Investing in Flow | Hacker News Reader

Investing in Flow

a16z.com

I see a lot of confusion over why anyone would want to take a stake in an Adam Neumann biz. Some guesses…

VCs are looking for return, and quickly, which is why they have glommed on to crypto projects. In the old model, you invest money, wait 5-10 years, and get a payoff when the company goes public or gets sold. With crypto, there is a much more immediate payoff with unregistered securities, AKA “tokens”. And then maybe a second payoff in 5-10 years.

There are no details from a16z or Flow on what this actually is, but I am guessing tokenized rent payments on a blockchain in some fashion, promising some sort of equity to renters, and quick returns to a16z. They came out with a splashy investment and a high valuation, and are hoping to make their money back on the unregistered securities, AKA tokens, and who knows, maybe more in 5-10 years.

Never underestimate the cynicism of a16z.

There are few industries as cynical as venture capital. They won't ever invest in projects explicitly designed for public welfare because "the economics don't work" or "the innovation isn't there".

But they will invest eye-watering sums into financing student newspapers for the middle-aged (Substack) or 'turn your car into a public taxi' businesses, knowing that 90% of them won't amount to anything.

> There are few industries as cynical as venture capital. They won't ever invest in projects explicitly designed for public welfare because "the economics don't work"

As oposed to which industries exactly?

"industry" wasn't the right word, as VCs don't produce anything. As investment philosophies go, it's very cynical.

8200+ points but you don't acknowledge the fact VCs are legally bound to invest LPs money for economic returns.

Well then it's unfortunate that our economy is structured to deliver economic returns to early stage investors that are grossly disproportionate to the company's actual performance in the market.

Flow will be no different. They will need to hire thousands D's of people with low interest VC cash and expand to 10 countries in order to deliver the same profitability as say a mid sized law firm. .

Never saw an ad for WeWork. Did see them with $3 sq/ft office space in Oakland renting for $12. Softbank gave him an incentive to blow it up, thus he did. Cleared a few billion in cash and will probably be back to buy the remnants of WeWork and rights to Jared Leto's sequel. A real meanie though.

Yup.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2022/08/17/adam-neum...

I think not everything needs a venture-backed, take-over-the-world solution.

For the issues being raised here (home ownership is inaccessible to many, renters don't have stability, security), aside from greater protections for renters, another class of existing solution is Community Land Trusts. These organizations retain ownership of the land, have a charter that's targeted at keeping housing affordable (or some related mission), lease out land on very long terms (like 99 years) with contracts that place limitations on resale of any improvements on the land. These restrictions can make housing permanently affordable, and removes housing on that land from being an asset for speculation. Residents get security from the very long terms of their loans, the governance of their CLT, and ownership of improvements on the land. The CLT can use revenue to create and maintain community amenities.

Sometimes good arrangements already exist, but they're not going to be rapidly scaled up across the country because no investor stands to get a windfall from rapid expansion.

It's sickening. These people don't care about improving people's living conditions. They care about extracting more and more and more money by exploiting a crisis that they have had a hand in creating.

Status quo is not ideal and I don't trust the government to do what is necessary to alleviate the situation.

Let's see if innovation, driven by greed, can change it.

Regulation just pushed the largest mortgage lender out of the market : https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-14/wells-far...

Regulation or repeat shoddy behaviour?

show me the great mortgage lender

Greed created the problem. It will not fix it. We must form a functioning government.

There hasn’t been a single example of a government providing good housing at scale anywhere in the world though. If your target is effectively slums, then sure, form a government who has no incentive to compete for tenants with improvements.

> These organizations retain ownership of the land, have a charter that's targeted at keeping housing affordable (or some related mission), lease out land on very long terms (like 99 years) with contracts that place limitations on resale of any improvements on the land.

This is similar to a co-op where the land is owned by the building as a whole.

You can't get away from the problem that if you price something under the market price, you'll get a lot of people who want to live there. How do you choose who lives there? Lottery? There's a huge incentive by the people deciding to self-deal.

Even then, it's still not efficient. For instance suppose the market price is $200k and you give it away to someone who really needs it for $100k, you just essentially gave them $100k. But they have to accept that benefit in form of housing. Perhaps they would prefer to live in a home worth $150k and get $50k in cash for groceries or school or whatever else?

And once they're there they won't want to give up the benefit. They're essentially getting something for nothing. Anyone who grew up in a city with rent control can tell you stories about people they know exploiting the system.

