It's not a tech company, it's a property company with the valuation of a tech company.
>WeWork's latest acquisition is a small software company with 24 employees. Euclid is a spatial analytics platform...Euclid's website says the company is "focused on redefining the workplace experience of the future." Translation: optimizing every aspect of the physical workplace so workers are their most productive. Euclid does this by tracking how people move around physical spaces. Its technology can track how many people showed up to a meeting or to that after-work happy hour. The company can see where employees tend to congregate and for how long. It's all done over Wi-Fi.
Edit - forgot to link the article - https://www.inc.com/betsy-mikel/wework-is-trying-a-creepy-ne...
1. Collect data
2. ???
3. Profit
In this case, I doubt having that data will do much; humans are already natural optimizers. Really, the things workplaces should be optimized for are unlikely to be easily measurable, so at best these systems will optimize for the wrong thing.
And really, the reason workplaces aren't particularly optimal now is that most decisions are made not for maximizing business value, but for maximizing the power and comfort of those high up. As an example, when businesses relocate their headquarters, it is generally to move closer to the CEO's home. Or we can look at all the decisions made to optimize a visible metric, like cost, to the harm of invisible ones. E.g., the open office plan, which is cheap and lets managers supervise by looking out their office window, but significantly harms productivity and employee happiness.
Well, sure, but all they're being told is that data is the new gold. [0] And gold is valuable, so data must also be valuable. They tend to forget that not all data is gold, because 'some data is gold' isn't what they were told and also isn't fun.
0: https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/data-analytics/article...
This right here. Most humans will do whatever they can to achieve minimal work. However, they aren't great at gathering all the necessary data and often find local maxima, so there is still some value in "AI augmentation".
However, I can definitely see some unethical companies being interested in this type of tracking, so I'm guessing there's a market for it.
But as it stands WeWork is far too expensive for me to justify paying out of pocket for considering how noisy the shared areas are compared to any of the cafes down the block from my home, where I can get the same work done in a similar environment for a fraction of the daily cost.
> We have approximately 1,000 engineers, product designers and machine learning scientists that are dedicated to building, integrating and automating the complex systems we use to operate our business
Edit - found this - https://www.inc.com/betsy-mikel/wework-is-trying-a-creepy-ne...
>WeWork's latest acquisition is a small software company with 24 employees. Euclid is a spatial analytics platform...Euclid's website says the company is "focused on redefining the workplace experience of the future." Translation: optimizing every aspect of the physical workplace so workers are their most productive. Euclid does this by tracking how people move around physical spaces. Its technology can track how many people showed up to a meeting or to that after-work happy hour. The company can see where employees tend to congregate and for how long. It's all done over Wi-Fi.
"Jane, I noticed you don't stay late after work, why is that?" "Mike, I see you sometimes go off company's wifi, why is that?"
With that said, there's already companies that track workers like this, so I definitely think there's a market for it.
Not enough, and you have a huge queue to use them, too many and you have lost office space rental.
Outside of that there isn't much tech to go around.
We used them before they were WeWork, when they were still GreenDesk in Dumbo.
Overall it was great, and it's a great product given the flexibility and move in ready amenities that it provides and if you ever step foot inside of Regus you will immediately notice the difference.
Though now there is a lot of competition from smaller companies and of course I'm sure Regus has stepped up their game in response.
Their growth is amazing, but ultimately it's still a real estate holding company. The same is true for E-commerce. Though their volume is immense, they trade no where near their multiples for revenue as other tech companies given the different margins they have, cyclical sales cycles, and many other factors that make that sector much less attractive than a pure software play in the B2B space.
But looks like we will see how this all plays out.
Really the exposure that Softbank has here is the real worrying issue. It's a massive stake, at a massive valuation, and if this IPO doesn't perform well (and most people think it won't), this maybe a real red blot on their performance.
Saving the world!
>Overall it was great, and it's a great product
Yes, much like Uber, Lyft, Tesla, Blue Apron and on and on, consumers love products priced far below their actual costs.
How is that a tech challenge?
The only actual tech they have is their swipe card access and room/desk booking systems
They might use some tech internally to optimise certain aspects of their business, but that would be like calling a coffee shop that does their finances in Excel a tech company
Techbucks S-1 coming soon!
> Pursuant to our related party transactions policy, all additional material related party transactions that we enter into require either (i) the unanimous consent of our audit committee or (ii) the approval of a majority of the members of our board of directors.
I was pretty impressed when I read "unanimous consent of our audit committee" but then it all went out the window when I saw or the majority of the Board. The company CEO/landlord is the person with the major conflict of interest. He also has the majority voting power of the company stock and will control the board. WeWork's attempt to mitigate this conflict of interest is nothing but smoke and mirrors.
"As of June 30, 2019, future undiscounted minimum lease payments under these leases were approximately $236.6 million, which represents 0.5% of the Company’s total lease commitments as of June 30, 2019."
Did you see the part of the filing where, in case of death or incapacitation in the next ten years where the CEO is unable to fulfill his duties, a group of two board members _and_ his wife will select the next CEO, and if those named board members are also not available anymore then his wife will solely pick the two board members who will pick the next CEO with her, and if _she_ is unavailable then the estate of the CEO and his wife will pick the next CEO?
Page 198
I've never seen a company like this transfer to successive control via the private estate of the CEO in case of a vacancy. There's a lot of WTFs in here.