WeWork exits 40 U.S. locations after tepid forecast
reuters.com
reuters.com
I just recently looked up a bunch of various coworking spaces in Houston, and the monthly shared desk pass averaged $450/mo with dedicated desks and offices starting at $700-1000.
And I find that weird, because all across Craigslist (in between the "executive office" and coworking spam) there are dedicated small offices (60-100 sqft) that go for around the same price as a shared desk. Almost always they include the same amenities (coffee, snacks, drinks), but it is in a boring office building or in another company's office build-out that they have no need for.
That is where their disruption strategy was. WeWork in hindsight had a brilliant idea. A readymade exciting, fun-filled work environment - the culture aspect. This would be virtually impossible to create by a single or handful of employees by themselves. Infact big companies struggle to create exciting culture for new age employees even with dedicated team and funds.
WeWork could have worked if it was managed well.
People are weird, man.
Maybe that's why I'm happy at home.
If such odds were more realistic, I would agree.
I am agreeing with you. Work can stay work. I don't need a contest for most scary cubicle. Still, some people go for that stuff. Let me them stay in office. For me, WFH all the way. I make my own fun there.
Maybe because it's 1/3 of a person's life and they want to make the most of it.
Eg in France the legal worktime is 35h, the debate is "32h proposed by the left, going back to 39h proposed by the right", but when I read the twitter people having to do 80h/week under Musk not only do I feel so horrible for them, but I understand then why a "fun filled environment" might be required to avoid people all falling into depression ...
And also there is no way those people are anywhere near productive for more than half of those 80 hours.
Not that I think work should be where people find relationships, but rather that different age groups have different needs and desires.
At my old company, there were two main offices - one in an office park in the suburbs for the "grownups" and a smaller one in a hip part of downtown for the "kiddies".
I worked remotely the entire time and that company also had a large percentage of remote folks like me, this was years before Covid.
tl;dr for a lot of younger/single people, work can be a big part of one's social life.
Full-time employees spend nearly all of their active hours at work. If they do not find relationships / friendships there, where and when will they?
I maintain that having sex with coworkers is ill-advised, but not for the same reasons as employers and their HR departments.
Because of the plitical climate. Very few people would be inclined to pursure romantic relationships with coworkers. Meanwhile people at the same coworking space is a fair game. I am speaking from my own experience. The bad thing is it also becomes like high school. Because there's no HR policy to keep people in check.
Perhaps this is not ideal?
Work relationships used to be not only completely normal, but expected and accepted.
I met my wife of 20 years at work. There were whole universities that had reputations as places where people went to get enough education to land an office job so they could find a spouse.
It is only in the last ten years it so that work relationships have become taboo, as HR departments seem to completely eliminate the risk of inappropriate relationships caused by a minuscule minority of bad bosses and the accompanying legal and financial response from eager lawyers.
While I find the notion of "inappropriate relationships" amusing and only really serving the interests of employers, I still consider it all-advised to have sex with coworkers. This really only matters where people have power or have a career to think about. People with low-accountability roles need not worry about it.
Regardless, I encourage single people to look outside of the workplace.
My own experience is that there is more than "a minuscule minority of bad bosses" that lead to problems.
Take a look at Office Space, that sort of sterile, glaring white environment was the norm for offices right up to the new millennium.
Yes, WeWork has some goofy themes (I had the misfortune of one that took Coney Island as an inspiration, so there were scattered silhouettes of Ferris wheels here and there), but at its core was warm, dark walls that were easy on the eyes, generally good interior design, and people who actually wanted to be at their jobs. I didn’t love it, but far from the worst place I ever had to work.
And once in a while I still drop by an authentic Manhattan office building, and it is like stepping back into the eighties. It’s no wonder jumping off buildings was so popular among stockbrokers…
I think tbh wework's vibe works quite well for temporary office/flex-space, low cost of entry.
The fact that everybody is somewhat of a transient at a wework creates its own cohesion too. e.g. I rented office space at a "real" office building once, and it was just weird for some rando telecommuter to share space with more established companies in more local industries. ymmv, but they did create something "new", or at least a niche office offering is now an established fixture in most metros.
There might have been outliers at places like Google and Facebook in the 2000s but it didn't start exploding till after 2010 when all the more traditional companies started thinking they needed to be like Google and Facebook.
Lots of boring offices got rehabbed into "culture" offices around 2010-2012, even if it was financially irresponsible. There was huge talk that it was required to have any chance of hiring millennials at the time.
