My guess is that initially they focused on a market that was underserved by tech (short-term real estate). That by itself is probably enough to get some initial funding.

Then you show that you're actually executing, at least as far as being able to grow and manage a real business with real revenues, which can easily get you another round.

From there they did two things. The first was to start to securitize the business. You can see this with things like their ARK spinoff, which allowed them to start raising money from real estate investors. Sure, real estate is a slow growth business, but it's backed by real assets, and it allowed them to start pitching to a new kind of investor while they left the equity investors in the original WeWork.

The second thing was what you mentioned, their pivot to "cornering the market". If you view VC investing, and especially SoftBank, as an attempt to find businesses that are going to eat the world with software, then you can see where WeWork's seemingly random pivot to "We" came from. You pitch the business is a fully vertically-integrated lifestyle where people live, work and send their kids to school. The potential returns on something like that would be insane, so if you can sell even a 1% chance of success you can see how it would be alluring.

It's also possible that "eat the world" was the pitch all along. I could see a world where Adam Neumann was smart enough to see the wholly integrated We as the end game from the beginning and pitch the real estate stuff as a path to getting there. The revenue and growth would be more predictable than something like a software product. The losses would obviously be more predictable too but predictable losses with a clear path to growth might not be such a bad thing if your end goal has a necessary condition of "be as big as possible".