All these efforts to control price are like trying to control global warming with new thermometer designs. The price is a signal of larger economic issues. The only reasonable solution I've found is allowing people to build more.

My guess:

A network of apartment complexes across the country that you can own equity in the entire enterprise instead of one single home. You can "freely" move between the apartments without having to go through financing etc.

This can be interesting with a massive capital and enough time to build out the network but seeing this cocaine addict's name in the mix make me feel this is going to fail fast. Real estate is a slow industry, VC money doesn't have patient for it

Lot of people dunking on Neumann here. But the space is very interesting and certainly there is a market need.

No one seems to understand that Neumann built a massively successful company, because they watch the documentaries and think he’s a scumbag for failing to deliver an IPO.

I don't know, taking $22 billion to make a company worth $4 billion doesn't seem that impressive. It's just office space at the end of the day, what's so interesting about that? He just was able to grift his way into a fortune is what I see as the impressive part.

Wasn't he the guy that had the company license the trademark from himself privately, lease his own privately held properties and stuff? It was all very close to embezzlement if I'm remembering the right company.

Speculation: I feel like that’s some of underlying value for the valuation, real estate, most likely owned by this known self-dealer.

I am surprised to see so many negative responses.

I bet most of the people here agree 100% with the problems and structural shifts this memo identified, and that technological innovation in the housing space to facilitate both social cohesion and affordability would be a *very good thing*.

Sure, Adam had some highly publicized issues at WeWork. Also, a16z is on a lot of people's shit list right now. Still, why do so few people seem to be rooting for their success? If you're prone to cynicism I get it - the only way this can end is grift - but personally I would like to see more companies trying to address these issues and Adam seems like he genuinely cares about it. Maybe a little too much, even.

The problem is that you can be a well meaning person, take a bunch of capital and unintentionally cause huge problems. Look at Airbnb, for example, which is causing havoc in the rental markets of major and minor cities across the globe. Airbnb certainly didn’t set out to cause harm, and I’m sure the founders would actively argue to this day that what they’ve done is for the greater good… same with Uber.

If you accept that the markets are inherently good and the most profitable outcome is the best outcome, then it’s easy enough to look at this as a positive move… but if you see capital + technology as a force for bad when unchecked, this is just more of the same — success for Flow could come at the expense of others.

Adam’s history is one of not caring about rules or expectations, he caused significant financial harm to a lot of people with WeWork and while I am not particularly cynical about Flow, I think the cynicism from others deserves more credit — it’s not just contrarianism, the housing market is very vulnerable (see all the private equity that pushed up American house prices recently).

A lot of the negativity comes from the fact that Adam Neumann is involved. He's incredibly dishonest and a borderline scam artist. He set fire to billions and came out incredibly wealthy. You may not care about the people he took money from, but what he did was still wrong.

Another point is that there is no concrete business or idea. The memo at least doesn't explain the actual business. It's vaporware. There are thousands of people with track records that want to open real cashflow businesses and can't get funding. And then there's someone like this that can manifest billion dollar companies with an idea. It just strikes them as unfair.

My impression is that there is an idea, and they are intentionally not explaining it to the public yet

The problem is that Neumann walked away with an absolute fortune, leaving investors and much more importantly employees holding the bag. He operated with what could charitably described as accounting methods of questionable ethics.

If this investment has some term that makes it so Neumann does not personally see one penny of this money unless the company is wildly successful and everyone else involved gets paid first, maybe it'd be worth considering. Instead, there is a very likely outcome here where he takes home tens to hundreds of millions while once again doing nothing of actual substance to change the market.

Basically, he's a huckster who enriched himself at the expense of others. People tend to root against people like that, and they don't like it when they're handed huge sums of money.

> technological innovation in the housing space to facilitate both social cohesion and affordability would be a very good thing.

Sure, just not one led by Adam Neumann or a16z, certainly not one led by both.

Maybe they will do something legitimately good, but from what we know of both of them, it's highly likely that they will optimize for what will increase their respective net worth as fast as possible, no matter the consequences and not for what will have the best impact on society.

And sure they don't have any obligation to optimize for social good, but you can't ask us to be excited about it.

Neumann already had bought close to 4000 apartment in January, presumably linked to this venture. So if you are somehow expecting them to come up with a solution to the affordability crisis, I think you are deluding yourself. It's far more likely that we end up with an airbnb-like for long-term stays that will continue to push the cost of the housing market ever higher, greatly enriching Neumann and a16z in the process. But hey, at least you will be able to book your place for the next 6 months right through an app with a nice UI, you won't need to line up to visit an apartment and it will even come pre-decorated WeWork-style to make you feel right at home!

