What people actually do at WeWork
esquire.com
esquire.com
1. Isn't this "gig economy" thing weird? Isn't it strange that people don't have stable long term employment? What's up with that? Is it good?
2. Look at these weird people trying to make dating apps for dogs. This is so weird. Instead of working in a trading or ad shop and getting drunk at 3, they work for a tiny "internet company" and get drunk at 3. The sacrilege!
This seems to be a mix of both, though the article is definitely not trying to paint millennial entrepreneurs in a positive light, you can tell by the choice of focusing on a GS alumni.
I do think that anyone who complains about the WeWork aesthetic or whatever should try to rent their own short term office space (that isn't WeWork). It's fucking grim. You wind up in some ancient building with spongy floors, dodgy elevators, and signs in the bathrooms about how the pipes are bad so please basically don't flush anything. Or in a strip mall above a dentists office. Or the attic of a converted condo.
The WeWork goal seems to be to provide some space with decent amenities for a slight premium. What's wrong with that? Maybe their locations will vanish in a puff of smoke when demand dries up, but no one's asking you to invest your money in the future of WeWork. Would you go to a new restaurant opening and say "well yeah the food is good but most restaurants fail"? Who cares! Eat the food. Enjoy it while it's here.
That's literally my current situation - in a 3rd floor attic. When our lease is up later this year we're most likely just going to go WeWork.
WeWork is useful! I think it gets a bad rap (though the atmosphere and the general vibe of the clientele probably does not).
But unless you're in SFBA or Manhattan, office space is just not that expensive. As soon as you're making payroll, it's pretty insignificant. If I start from 1-2 people again, I'll probably consider WeWork again. But I'll get out of WeWork much faster next time, too.
As for Co working spaces, I think they have a place, but once you hit 1 or 2 other coworkers, you need your own space. It's worth the lawyer for reviewing what you're getting in to, but I do agree, there's a lot of sketchy places with dodgy and gross problems. But you can find nice spots if you're patient and diligent.
This is the real advantage of them. Even if it costs x% more the value of not being stuck with a lease for a long time is definitely worth it. A lot of financial firms in London are moving to them, leases are typically long (10 years with a 5 year break), and with the uncertainty around brexit it makes total sense to transfer the risk to WeWork et al for not much money at all.
Again, there can be value, and places like WeWork, 1871, Blue1647, et al, serve specific needs. Like I said before, a lawyer and a willingness to hunt for the right space make all the difference. And right now, there's more empty spaces than filled, so it's easier to negotiate something that could even be just yearly...
I don't like open-plan or cubes but I wonder if having three people in one office is any better, and I also wonder how many companies do that when they go with something like Regus.
It turns out that renting a decent-sized office in most metros and furnishing it isn't all that expensive. It's really only in bizarre markets like SF or NYC where they really click.
My thinking is that they work much better for companies in the 1 or 2 person early stage and quickly stop making sense as you near some number approaching 10 people.
* toilet paper provided
* coffee made
* trash taken out
* Comcast negotiated with
* walls decorated
* lease docs who cares
* bikes not stolen
Running an office was a hassle more than an expense. Though the private bathroom was nice.
Coworking hits a sweet spot when you don't want to hire an office manager.
* quiet working conditions
I was at WeWork in SOMA ( San Francisco) this week for an interview with a Crypto Exchange startup. Was really surprise at how noisy it was, everywhere except the badge access room (which I'm guessing is very high fees).
The recruitment firm was working out of WeWork. That makes sense for them, cos they are on phone on all day, but what about software engineers and other techies? Do any of them work at WeWork? How do they deal with the noise? I don't see any way to do deep work in a place like this.
EDIT: This particular WeWork was unusually noisier than any other coworking places I've been at. Noisier than Workshop Cafe in Fidi, pariSoma in SOMA, and a couple of others that've since shutdown (I've been coworking on sideprojects nights, weekends since 2008).
At one point, there was even a family with 2 small kids eating lunch there.
Also for 1-2 months half of the tables didn't have a power outlet because they had to remove the extension cords (security reasons) and had to wait until they could install the cords below the floor.And they didn't even offer a discount or something in return. Neither did they inform the customers how long and why this is happening - I had to go up to them and ask. How can this happen?
For a business where operational excellence and customer support must be stellar, they are not doing a very good job. And don't get me started on their software. And we've tried out 3 locations in SF, with similar experiences.
Maybe it's different in other cities.
But I've had this experience working at private offices as well. It's basically a problem anywhere with a) open-office plans and b) sales/marketing people who are in the same area as developers (sometimes startups outgrow a co-working space but aren't big enough for a seperated office).
This is why I work with headphones on the majority of the time whenever I'm in an office (coworking or otherwise). I have enough trouble self-regulating my attention without having to distract myself from others.
There was a similar problem with the capacity of the men's bathroom.
WeWork should take more care that their physical infrastructure is not overwhelmed by subtenants who are mostly alike.
It's one redeeming feature is it hosts developer meetups free as a marketing move and has a decent room for that.
I just wish they had a better system for printing. It's a goddamn nightmare with the codes and printing queues. Just cut the crap out of printing administration and just make it free already.
You are bang on point about renting a place on your own. Absolute nightmare in Bangalore.
I always thought WeWork was strange. Most people’s goal is the same, get out as soon as you’re ready.
