One of the Wildest Business Rises and Falls in History
整理 | Cao Yi
From Zero to a $47 Billion Unicorn in Under a Decade
From its modest beginnings, WeWork grew to become a global brand with a valuation of $47 billion in less than ten years (2010-2019), briefly ranking as the most valuable startup in the United States. At its peak, WeWork operated over 700 locations in approximately 40 countries.
But the party couldn't last. Within a year of reaching its peak, the company's valuation plummeted by $40 billion. It has been bleeding cash ever since its failed IPO, and with the rise of remote work during the pandemic, the demand for shared office space has nosedived. WeWork spiraled downward and filed for bankruptcy in November 2023.
The business bestseller "Billion Dollar Loser" tells the inside story of WeWork's spectacular rise and fall.
At its core, WeWork's business was simple: lease space, divide it up, and rent it out. The company distinguished itself through amenities like stylish design, flexible subletting options, and regular events. But unlike similar businesses, founder Adam Neumann (Neumann) had grandiose visions for the company's future.
Neumann insisted that WeWork was a tech startup, a social network, a community builder, and an organization dedicated to transforming society. He famously sketched out an ambitious triangle to illustrate WeWork's future, with office leasing, real estate, and services at its three points. He claimed each "corner" could become a separate business worth $100 billion.
To Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank, Neumann described their relationship as "special," and Son boasted to Neumann, "The last time I had this feeling was with Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba."
The speed with which the WeWork bubble burst was breathtaking, leading Bloomberg to remark, "In the distant future, when historians look back at the gusher of cash that banks and venture capitalists poured into Silicon Valley, they will almost certainly hold up the implosion of WeWork as a cautionary tale."
Drawing from over 200 interviews, author Reeves Wiedeman takes us inside the company to tell the full story of its epic rise and rapid decline under its charismatic, erratic founder.
In the story of WeWork, we catch a glimpse of the excesses of an era that might just have the distinction of being one of the wildest business rises and falls in history.
A Revolution in Disguise
Each generation reimagines the office to suit its needs. The 1980s gave us cubicles and personal computers. And then came "coworking," an offshoot of the movement in which Silicon Valley startups tore down the walls and lured laptop-toting workers with beanbag chairs and foosball tables.
Green Desk, founded in 2008, was in some ways the original WeWork, a shared workspace carved out of a century-old coffee factory. With the global economy in "free fall," Neumann was warned that no one would rent office space in a down market. But Green Desk took off, drawing unemployed locals who didn't want to sit around their depressing homes.
Inspired, Neumann decided to launch a new company, hoping to replicate the success of his new-style workspace. At the suggestion of a Hollywood agent, the company would be called WeWork.
While the suits may not have signed up, the exposed brick and creaky century-old floors had a certain appeal to the newly unemployed, the unpretentious, and those who yearned for authenticity. When WeWork opened in February 2010, its 17 tenants included musicians, tech startups, and architects.
Neumann believed that people craved real-world connections in the digital age and that the path to post-recession riches lay in starting a company and shaking up the status quo. The company's pitch was not just about office space; it was about an alternative to spending decades climbing the corporate ladder.
WeWork 租赁并分割空间，然后出租
早在纽约，诺伊曼很容易找到愿意投资一家稳定增长的房地产公司数百万美元的富豪。然而，他内心的全球扩张需要特定投资，这些资本通常流向那些声称利用技术颠覆行业的公司。在 2012 年庆祝公司成立两周年纪念日派对上，诺伊曼宣布 WeWork 并不是一家房地产公司，而是与许多硅谷领先企业相连的公司。他将自己定位为社区建设者，而不是房东。
诺伊曼告诉潜在投资者，只要提供资金，WeWork 可以按任何所需速度扩张。对公司办公空间的需求如此旺盛，以至于唯一阻碍公司发展的问题就是建造新办公空间所需的资金。
在风险投资家眼中，一位成功的房地产大亨能够让投资者相信其公司价值是其收入的五倍，而那些承诺构建网络以实现指数级增长的科技公司创始人，则可能突然获得十倍甚至二十倍的估值。即使是全球最大的房地产公司也只占有 1% 的市场份额，但 WeWork 可能打破这个模式。即使只占有 2% 的房地产市场份额，它也能让亚马逊的收入相形见绌。
但事实上，WeWork 只是将办公空间出租给付租金的人，它的业务似乎与那些即将腾飞的科技公司毫无相似之处。在这种情况下，开发软件至关重要，WeWork 希望向会员销售各种商品和服务：从医疗保健计划到折扣软件订阅，公司可以从中分得一杯羹。
因此，当高盛提出以 2.2 亿美元估值进行投资时，诺伊曼认为估值过低而拒绝了。2014 年，在获得 DAG 资本、摩根大通等投资者的资金后，WeWork 的总估值达到 50 亿美元，跻身全球最具价值的十多家独角兽公司之列。
然而，建立“护城河”谈何容易。到 2013 年，几乎没有任何 WeWork 会员以有意义的方式使用该网络。到 2016 年，租用 WeWork 办公空间的数据分析初创公司 Thinknum 的员工发现，只有 21% 的会员通过 WeWork 的内部平台发布过消息。到 2017 年底，服务仅占 WeWork 收入的 5%。
2016 年，诺伊曼开始担忧公司的支出。当年 7 月，彭博社获得的一份 WeWork 内部财务报告打破了外界对 WeWork 高增长的幻想。文件显示，由于新员工业务熟练度低，导致新空间开业时间推迟，造成“交付逾期”，WeWork 下调了当年的收入预期，并将利润预期下调了 78%。
作为一家已经筹集超过 10 亿美元风险资本的公司，愿意以天价估值为 WeWork 的亏损提供资金的投资者数量正在减少。此时，对 WeWork 而言，似乎除了上市别无选择。
但突然之间，世界上唯一能给公司提供救命稻草的人出现了。
孙正义经常自诩能够透过数字看到公司和企业家的灵魂。对于那些“心中没有真正信念”的创始人，他通常直接放弃，而像马云这样的创始人，他所给予的往往超出对方想象。
在诺伊曼身上，孙正义不仅找到了盛放现金的容器，还找到了一个急于塑造自身形象的梦想家——孙正义 2.0。
在孙正义看来，WeWork 所在行业的未来是“圈地游戏”，拥有最多地盘的一方最终获胜，而自己的资金能让 WeWork 击败任何竞争对手。因此，对于诺伊曼“在 2016 年开设 100 家分店”的梦想，孙正义并不感兴趣。他告诉诺伊曼，如果眼光足够长远，并且愿意迅速采取行动，那么摆在面前的机会将远超想象。“无论采用什么策略，把它做大十倍。”
对愿景基金来说，WeWork 也提供了一个独特的机会。愿景基金需要找到信天翁级别的巨型企业，利用现金打破行业壁垒，而且这些行业的理论回报应足以抵消成本。像房地产这样的行业具有高昂的租赁费用、庞大的潜在市场，并且需要大量资本支出。
WeWork: Do What You Love
In August 2017, SoftBank publicly announced a $4.4B investment in WeWork, boosting its valuation to $20B, making it the fourth-largest private tech company in the US after Uber, Airbnb and SpaceX.