> and that technological innovation in the housing space to facilitate both social cohesion and affordability

My gut reaction to the news is totally negative. I agree with your above point, but I see that innovation coming from outside Silicon Valley-VC bubble. We need communities to organize and modernize zoning. We need modular housing to drive down the cost of construction. We need to focus on the basic economics (supply & demand) of housing.

If I had to guess, a16z & Adam are going to throw money into being shitty landlords. They are going to get their cut. I'm very skeptical they will make the world a better place.

I sure hope you work in pr at A16Z

What are you talking about? What "technological innovation" would Adam possibly bring to housing that improves social cohesion and affordability? Like, an app?

Perhaps it's because:

[1] Marc Andreesen himself is NIMBY. Which is what is contributing to the housing problem across the USA (and parts of Europe). The inability to build new housing leads to the insane property pricing and the very housing crisis that they are trying to solve https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre...

[2] Adam Neumann is a self dealing grifter.

You have two dishonest actors proposing a solution for problems they may be causing directly...

> In a world where limited access to home ownership continues to be a driving force behind inequality and anxiety, giving renters a sense of security, community, and genuine ownership has transformative power for our society.

To paraphrase, "we will continue hurling investment money into residential real estate to create a permanent serfdom of renters."

It's notable that there are no references in this article. We actually have a 9 month supply of new housing now (which is a lot, that's up from a low of just a few months). Population growth in the US continues to go ever lower (but isn't going negative). Here is a nice data-driven video overview of this current economic situation and also about how this likely indicates a worsening recession ahead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6JBX8Y8XQM

It would be nice to see this data explored in a more localized way. I know there are excesses of new housing in some places and shortages in other places. I also don't know how much of the current excess housing supply is due to houses being built in less desirable locations.

Of course there are no references. The whole pitch is about vibes. Fun to see investor storytime being regurgitated by the investors in question with even fewer details than they probably got from Adam.

Something like localized analysis of housing probably doesn't "scale" enough for a VC firm like a16z.

I think A16Z needs to invest more in character references

or an HBO Max account.

Or a different type of character reference; a character count for the landing page which requires multiple paragraphs of information before confidently claiming to have solved shelter for all mankind.

Anyone know what this magical idea is?

Color me skeptical, but the deliberately vague strawman arguments in the post read between the lines to be something like: "If you're a homeowner we want to your equity and if your a renter we want your rent". I don't harbor any illusions that flow wants to help anyone but themselves.

I have no idea what flow actually is, but if it's something like "airbnb but permanent on the blockchain" like we work was "Airbnb but for your work desk", then no. Heck no.

it is almost certainly some variation on co-living

"Why have 3 roommates in a house when you could have 300 roommates and live in a recently, cheaply converted commercial building designed to be a clone of the Googleplex?"

That actually sounds pretty cool! If that's _not_ what Flow is, I hope somebody does roll with that idea.

Already exists all over the world, just Google “co-living”!

I think the one in US are just furnished rooms with some amenities like cleaning. These seem to be aimed at young people < 25 yrs.

I am looking for ones where all age groups live together. People with kids, young ppl , grandparents ect.

Co-living is actually pretty great when done properly: it’s not a solution to the housing crisis, and suffers from the same economic problems as WeWork did with office space, but as a resident, it’s great — assuming you want to live with other people.

Most co-living spaces end up going broke (including the one I’ve lived in) so I don’t have much faith in Flow’s viability if it is co-living… but it’d probably be great to live there on VC’s dime (just like WeWork was great when subsidised by VCs).

"Done properly" is probably highly correlated with a high degree of control and ownership (if not in a financial sense, in a sense of ownership and responsibility), both of which are extremely ill-suited to a large company running things nation-wide.

Apartment buildings with amenities and probably an app to unlock your door. Incredible.

facebook is just a forum where you use your real name

My guess is it is a new way of quickly moving furniture so they can have you move locations every 29 days so you don't get any legal eviction protections. But your rent for this new venture buys into a blockchain ponzi scam and you get some kind of token out of it.

> The second model: you rent an apartment, but: it’s a soulless experience; do you even meet your neighbors, much less have any friends in your complex? Does it feel like home, or just a place to sleep? Are you proud to bring friends and family to visit, or hesitant?

