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Comment by cleansy | Hacker News Reader

I wonder who actually rents from WeWork. I checked their prices for Berlin, Barcelona, London and found cheaper alternatives with the same or better features after just one google search.

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I spent six months in a NYC building very recently, and had the opportunity to listen to the sales team give their pitch to leads every day as I hung out in a common area. My observations:

1. Lots of the people looking at WeWork space are aspirational, to the extent that they hope being at WeWork will boost the prospects of their small business (via networking etc)

2. The tenants in more than one office on our floor were involved in one form or another of cyber-currency promotion.

3. Turnover is wicked fast.

4. Marketing to WeWork tenants is a lucrative revenue stream, both online and in WeWork buildings. All these kids have money burning a hole in their pocket and service providers are paying WeWork a lot to reach them.

5. WeWork competition is very strong at the high-end (Knotel etc). Everyone else is hanging on for dear life.

We paid less for WeWork in Chicago than we did for a private office in a relatively bad location, even before counting Internet and utilities, and got a month-to-month renewable lease to boot. WeWork is a lot of annoying things, but I don't think "terrible deal" is one of them. You can do better if you look (we're not there anymore), but it's a good satisficing default.

Really depends on your location. WeWork Berlin has absurd prices for the local market. The city already had plenty of great coworking spaces at half the price long before WeWork showed up.

Yes. I am digital nomading and the coworking in major cities in developing countries usually cost usd 100/mo, including free water, coffee and events. The WeWork places I checked were 2x-3x the costs and I can't imagine them to be that much better.

Having said that, 80% utilization is great and maybe catching all the premium market will work.

Wework are overcapacity for all locations here in Toronto while the off brand nearby coworking spaces still have lots of space. I have been hearing similar news from friends living in other cities as well. All agree about vibe and good-feel of wework compared to blandness of knock offs.

This. Exactly this. It's the intangibles. Comparing price / sq ft is like comparing the performance of Mac and Pc.

I have a single private office at WeWrok in downtown LA for $650. Is that a good deal or bad deal?

Do you feel like you need to ask me what size my office is to answer? If you do then you fundamentally misunderstand what WeWork is selling.

Yes WeWork buys square footage, but that is not what they are selling. Google does not sell search (eyeballs), Amazon does not sell products (logistics), Github does not sell code storage (collaboration), and Apple does not sell computers.

This holds true for every successful company in the world until the innovators dilemma[0] overtakes them.

It's meaningless to compare sats.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

Another thing to keep in mind is that all tenants are not created equally. Coworking spaces like WeWork will give preferential rates to anchor tenants (already profitable/hugely funded/well known) to help attract tenants that pay the sticker price but with higher turnover.

Executive suites have been around for a long time. Perhaps WeWork has some cool perks, but what prevents their dozen competitors from copying their style?

I recently looked around and there are 10 executive suites firms within 2 miles from me (a WeWork is 12 miles away). I tried two of them and they were very nice.

I wish WeWork well, I just don't get their business model.

At least in nyc, it seems to be a mix -- small non-profits/start ups who need a professional looking space but can't or don't want to deal with office management as well as some big companies who need a lot of extra space and will just rent whole floors for fairly lengthy timeframes.

From my understanding, WeWork is great for short-term rentals. Once you go beyond a few months the economics don't work out at all, but if you want some space to bootstrap (and, crucially, to up/down size that space at will) WeWork is useful.

I know a team of 10 in London that just moved from their own office to a hosted WeWork space and they will be saving nearly 40% per year on office space.

"Better" than WeWork does not mean WeWork isn't also better than existing patterns. I put "better" in quotes because cheaper is not always better.

My company does in two locations: Denver & London. We're an ad agency with a handful of employees in both locations that relocated for business.

We have other locations in Europe, LA, NY but for a single employee or two it makes sense.

The main benefit to WeWork is you get generally great locations / nice buildings with no long-term commitment. So yes you pay a premium (which might not be worth it) but you get flexibility.

There may be a difference in quality of the features. I've been to a few off-brand coworking spaces that had terrible wifi

It's pretty amazing that some coworking spaces manage to have bad WiFi. Like, there are three requirements for a functioning coworking space: desks, meeting rooms, and internet access. Focus on those before building the cereal bar.

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