If you look at it purely from the perspective of economic theory, stable long-term employment is weirder than everybody being an individual contractor. Ronald Coase asks the question "Why do firms even exist in the first place?" [1] and comes to the conclusion that many transaction costs come along with marketplaces, and firms may be well-suited for dealing with those transaction costs internally. In this light, It may be observed that the gig economy firms "solve" transaction cost sub-problems, eradicating the bulwark of the firm and exposing the would-be workers to the competitive forces of the marketplace.
This. The toilet stalls in US are the worst. No privacy whatsoever. Seems like their design is meant to oppress. Hurry you back to work, grunt!
In WeWork I can go to a quiet dark room, with moody music, and take a shit, in peace.
Which is annoying, because there are only a fixed number of stalls (in my WeWork there are 7 total stalls for all the men in a 7 story building). I hate going from to floor looking for a place to take a shit. Unless you had something really sickening for breakfast or lunch, taking a shit should not take more than 2 minutes. I don't know what people are doing in the bathroom that takes them so long, but I suspect it's people taking a break from their work in privacy.
... What genius thought of the idea to automatically unlock bathroom stalls?
The problem here is not enough restrooms.
TLDR technology has a downside
Aside from all the other myriad god-awful decisions that someone didn't think through, this one weirds me out the most. I know it's hard to see these things on blueprints, but it's as if these people never shit.
(I know, I know - the correct answer is, "this is the cheap best-practice way of installing toilet stalls". Fuck you; I'm glad I have a private unisex bathroom I can typically use to handle private bodily functions.)
The only place I've seen adult toilets like this is in a prison tour.
And here I thought that urinals without a divider were awkward.
Anyway, brings an old SNL skit to mind – the love toilet. Look it up.
I have been in quite a few countries, everyone poorer than the US , yet somehow , as cheap as they made their bathrooms, it isn't possible to look into peoples stalls.
It's very weird that someone would design something like that.
Do these buildings do this for security? I'll never understand. In my current office we share a few bathrooms with one other company but there's no key at least.
Yes. One building we were in had a problem where people would walk in off the street, then hide in the bathroom to attack or mug people. The hope with the key protocol is that potential attackers would enter, try the bathroom door, see it was locked, then leave.
Cheaper than having a security guard 24/7.
Visit the Hopkins medical campus sometime (but during the day). There are guards with long guns on every street corner.
Do female toilets have these kind of stalls too?
Then there were client bathrooms on a different floor. At one workplace, it was twice the size of the normal bathroom with the same amenities (2 stalls, 2 urinals), quieter, music, and air spray. The other workplace also had 'client' bathrooms which were two private bathrooms.
Both of the latter were a mainstay for people going off to take private dumps.
My first impression was "how am I supposed to work here?" I loved that they had cold-brew and beer on tap, a clean working-space, and interesting events. They seemed really optimized to provide a workspace that was fun.
The problem was, I wasn't there for fun, I was there to get stuff done and for that I needed a place that was peaceful, quiet, with few distractions. The environment at WeWork wasn't optimized for that kind of long, deep work and in fact seemed to actively fight against it.
If your work tasks consist mostly of light, interruptible "busy" tasks, like responding to email, or participating on Slack, WeWork is probably fine. If your work consists of long, deep-dive tasks, I'd recommend getting your own office space until WeWork starts providing an atmosphere that better accommodates peace, quiet, and isolation.
And i don't just mean those floor hopping beer parties that start Friday around noon, but the weekly get togethers that are nothing less than cheap alcohol ragers.
That place is impossible to get stuff done in (but a lot of fun to visit).
Then what's the advantage again? LOL.
The binge drinking starts well before noon there -- nearly every single day, at least all over WeWorks in New York.
We'd have a great big drinking session on Friday afternoon, get absolutely blitzed, and then head to the bar. Coming straight out of university, it was amazing. Sometimes we'd supplement it with a Wednesday session as well.
As far as actually being productive goes though, it was terrible. You never know where you're going to sit, often you're across the office from your coworkers. You can't have any personal desk space, and it's really noisy. But hey, I had fun.
I imagine this is what all the small talk around the offices of OKC/Match/IAC is like.
Please could someone on HN tell me how the hell one organises, gets funding and pays for this type of PR. I can dev the apps but I am just unable to promote.
Any help or information is appreciated, thank you.
Seemed all hip and no utility.
As such, I'm not sure where the economy of scale will come from and why should this be a sustainable business? To be fair, Starbucks and other coffee/restaurant chains also have similar general business characteristics.
Along this note, I don't understand why WeWork is a venture-backed business as opposed to a normal bootstrap business (with more emphasis on early cash-flow and less on growth) as it's usually the case with the above type businesses.
With the name recognition they're getting, they may also get really good deals on office space: I've personally witnessed a co-working space gentrifying a whole city block. The whole block was also owned by the same investor, who apparently gave them a 50% rebate on a ten-year contract. She has easily gotten a 10x ROI on it, since rents in the rest of the buildings tripled within two years.
This is their CEO being quoted. If this isn’t Silicon Valley pixie dust I don’t know what is.
Yet the CEO is admitting that the valuation is pretty much bullshit; how can “spiritually” make a single note but of difference for how much a company is worth? Imagine if a company said they were highly valued because they were committed to prayer and going to church every Sunday.
WeWork started in 2010. If they aren't making money after 8 years, then they aren't pre-revenue at a $20,000,000,000 valuation but scammers. Every other lease company says these types of rentals are lucrative, so why aren't they for WeWork?
Their next venture should be WeDie, a chain of euthanasia centers for disposing of people who've outlived their sell-by date.