Excuse me, what? I've absolutely met my neighbors. In past buildings in Brooklyn I've gone out to dinner with some, spent hours on the stoop having conversations with others, taken care of their kids while they ran an errand, and had all sorts of positive (and negative) experiences with them. That's what living in apartments in a dense city community is like. People come hang out in my place all the time.

It's hard to even comment on what they're proposing, since there are no details, but the last thing we need is more single family homes and corporate landlords.

I guess the only frame of reference this set of VC/founders have to go on is the last time they rented before becoming millionaires.

This is so classist (not your comment but op). To imply that folks who don't own their home shouldn't/couldn't be "proud" to bring their loved ones there. Are you kidding me? Entire generations, communities, families have lived and died in rental housing. Entire swaths of the population. This shows very little respect for them.

Absolutely. My mom grew up in a predominately working class Irish public housing complex that my grandmother lived in for almost her entire adult life. It was small, but 5 kids grew up there, and when they had their own kids, we'd go over every Sunday for dinner. Not once did anyone feel ashamed to have all the extended Irish family over in that small apartment. It always amazes me how people that know so little about the world try to tell the rest of us how we should live or feel.

To a ton of tech people I guess their only understanding of rentals is prefurnished single bedroom "luxury" apartments in tech hubs. And then you get the classic "well I didn't spend meaningful time in my apartment so everybody else must be just like me" problem.

This stood out as the weakest part of the thesis to me as well, but I think in general it's true that apartment living trends towards atomized, low-community existence. Even classics of modern high-density architecture like Unite d'habitation with its multi-floor, windowed interior hallways don't really function in their stated intent of building social spaces. Not that Adam Neumann is the person to solve it, but creating vertical communities that are as deeply integrated as horizontal ones has been a central open question in architecture and urban planning for nearly a century.

For sure, there certainly could be improvements architecturally, and I agree the Adam Neumann probably isn't the person to solve it.

I do love Brooklyn's planning for the most part, with mixed use commercial avenues and largely residential streets, but I'd also like more outdoor space to socialize in. Half my family is Algerian and I love the style of the Casbah, with interior courtyards surrounded by apartments or multi-use spaces. There's some good footage of this typical Casbah style building in a music video by the Blaze, for those that haven't seen it [1]. I've seen a similar style in Oaxaca as well.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fea7wuV6s

The suggestion that renting is bad is wrong and insulting.

The US has made a series of poor choices to try to treat housing as a means wealth generation.

Housing can be affordable or a good investment it cannot be both. Ownership incentivize's NIMBYism, which has huge detrimental effects. Renting does not.

That's a lot of words to find out exactly zero about Flow and what it's doing, for which the buried link to the website also does nothing to explain.

Also, it's kind of rich to hear a billionaire wax poetic about the woes of the real estate market. According to a quick search, he of no surprise owns several properties, including a $177 million property.

Let me see if I got this right. Instead of a16z using its resources to actively push for YIMBY changes in society and politics that would actually have positive outcomes on the problems stated, it's investing in the next idea from the WeWork dream seller / scammer, and we don't even know what the venture is? Is this what the venture capital world has become in 2022?

For all their "American Dynamism" talk, Marc is just another classic rich NIMBY.

source: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre...

> revolutionized the second largest asset class in the world — commercial real estate — by bringing community and brand to an industry in which neither existed before

This sounds very disingenuous. Starbucks was arguably the first 'community brand' where people would associate one with an informal meeting place rather than to drink a coffee. Even in Silicon Valley, there are cafe chains renowned for this meeting vibe.

And then there are country clubs, which are newer and more bourgeois.

Even the neighborhood newspaper kiosk in historical European cities did a better job of bringing community and brand to real estate than WeWork.

Country clubs are a new thing? I'm legitimately curious -- I thought country clubs were a thing of the past. Are they having some kind of comeback?

Maybe dependent on locale, but country clubs never really went anywhere. They tend to be more of an invaluable networking tool with more traditional professions vs tech, but my lawyer friends consider country club memberships to be more or less an essential part of doing business.

This is really gross. Andreessen, who’s used his sway to stop any slight increase in housing density in his own town, talks about the broken housing system and how investing billions into a failed scammer will revolutionize housing in a way that’s completely unstated, but presumably involves attempting to find ways to collect rent from people who need housing while also putting all the capital risk onto those individuals as well. The worst thing we can do for housing is to give any credence to this company’s plans.

Unfortunately, This scammer 'Adam Neumann' hasn't failed and still was able to exit out of WeWork with a ton of money. So he is not entirely a failed scammer and was able to get away with it and try again.

