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Comment by goatinaboat | Hacker News Reader

In 2025, every Fortune 500 company will have 10k+ remote workers

But what does that mean, exactly? I mean, imagine I'm an employee of BigBank in BigCity. My options are work from their office in the centre of town, work from my house wearing my pyjamas or... get dressed for work and commute into the centre of town, and sit in a WeWork instead and then charge it back on expenses because... reasons? I have better coffee and better wifi at my house...

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Imagine you are an employee of MidSizedBank in MidSizedCity but happen to live and work in BigCity because your company has enough business with BigCity companies that it makes sense to have a local presence for face to face meetings. MidSizedBank isn't quite sure how much business they will actually be doing out of BigCity over the next five years and do not want to commit to a space just yet but currently have six people in BigCity and have teams day-tripping in for 2-3 days every couple of weeks. WeWork provides the space and general office infrastructure and MidSizedBank has flexibility for this remote team.

The WeWork I am at in London is filled with companies like this. Docker's UK team, PagerDuty's EU branch, more small quant teams than you can shake a stick at, etc.

You may have better coffee and wifi at your house, but the rest of your team is not interested in crashing in your kitchen all day...

If WW can do this, so can any competitor - large and small.

UK retail is about to implode, so there's going to be plenty of competition in the co-working space as landlords and local business associations agree that reduced rent from light office occupancy is better than no rent from shops.

That may not quite serve the MidSizeMarket - but just as easily, larger competitors with stronger branding and sales efforts could move in. Especially after a downturn.

So WW is horribly exposed. It has no real first-mover advantage, no long-term loyalty from customers, and serious financial issues.

But what differentiates them from any other company that rents out commercial real estate and re-leases it on a shorter term?

I can totally believe that their line of business will grow by a huge factor, but I don't believe that they will ever earn the out-sized margins to justify their current valuation. Their business can be replicated by anyone with a bit of capital to spend on leasing office space. They don't actually own most of their office space; they just lease it.

Nothing specific differentiates them other than scope. I can bounce among a hot desk at a variety of locations around the city, do the same in cities across the EU/US, and my company only needs one service provider account to manage. And we can do so with a generous subsidy from US VCs...

> I can bounce among a hot desk at a variety of locations around the city, do the same in cities across the EU/US ...

what about a consistent user experience? that might differentiate We from competitors: ease of use and familiarity of environment for the workers. I mean, I go into a Starbucks or a Target store and it looks familiar and I already know what I'm gonna get (another Starbucks).

> I mean, imagine I'm an employee of BigBank in BigCity.

Companies like BigBank will have offices in dozens of cities around the world with frequently shifting office needs. A WeWork type company can definitely fill a role for them. But that niche is already filled and it's a tough business. At this point WeWork is renting out space for less than they paid for it. Obviously that's good for market share but not a good sign for long term viability.

Imagine you work for BigCo in BigCity but live in SmallCity a one hour drive from BigCity. Now you options are spend two hours in your car each day, work from home, or walk 10 minutes to the local WeWork space where you have a desk. Now Imagine that there are also 7 other people at BigCo that live in SmallCity, now you guys can get a shared office space together and still be all be 10 minutes walk from the office.

In fact the company I used to work for did just that. They rented 10 desks at a local co-working space in the next town over and told everybody who lived around there that they where free to work there if they didn't feel like making the 1 hour commute each way.

You might not have the option to work from your office. My workplace is oversubscribing a new location in downtown $Big_City with the simultaneous requirements that all seats in the downtown office be filled each day (to get the tax breaks $Big_City offers) AND that, since there are not enough seats, everyone will have to work from home on some kind of rotation.

And, have you worked from home on any kind of permanent basis? I don't have a family but I still like to get out sometimes. If you have no room for a dedicated office, or if you have pets/family that can be a distraction from work, a collab space is desired.

If a company is controlling costs by forcing people to work-from-home instead of paying for office space, it's not going to reimburse the people who it is forcing to work from home for a collab space plus a profit margin for the operator of the collab space.

As for individuals on their own, sure, if you are permanently working from home, a collab space is great if you don't have a dedicated office—but if WFH is a permanent arrangement, why wouldn't you rent space that includes a dedicated office instead of renting the two things separately with a commute between them plus probably paying a premium for shared office space since it will probably be in a more central, and expensive, location.

I mean, assuming We’s business plan isn't to continue to rent space at a loss forever, but to eventually make a profit.

You don't go to the center of town, you go substantially less far to the local WeWork office, because it makes sense that WeWork in your neighborhood, rather than your company.

As someone who's worked from home for ~3 years now (and with much better coffee and Internet), it's isolating, and I basically don't stand up from my home office for ~16 hours some days, since it's also where I happen to spend at least some of my free time.

Screw "third place", I don't even have a "second place". I live in Bentonville, AR and I cannot wait for the WeWork that was announced here to get built.

But I can't see them actually putting offices at neighborhoods. I've looked at Warsaw and London and the locations are rather central.

What they have currently != what they'll have in the future.

Have they said this anywhere?

Not directly, but I kind of assumed every business wanted to be the "third place" these days, so I extrapolated that to mean that WeWork wants to replace your "second place" with their offices, provide value by saving your commute, and then consume your "third place" entirely as well.

A ton of articles articles talk sideways at this idea, here are a couple (the second link is the most direct "answer" to your question but it's all interesting):

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/03/wework-smart-cities-m...

https://www.curbed.com/2019/4/29/18523156/weworks-economic-i...

I'm not trying to assert "this is the truth", sorry if that's how I seemed. It's just my layman's take on the situation.

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