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Comment by FussyZeus | Hacker News Reader

What on Earth is WeWork doing that requires TWELVE THOUSAND PEOPLE!? Holy fucking shit

Managing 800 physical office locations? That’s not really that many people per location.

Do they seriously have employees at each? I assumed it was either a franchise or contractor thing. Rare for a tech company to actually hire people directly for that sort of thing.

They aren't a tech company. They are an office leasing and real estate company, and have the appropriate employees for this type of business.

> and have the appropriate employees for this type of business

I disagree. WeWork has 836 locations and 12.5k (now 10k) employees, or ~12-15 employees per location. Regus/IWG has 3,306 locations and 9.6k employees, or ~3 employees per location.

How is 4-5x the number of employees for a comparable non-tech company appropriate?

WeWork is trying to grow aggressively, so they probably have a shit-load of sales people.

You'd have to know how the two companies split functions between employees and contractors. Though I'd not be surprised if WeWork were staffed relatively heavily. To note something random, WeWork has an (unstaffed) booth at Kubecon which suggests they do marketing activities that someone like Regus generally doesn't.

Probably because Regus is more interested in running a business and not advertising to potential investors how cool it is.

Just my guess.

On top of that, Regus pays a huge portion of the employees at center hourly. I know Regus is not sexy, but they should get credit for focusing on economics that work at scale rather than just pumping up some ridiculous valuation with no chance of liquidity outside of getting bought or IPOing.

I have seen Regus people at conferences before. They may be more selective, but they do these things as well.

WeWork has a number of side businesses that have no link to their office business. Regus does not.

WeWork is not a tech company

Something I love is how companies have been able to convince people that they are a tech company just because they have an app even when they do something which has existed before the internet was even around.

Why do people keep referring to WeWork as a tech company?

WeWork has not only been in the business of running offices, they have been in the business of _producing_ new offices at scale. They have contracted and built out over 800 locations within 9 years. Probably 100-200 a year as of late - which requires a horde of lawyers, real estate people, project managers, area managers, recruiters and so forth. They even have their own factory for (cheap and shitty) tables and chairs. If every office location has 1000 seats, we are talking 100k tables a year.

Certainly nothing to merit 12k, but they do have close to 1,000 locations and it's fundamentally a brick and mortar managed office space company, so every location needs at least a few people to keep things running / deal with client issues. The question is how big their back office operations really needs to be.

Probably a big portion of that is managing the actual physical locations and another big portion of that is sales.

Managing their local facilities.

do things that don't scale /s

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