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Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

This is some dense shit. I can't imagine how working for WeWork feels like, right now. I have worked for companies where all the employees were eagerly waiting for the day the company will go public. It was seen as a pivotal moment both financially and professionally.

In any rational world that's a landmark moment. A significant milestone for founders, investors and early employees. For WeWork it has been the complete opposite. They filed to go public and everything is going south since then. Must be surreal that what seemed to be the start of a bright future may be very well the start of a dark end.

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WeWork has been an obvious fuckup to even casual observers for years, if people inside the company couldn't see this I really don't know what to say.

All the more reason for employees to be excited about the opportunity to finally see liquidity for their shares.

Well my point is it should have been obvious the shares were absolutely worthless.

A lot of people convinced themselves that if they could just make it to the IPO at least they’d have a lucrative way off the shipwreck. Oops.

It’s hard to see things when your salary depends on you not seeing said things.

I can see how their leadership is a bit bush league and they are potentially overvalued, but it’s not obvious to me that their basic value proposition sucks or is that far off the mark.

They sell things for less than cost at scale, what basic value proposition is that? Read that S-1, it's an absolute hot mess.

> They sell things for less than cost at scale,

God, I love this phrase so much. It's such a brilliant stab at many of these recent unicorns. "Oh you think they can burn money fast, well watch how fast we burn it! We're number one!"

"We lose money on every transaction but we'll make it up in volume!" was literally the rallying cry of the DotCom boom/bust. It's not new

The "no meat" policy is what did it for me. The company is such a virtue-signaling joke.

https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/13/technology/wework-meat-ban/...

You know I would have thought it's the billion dollars per year of cash burn and the borderline theft of the CEO leasing assets to his own company instead of the meat, but ok.

WeWoke

Possibly like Zynga in 2011[1]. Though CEOs seem to get additional chances even if they have blow up investors multiple times, I wonder if a publicly taking the upside potential away from employees cuts future access to talent.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3220819

> I can't imagine how working for WeWork feels like, right now.

Focus on stealing office supplies.

Bart, it's not about how much stock you have; it's about how much copper wire you can get out of the building with. (c) Simpsons

I love that episode because I'm sure that's how it was in the Dot-Com Bubble. People basically taking everything they could.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arENYYkYBts

I feel bad for everyone who had to exercise and pay taxes on a high strike price that will keep them underwater at the 15B valuation.

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