To WeWork’s competitors, this influx of cash from Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Vision Fund was an unfamiliar paradigm, funding customer acquisition at scale. Its capital was its moat. While few of these cash-burning companies came close to profitability, the deals also made it difficult for rivals to keep pace.
In WeWork’s “blitzscaling” playbook, the Vision Fund’s function was to disrupt the fundamentals of capitalism, enabling WeWork and other portfolio companies to price not for profit, but for market share. Because in a “perfect” world, a business gets so big it cannot fail.
By pouring capital into startups, the Vision Fund gave them the “gift of staying private,” in Son’s words. Among the companies the Vision Fund backed, Son seemed to have a favorite. “WeWork is going to be the next Alibaba.”
In the summer of 2018, Son and Neumann planned to have SoftBank and the Vision Fund buy out existing WeWork shareholders, purging any dissenters who harbored doubts about their shared vision.
But Son’s “gift” to WeWork also alerted executives to the fact that SoftBank could be both lavish and miserly as the company burned through its cash at an alarming rate. Worried that SoftBank might be playing for time, trying to force WeWork to accept less favorable terms, they began to consider an IPO as an escape.
The $47B Mirage
On December 18, 2018, Son and Neumann’s fears were realized: SoftBank’s Japanese mobile unit went public in the world’s second-largest IPO after Alibaba, but its stock went into a tailspin, losing $3B in market cap on its first day of trading. Not only had Son’s investment soured, but he also found himself in a financial bind, as several banks made margin calls on his personal holdings.
On Christmas Eve, Son called Neumann. The deal was dead. The market crash had spooked potential backers, making another mega-round of funding too risky.
Four days later, WeWork confidentially filed its draft S-1 with the SEC, the moment Neumann had hoped to avoid. “For Neumann, to have this kind of father figure let him down in this way, it’s hard to overstate how personally devastating that was to him,” said one of Neumann’s top lieutenants. “I don’t think he ever really recovered. Almost everything he did from that moment until the end can be traced back to that.”
WeWork’s IPO filing revealed the freewheeling ways in which the shaggy-haired founder had built his office-space empire. The prospectus showed WeWork behaved more like a family business than a public company; how Neumann had sold WeWork-related trademarks he owned to the company for $5.9M; and that it lost nearly $2B in 2018.
Worse, Neumann’s showmanship and dealmaking ability, which had previously been such drivers of WeWork’s growth, failed to connect with skeptical institutional investors during the roadshow. “Every time Neumann did a roadshow,” one banker observed, “WeWork’s valuation went down by a billion dollars.”
After a series of setbacks that included its valuation being slashed and its IPO postponed, Neumann’s fate was finally sealed: as of the WeWork board meeting on September 24, 2019, he was out as CEO.
In 2019, SoftBank reported an operating loss of more than $12B, its first annual loss in 15 years. On a call with Vision Fund investors, Son admitted that he had put too much trust in Neumann. “We created a monster,” he said, warning the CEOs of other Vision Fund companies to be mindful of their own companies’ limitations.
Neumann had engineered the perfect business for the second decade of the 21st century: filling empty properties with the burgeoning freelance workforce, convincing established corporations to embrace the communal ethos, and tapping into a global glut of capital that allowed anyone with ambition and a PowerPoint deck to build something massive.
After his ouster, Neumann kept a notecard on his desk, according to Vanity Fair, to remind himself of three lessons he had learned from his ordeal: listen, be on time, and be a good teammate.
But Neumann’s story is far from over. Even after being forced out of WeWork, he remains a billionaire, worth $2.2B. Less than a year after WeWork nearly collapsed, he began pitching his next unicorn to the venture capital community.
In recent years, Neumann has started a new real estate venture called Flow that aims to capitalize on the rise of remote work and the shortage of housing in the US. In 2022, Flow raised $350M from venture capital firm a16z. Neumann told Fortune magazine that he hopes to “compete or partner with” WeWork.
