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Comment by sasper | Hacker News Reader

It's been fantastic for our fast-growing SaaS startup. We've been able to spin up offices in 4 international cities in the last 18 months with very few issues, and our teams are productive and happy with the spaces.

I manage one of the new offices and have LOVED the responsiveness of the local WeWork team, the facilities, the infrastructure, and it's lightyears better than the previous office we were occupying. I don't have to worry about office-related issues any longer.

That is, if WeWork stays solvent and doesn't go bankrupt.

It's really too bad because their core business (renting office space) is done really well. Maybe a bankruptcy and restructuring would be good for their business, or maybe it will cause them to explode.

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It seems like the value that they are offering is just outsourced-office-management then. Am I wrong in thinking that? It's hard for me to parse what WeWork was "trying" to become. A real estate company that manages offices? An office management company that also does real estate?

That's kind of exactly the point. IMO there are a lot of unicorns out there that have pretty decent business models (Uber/Lyft, WeWork, delivery services, etc.) The problem is they are probably worth much less than their investors paid for them, because everyone is discovering that once the VC subsidies go away after the "growth at all cost" mentality, these are actually pretty low margin businesses that don't warrant their "tech" valuations.

Yup. Other issue for many of them (which WeWork actually should be less exposed to) is that, most of it hardly being rocket science, "blow money until monopoly" seems to forget that customer subsidies

A. aren't r&d/infrastructure,

B. will have to be earned back, and not just 1:1 either...

So even if whatever competition is knocked out, anyone entering the space after that, and not saddled with legacy funnycost, won't need your efficiencies and economies of scale to manage an edge in pricing. And market dominance can't negate lack of friction for eg drivers and riders to run a second, third, fourth app all at once.

But the sun appears to be settling on bizarro cargo culting Amazon being seen as a viable business model.

As a consumer I'll miss it!

The bet behind WeWork is that there's a ton of value currently being left on the table in outsourced office management; that everyone's doing it wrong, and doing it right is worth untold billions of dollars.

I'm not sure I can get behind that bet, but it's not an inherently absurd idea. Imagine explaining to someone in the early 70s why Wal-Mart is going to grow from a Southern department store chain to the largest company in the US.

That's a big part of it. But their scale and presence also means they get to do things that have been invaluable for us, like being able to book meeting rooms in and have access to other WeWork premises with low effort.

Management, location, and community. Hospitality. Basically, Wework is a hotel for awake business-focused people, with all the tweaks needed to make that work. It's kinda why Arlo SoHo NYC (hotel) reminded me of one. The real estate line never made much sense to anyone who ever was in one, I think Bloomburg started it. (Though real estate was the business that Adam used to screw everyone so, maybe that was his personal business lol)

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