An actual failed scammer is Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos.

I guess a distinction between a "successful" scammer (Adam Neumann) and an "unsuccessful" scammer (Elizabeth Holmes). Scammers alike but I guess different post-scam collapse treatment by the investment community. Makes you wonder about a lot of things.

Adam Neumann is what happens when you put all your SPECIAL stats into charisma

Need some in Endurance for Chem Resistant

Nice!

Although I think he dumped the rest into Luck right before he hi-rolled Softbank.

This is almost certainly going to be a rent-seeking venture that attempts to sell "freedom of movement" by having something that feels like student accommodation for adults and small families... a kind of shared living space that can be rented month-to-month with some perks like community spaces and services, pre-furnished, etc. To sell a lifestyle.

Of course that comes at a cost, one that very few people can afford. At least, it will be unaffordable to most. It is always true that more people than one realises is actually awash with money (thanks to the prior generation benefiting from incredible growth of their assets) and for them this freedom of movement by renting on a rolling short-term basis and upping on a whim will allow them to further access high paying work.

I'm really not sure that what housing needs is for large-scale VC money to be poured in (and the corresponding expectations of return on that).

Will it be profitable? Yes. Is it ethical? No.

Fool me once, shame on you. fool me twice, you’re a visionary Adam.

So how's Flowcarbon doing? Was that a good idea?

I guess it is dead? FlowCarbon was Adam's idea last quarter, some sort of carbon credit / crypto currency confection.

https://www.vox.com/recode/23142106/adam-neumann-crypto-carb...

https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/07/17/adam-neumanns-new-...

Right. So the most charitable interpretation is that a16z is just throwing good money after bad at this point.

WeWork 2.0 - Elizabeth Homes Edition.

The disclaimer at the end is nearly half the length of the post.

> There’s a reason the federal government started subsidizing home mortgages: someone who is bought in to where he lives cares more about where he lives.

Hasn't this thought process proven wrong in europe. Renters were similarly engaged in local communities where there were sufficient protections for long term renters.( I can't find the study now ).

I really don't understand why govt need to be in the business of providing home ownership subsidies. Seems like it has contributed to exacerbating current situation in US.

So did Adam buy a bunch of houses and apartments at peak valuations which he'll generously be offering to sell to Flow for a very modest profit?

Housing is absolutely not an issue that more consolidation and VC money can fix. Watching the US just nosedive right into becoming a renter society and giving up on the prospect of ownership is pretty wild...

Easy for AH- they charge fees on the capital they deploy. Adam and his BS are ultimately the problem of your poor grandmother’s teaching pension getting invested in a noted charlatan.

I used to have a high opinion of venture capital, seeing them as tech visionaries and folks with access to deep pockets that fund the best technology that is truly changing the world. Maybe something has changed, but now all I see are just financial hustlers, working markets, trying to capture or corner spaces with "unicorns", looking for M&A activity that might have already been pre-negotiated looking for something to fill that spot, and weird market plays that never seemed to make sense financially (Web3? WeWork?). My perception now of VC is much like any other private equity play. They're in it for the financial hustle, and I don't feel that their "ideas" really hold much water. Why we look up to VCs as thought-leaders and visionaires when they are financial creatures beats me.

While the top VC players may have earned the respect by themselves being visionary entrepreneurs (once, decades ago in many cases), the rest of the VC market is filled with also-ran investors who have never been practicing entrepreneurs, following markets like lemmings and looking for a relatively quick buck while not even understanding the markets they invest in. When I hear someone is an investor, especially if they're not one of the handful few of well-known investors, I just think to myself "banker". I don't know if it's always been like this, but it certainly feels like it's gotten worse.

Occasionally, VCs fund something that changes the world, but I don't think that is necessary (and maybe also not even strictly sufficient) to make money in that business.

I think VCs reflect the market. Alot of the fundamental new things have been done already. So if you’re looking for new sources of huge returns, you’re looking for ways to do things differently vs inventing some new technology.

The other thing is that you have more really rich people who control lots of money without a lot of governance.

Andy Grove's response when John Doerr decided to leave intel for kleiner

"Come on, don't you want to be a general manager and own a real P&L? I'll let you run Intel's software division. John, venture capital, that's not a real job. It's like being a real estate agent."

but no one goes there for a real job, they're there for the money, then if they want a real job, they can get one, on top of it with the free time

> While the top VC players may have earned the respect by themselves being visionary entrepreneurs (once, decades ago in many cases), the rest of the VC market is filled with also-ran investors who have never been practicing entrepreneurs, following markets like lemmings and looking for a relatively quick buck while not even understanding the markets they invest in. When I hear someone is an investor, especially if they're not one of the handful few of well-known investors, I just think to myself "banker". I don't know if it's always been like this, but it certainly feels like it's gotten worse.

