

Automating a business process that was not previously automated to that extent, and building a business based on the automated process, qualifies you as a tech company, in my opinion.

Once the automation of that process has become commoditized, and everyone who builds a business on that process uses the automated version of the process, then it goes back to being a [whatever] company business.

And if you're one of the first to achieve that automation, and you're able to do business better/faster/more/different than every other player in that market because you have technology they don't, that's disruptive, in my opinion.
 
And yet in the end they are filing for bankruptcy. Maybe Covid and the work-from-home revolution hit at the worst possible time for them. Call them a tech company or a real-estate company or whatever you prefer. Bottom line is that they were way over-valued a few years ago.
 
I don't know why, but it really pisses me off when companies like WeWork are called "tech companies". Like, they didn't break out any sort of technological innovation or use technology in some new way. They were subletting office space. Just because they had an app doesn't make them a technology company.

Also, I've been saying for several years now that we need to declare a moratorium on words like "disruption". Having a business that lives within the margins of an industry is not a disruption.

Most of the tech companies started in the last twenty years are better described as tech-bro companies. They offer nothing new in service terms, develop no new products or technologies, develop no new processes to improve productivity and are generally aimed at ideas with no real prospects of profitability.

But they get plenty of funding because their upper echelons are stocked with the right kind of people (for a given value of right).
 
Funny.

I clicked on the thread thinking that I'd mention that I had heard that WeWork was basically toast years ago. And then I realized that this thread was from 2019. Yep. That might even be where I heard it from. But yeah, I was sort of wondering where I'd heard about them before when I saw them in the news recently.
 
Last edited:
Automating a business process that was not previously automated to that extent, and building a business based on the automated process, qualifies you as a tech company, in my opinion.

Once the automation of that process has become commoditized, and everyone who builds a business on that process uses the automated version of the process, then it goes back to being a [whatever] company business.

And if you're one of the first to achieve that automation, and you're able to do business better/faster/more/different than every other player in that market because you have technology they don't, that's disruptive, in my opinion.

except Neumann didn't actually do that. Companies like Regus have had similar work flows. WeWork just broke it down to square feet within the office and added a bunch of "silicon valley" esthetics.
 
Most of the tech companies started in the last twenty years are better described as tech-bro companies. They offer nothing new in service terms, develop no new products or technologies, develop no new processes to improve productivity and are generally aimed at ideas with no real prospects of profitability.

But they get plenty of funding because their upper echelons are stocked with the right kind of people (for a given value of right).

I find most of the people hailed as "tech gurus" these days are really just finance dude-bros who focus on the tech sector. Most of them couldn't script "Hello World" but they get credited for creating whole new platforms. Also, we need to stop hyping up platforms. They really are just middlemen.
 
Back
Top Bottom