WeWork – It’s Not About Office Space

This post fits WeWork into two commonly discussed trends—greater urbanization and a shift towards freelancing. One problem is that evidence for these trends being real is weak, even though many thinkpieces take them as starting points. That doesn't necessarily spell trouble for WeWork, but I think if it succeeds it will be for reasons other than riding nationwide, macroeconomic trends.

On urbanization: the proportion of Americans living in urban vs. suburban vs. rural areas is not really significantly changing. NYC is growing, and so is suburban Dallas. Even among millennials the trend is weak to nonexistent. [1]

On freelancing: Despite much discussion of the "1099 economy", the data doesn't show, at least for now, any shift towards freelancing. The proportion of Americans working full-time jobs for a single employer is actually on an upwards trend at the moment, as hiring has picked up following the economic recovery [2].

[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/think-millennials-prefer-...

[2] https://www.economy.com/dismal/analysis/datapoints/255258/We...

I worked in a WeWork for about a year. Their biggest gap, which they are nowhere near overcoming, is culture.

The culture at WeWork is incredibly artificial and made everyone there feel disconnected and unhappy. A huge focus on sports and drinking events. Art everywhere, but not that reflected the values of the people there; but rather art that was speaking at the people there.

Management was constantly changing out, and it was impossible to have a relationship with the people in charge and they often seemed not listen to the concerns and needs of the people renting space there. I felt zero connection to people at other companies there.

There was always this weird vibe from them trying to do a political song-and-dance too, like having the mayor come by for press events, and way too many suits running around acting like they were important.

This is in stark contrast to coworking at small, truly community driven places like betahouse (Central Square in Cambridge, now defunct due to difficulty to find new real-estate), which fostered deep and long lasting connections between its members. Even 5 years after we disbanded, we still all keep in frequent touch and rely on the connections we made there.

I'd make the comparison/analogy of culture-rich dormitories at places like MIT, and mega-corporate hotel-like dorms at Boston University (or just a hotel). WeWork is the soulless corporate hotel where you'll never get to know anyone.

Maybe I'm just too punk for WeWork. There's no way to have a soul/culture in a place like that. I shudder to think about living in a place run by them.

Some US corporations already supply housing, food, and of course jobs for their workers. It will be interesting to see how much WeWork abstracts these concepts into life-as-a-service, as publicly available resources in urban living are further squeezed.

Day care, schools, primary care clinics, semi-private green spaces. We_____

Google Cached link:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Fascinating take on this valuation. Love when people look past the knee jerk headlines and offer a different approach. I wonder how he came up with that insight?