Funny you say that because a16z was a top-5 (maybe even better) performing VC in the 2010s and the guy who wrote this article is the Marc Andreessen who created Mosaic/Netscape.

I think this just goes back to the classic "live long enough to see yourself become the villain". I mean seriously, a $350 million round to a company that doesn't yet exist and is led by a bona fide fraudster. Boggles my mind.

Becoming a villain is a choice. There are plenty of counterexamples in our industry, folks who succeeded in tech and/or finance and didn't go on to make investments in fraudsters and whole industries of fraud.

Yeah mostly I meant that Marc isn't some Wall Street banker bro, he's was foundational to the internet, silicon valley and modern life.

I figured it's valuable that he did create something that's valued at nearly $4 billion dollars today, but then I looked at it and he did raise $22 billion.

The question is, is it trivial to take $22 billion dollars and create a $4 billion business? In some cases I would say yeah, its still valuable. I'm not entirely sure I could create a $4 billion business regardless how much money you gave me. On the other hand its real estate, so I could just buy $22 billion of real estate and hopefully come out somewhere just shy of that amount. I'm not sure but the spread between $22 and $4 leaves plenty of room for error.

But there is something to say about failing. Traders that have lost a lot of money are more valuable than those that have never had any downs. But from hearing Adam Neumann speak, it strikes me as though he hasn't learned any lessons. He's a master at deflection and has an excuse or explanation for everything. He has no self awareness or humility. You can listen to his interview from 2021 and it's really incredible.

Anyway, that's all to say I'm surprised anyone would give him another chance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgp-CM-gQik

The old joke goes: "What's the easiest way to make a small fortune? Start with a large one."

> Adam is a visionary leader who revolutionized the second largest asset class in the world

I was of the opinion that Adam made a serious and flawed business decision of taking long term leases with borrowed money, but selling short term fluid leases for revenue leading to books that are incredibly risky. At the time of collapse, the sky high valuation was basically a branding exercise, rather than actual business value (adjusted for risk)

> it’s often under appreciated that only one person has fundamentally redesigned the office experience and led a paradigm-changing global company in the process

How is that A16z is oblivious to the fact that astronomical valuations were tempered after scrutiny of the business of WeWork?

>We understand how difficult it is to build something like this

Again. They took cheaply available VC money, turned it into long term leases. That is a terrible business to be in, risk wise.

Not to mention bullshit about "community" and what not that they tried to build around WeWork.

>Adam returns to the theme of connecting people through transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes.

What is novel about this? Aren't Cul de Sacs supposed to be this? Or even apartments?

Meh A2z or whatever they’re called doesn’t really care about the OPM. I’d fund him just for entertainment factor. The world needs more spirituality in its valuations. And they’ll just dump their shares on a bigger fool like SoftBank.

The reality is that fame (even the notoriety version) gives people the ability to summon literally hundreds of millions of marketing for free.

All things being equal, that makes them a pretty good bet.

Flow probably will have a far easier time getting PR than almost any other startup this year. Same goes for inbound CVs, follow on investment, and basically anything else that makes startups tick.

So it's not that surprising that he can raise from an S Tier investor with a smile and a landing page that's literally just a logo.

Adam should write a book “how to fail upwards in silicon valley”

What is infuriating is that there is so much great work done by great people on building strong resilient and affordable towns which are a pleasure to live and work in, but the easy VC money flows to the wierdo charlatans instead.

Many of the top VCs still see themselves as the 'weird outsider' despite being unfathomably successful, and shovel money at moonshot projects led by charismatic charlatans.

Listening to Marc Andreessen talk about Web3 use cases was eye-opening. Despite being the guy that made web browsing mainstream (Netscape), he sounds like your typical crypto Youtube shill, all buzzwords all the time.

>How is that A16z is oblivious to the fact that astronomical valuations were tempered after scrutiny of the business of WeWork?

Do they care? If they cashed out on Masayoshi Son's money then it was still a great deal for them.

Cronyism is alive and well on Sand Hill road but "Adventure" left Venture capital long ago.

