Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by ethbro | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

ethbro

Furthermore, and this to me is the most damning indictment: where's the moat?

SoftBank and Masayoshi Son's hypothesis is:

1. Find a market which can be captured by a business with access to massive capital

2. Provide massive capital

3. Extract profits once a monopoly has been established

WeWork is a terrible example of this, because in no way does scale give them unique advantages. And furthermore, "scale" in this context means "scale in the office property market" -- that's a pretty big pool to expect to overflow.

View on HN

I can't quantify it - but WeWork's scale does give them a bit of an advantage.

I run a small digital agency, as a WeWork member when I'm on the road being able to know I can find and book space for meetings or work is invaluable. We've also spun up offices in new cities (Mexico City for us) easily and quickly with a confidence in the level of service and support that we're getting.

There is a premium for this and we've moved on from those offices sometimes as we settle in. But its not a non-existent advantage.

> WeWork's scale does give them a bit of an advantage

Within the original thesis per se it gave them a possible demand-side advantage. (Commercial real estate is too big for any meaningful sell-side advantages.)

Being able to say "let's open a branch in Singapore and see how it goes for 6 months" with a few clicks is quite awesome. If I trusted it to be around in a few years, it would change how I think about deploying people.

To be able to deliver that value prop, you need seats available in Singapore. (And New York and London and Dubai.) Hence a potential scaling advantage.

> Being able to say "let's open a branch in Singapore and see how it goes for 6 months" with a few clicks is quite awesome.

I'd have thought that for most businesses, the two big obstacles for doing this are a) getting skilled people to suddenly move to Singapore at your will, and b) getting the Singapore office well integrated with the rest of the company.

Compared to those two, setting up an office lease is about as hard as tying your shoelaces.

> Compared to those two, setting up an office lease is about as hard as tying your shoelaces

This has not been my experience. Given how localized real estate markets are, they haven't been subjected to efficiency-driving global competition. The result is every market has hidden oddities. Little details that are a nuisance if you know about them but a disaster if you bumble through the process.

For long-term commitments to a market, sure, it makes sense to own your plot. But for short-term assignments? Toes in the water? Being able to spin up an office with flown-in staff committed to for the short-term, to develop leads and/or find those skilled locals to hire, is a tactical advantage which doesn't presently exist.

Same for Uber.

I was going to include Uber, but there's an argument that creating a realtime, massively-scaled fare-setting infrastructure is a moat.

Uber's product isn't rides. Uber's product is being the market-maker between riders and drivers.

Right, but Lyft has the same product. Given enough time, we might see other ride-share companies succeed with the same (yet inferior) tech servicing specific cities.

Austin has a non-profit rideshare business that matches riders and drivers.

http://www.rideaustin.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com