I'll be curious to see what they come up with

I guess this is where wework was headed before he got forced out

I put together a simple site to try to develop the solution to at least one of the problems of apartment living -- loneliness

https://myapartmentfamily.com/

you might want to read the room here before promoting your adjacent idea.

Neumann and a16z suck, but that shouldn't stop us from discussing relevant ideas here.

Hey, seems like a cool idea! I've always lived in apartments and wished there was an easier way to meet people than relying on bumping into them in the hallways. Have you built anything yet? By the way, I noticed a typo -- "aprtment."

thanks!

and thanks for the typo note -- fixed.

nothing built, other than the carrd.co website there. i kind of wanted to put something down 'on paper' to try to develop the idea a bit more myself, maybe show it around online here and there - at least see if i'm just a monster or if other folks have the same problem, etc. and it's def helped to put the site together - it's just allowed me to take the next step - think about:

  - how to contact people, 
  - what types of friendships/relationships/apt-family people might be interested in making/creating, 
  - how would we actually set up an initial meeting between future-apt-family members
  - is 'family' too strong a word/idea? part of my goal is to increase solidarity generally.
  - could / should these communities be able to evolve into something much more thna 'just' a family -- tenant union, buy the building/property, land/building-type trust stuff?

i thought of 'competition' (co-opetition?) that already exists, things like:

  - apt communities doing 'pizza days' or whatever once a month
  - some communities have fakebook groups, etc.
  - some folks will actually meet around the building - parking garage, street, laundry room, dog park, walking around the hood, etc.
  - some folks will meet on Nextdoor

and i didn't want to fall into the 'trap' of trying to build something online -- or mostly or only online.

my natural inclination for a lot of things these days seems to be 'avoid doing this venture online because it will suck -- almost by definition'. that's a bit harsh, but just my take. some of my ideas, like a kb idea, it's online-only and that's fine/good. but when i think of 'online apt community', the closest thing i can think of right now is 'nextdoor' -- which... has always felt like a racist/classist cesspool to me, whenever i checked into it. just my take. so doing yet another online community like Nextdoor, or fakebook, just has an 'ick' factor for me.

one buddy said his communities' 'pizza days' are all he has ever needed to make NEWFOREVERFRIENDS in whatever city he has ever been in, and that this MyAptFam idea is completely stupid or worse.

and then i met a kid who said, during some discussion i wasn't even involved in, "i'm NEVER moving to another city where I don't know someone again."

Oh man I wish there were pizza days in my neck of the woods.

I really like your thinking about keeping this from being entirely online. How about something involving flyers or bulletin board notices, but maybe the app somehow facilitates that?

Another thought that bubbled up in my head is that I wonder if there's a way to gamify the act of meeting neighbors ... ooooh now that feels like it has potential to me. Your building gets points for how many people have met each other, and there's a geographic leaderboard. Or maybe you could set up the incentives to encourage deeper interaction, like involving some of those icebreaker games (some of them are actually not lame IMO). Honestly if this app took off, I could see the apartment's "social score" affecting property value. Ok now I'm getting excited. Also worried about potential negative consequences.

yeah, flyers, bulletin boards, etc. -- lot of this stuff, in a sense, you're confined/constrained to doing online things because presumably we don't own / manage / control the building, but we could either operate without the blessing of building management, or work with them.

i'm guessing building management-type community-building software already exists -- i've used some of it to pay rent -- but nothing that actually tried to build community, that i remember.

to me, having building mgmt involved is problematic, but.... not necessarily a dealbreaker. maybe your pitch would be, "hey, use our software for $5/apt/month, and we'll increase your lease renewal rate by 5%, and therefore you'll end up saving/making a net of +$6,000 this year for your 150-apartment complex. (I don't actually have any idea of the economics.)

i did talk to a friend who is part of an investor group that owns apt buildings - he's not interested in this solution from an ownership perspective (maybe he should be?) - but presumably he would be able to get in touch with the companies he/they hire to manage the buildings. i think the mgmt companies get 10% or something to run/maintain a building, and presumably if they don't hit their revenue targets, then a new mgmt company is hired (??) - no idea tho really.

so, we would not have at least my ideal scenario of a perfect apiring-to-be-a-family community -- b/c it would ultimately be controlled by the apt mgmt -- but we could still achieve _some_ level of camaraderie/family/solidarity/friendship amongst the tenants -- and that might be where we have to start.

i kind of think of it like tv during the clinton years (i think?) when he/they/the gubment/tv/media were pushing the whatever communications act of 199x -- basically, giving away much of the tv/some?? spectrum for free to the megacorps (instead of licensing for real money from taxpayers, providing some of the spectrum for public broadcasting, etc.) -- and all the major news channels/shows/etc. just didn't cover it -- so the public/taxpayers never knew about this heist of the century.

so, something similar could happen with an apt community 'bulletin board' -- someone posts, "Hey, my rent is going up $300 this month, wtf??" -- and building mgmt is like "nope, deleted." -- so, that would suck, but....i would argue the tenants could/would at least know each other enough to take their organizing on that topic to another forum and/or offline.

i suspect a lot of this hippie-dippie community stuff is what adam neumann is trying to do with flow.

i like the gamification idea. i usually _hate_ those 'team building exercises' in various settings, so....i might be too biased in this particualr use case to see clearly, but it sounds cool/fun - if you're actually into meeting your neighbors. coming up with things/ideas/games/etc. that would actually work would be difficult, but prob also fun, interesting, etc.

what would the potential negative consequences be? maybe a building has a '0' social score? :-D

to me, right now, most apt complexes with 50+ units deserve a score of approximately 0 anyways.

Yeah, status quo is almost all apartments get a score of 0! OTOH, I did have some friends that lived in a giant apartment complex in Santa Monica that was one big debuached party 24/7. People who moved there knew that that's what they were in for. Not sure what conditions set that up. It seemed like the reputation of the building was self-sustaining.

My concerns about the gamification are that it would be quite easy to accidentally make things really creepy. E.g. lets say you have a game intended to get you to share stories with your neighbors, and the win condition is that you prove to the app you know stuff about each other, and then you accidentally end up with neighbors aggresively researching each other, and it's 1984.

santa monica story is funny. and fun.

interesting tho if you think that certain buildings could have personalities -- oh, this is where the partiers live, hippies over there, capitalists over there, etc.

yeah - i can see the risk of creepiness from gamification, and just other stuff.

we could do something to try to set up guardrails, but lot of creepy folks out there, and others who just don't know how to act -- i.e. possibly unintentionally creepy, might be immature, just make a mistake, etc.

guardrails might be a 'School of (Apartment) Life' HOWTO Guide, with something like:

  - don't go into someone's apt, or let them into yours, unless/until you know them really well
  - don't be aggressive with asking about people's personal stuff -- take things slowly
  - don't shit where you eat (you are free, of course, to date / break-up with, marry / divorce the people you live with / near, but we STRONGLY recommend against it -- for various reasons -- read more...)
  - etc.

Finally! A potential solution to the housing crisis. Newly VC-infused and rehabilitated Adam Neumann. Yes yes yes. The world needs more of this.

This is also a good hedge against the crypto pyramid starting to slow down. Leveraging peoples' willingness to try to get rich quick to create a pyramid was profitable, but once people lost their money and crypto lost its luster, they wandered off and were no longer easy victims^Wcustomers... but imagine if VCs could also control your housing. Wandering off is so much harder! Built-in market protection.

Brilliant.

Any predictions on what Flow actually does?

Coworking spaces automated by bots in your home!

Maybe the solution to the housing crisis is to build more affordable housing and to eliminate the practice of using housing as an investment / safe place to park money. Also, outlaw or heavily regulate Airbnb.

I don't think another VC-funded app with cool branding is going to save us.

Honest question: why are there so may Airbnbs? What's the advantage over traditional hotels / hostels? Are the prices significantly lower?

They were definitely lower when AirBnB launched, although most of the difference is gone nowadays (might vary by locale).

AirBnBs are also far more likely to have a fully equipped kitchen setup, separate rooms, and larger setups for families and groups, none of which are impossible with hotels but are definitely not very common.

I do think AirBnB generates way too much negative externalities for the value it brings, but there is value in it for the consumer.

I dont get why creating more housing means housing is no longer an investment. It's still an safe investment, it's not going to zero, just will not continue to be a great investment.

tl;dr it's wework but for residential real estate... nobody asked for this, it sounds awful and fuck adam neumann

I don't get why anyone would still do business with Adam Neumann.

Neumann provided very lucrative exits for his earliest investors. I assume that’s the play.

Next week on HN: Adam Neumann sells Flow trademark to Flow for 2 million.

Just flag it, it's not worth the effort to get into this. For anyone not aware of the context, look into the recent NIMBY bullshit by Andreessen.

And if you want a TL;DR:

Andreesen, who this article is written by, was himself trying and succeeding to get his own city council to axe housing development in his own neighborhood, causing the very problems he's writing about.

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