I could see WeWork working in 2012 by getting money from small startups and large company with overflow problems in their formal offices. They just missed the startup boom by a couple of years.
What I find interesting now is seeing which companies have structured themselves to survive recession-like economic times. Really shows who has sustainable business models and who doesn't.
It's about having space, good sound-proofing, good chairs/desks, good internet connection, etc. Coffee/tea/water/snacks etc (even if paid).
A lot of the "boring" places don't have any of these.
I had always imagined them to be similar to what I imagined the Google office to be like - lots of amenities, lots of space to goof around, lots of cool little and big things that are rarely found in offices.
Instead you get your plain old "overcrowded startup offices". Tiny desks, tiny rooms, average coffee, no real amenities. Some chic design elements here and there, but that's about it.
Nothing I'd pay 500 EUR / desk per month for.
I wasn't sold on WeWork in theory until I started going with a friend (as a guest) and I was sold immediately.
I tend towards the introverted side so its not the socialising or "networking".. It's the environment: - constantly kept clean - good view, aesthetics & lighting - productivity happening all around you. - Kewl kitchen area with expensive tea & coffee
All Access is gamechanger too, the idea that I can go to Miami, spend some time at south beach and then be super productive at Lex Avenue WeWork with a super kewl view is AWESOME! (I live in London)..
The idea that u can use the same keycard to work in a familiar yet different environemnt in London & Miami is super kewl. Its like the democratisation of the kind of lifestyle you'd have as a billionaire.
Pretty much everybody who looks for co-working places are working in non R&D type stuff.
People from other companies "comingling" is usually a REALLY good thing for the companies. Usually the best stuff comes out of this (Steve Jobs & Xerox's PARC)
The biggest ongoing cost for WeWork is leasing the office space. This cost doesn't go down just because WeWork has some brand recognition. Even worse, there's nothing stopping a property owner from operating their property as a co-working space themselves, cutting WeWork out of the equation.
It's not that WeWork couldn't be profitable. But it was never going to pull in the profits of a successful tech company.
So as they scale they’re signing up for a huge liability with a fairly uncertain stream of cashflows on the other side. Since there are only so many high-quality businesses that want temporary office space at a WeWork in a given area they also need to accept additional risk as they grow revenue regionally.
Add to this the intense correlation of WeWork’s customer base to firms dependent on VC$ and you’ve got a lot of correlated risk sitting on one side of a nasty liability. Not good stuff.
Not only was WeWork's customer base dependent on VC money, so was WeWork itself! So it's really VC money going around in circles until the music stops, which is now.
It reminds me of that old joke: startups are an inefficiency imposed on the transfer of wealth from VCs to landlords.
- Internet outages that lasted for a significant amount of time (not great for a tech company) - Power issues - Bathroom/plumbing issues - Various key card issues - etc (I think a microwave exploded at one point)
It's nice if the fun stuff is there, but if they can't do the boring stuff of running a functional office space well, I'm not sure if it's worth it.
This seems like a doomed idea. Every person I know who goes to a co-working space is because they want to get work done. They want good Internet and quietness. If they wanted a fun-filled work environment, they'd work from home. It almost sounds like WeWork based their model on the wrong part of office culture.
Isn't the prevailing narrative about the current tech layoffs that there were simply too many of these types of employees and not enough productive ones?
WeWork is failing because their most profitable customers are the big corps that buy space from them, not the broke startups and hustlepreneurs that these spaces are marketed towards.
Gen Z doesn't want a beer fridge and ping pong, Gen Z wants fair wages and reasonable hours.
I think more municipalities should get into coworking spaces. Not everyone I needs full incubator support; they just need a place to work.
The State of Washington used to have coworking stations set up in the wide, mostly empty hallways of the convention center in Seattle. Comfy chairs, electrical outlets, a reliable location, and fast wifi is all some people need to get their company off the ground.
It would have been interesting if WeWork had aimed at utilizing that unused space - a hotel that didn't rent Salon G could set it with some tables and power in desk form, alert WeWork it was available the night before, and if you wanted a desk it could point you to it.
The hotel gets some revenue for a room that would have sat empty, you get a desk to sit at.
Hotels also have an image to maintain for their target guest demographic, so they wouldn't want a gaggle of Bankman-Fried lookalike startup bros streaming in and out of their premises daily. At least the MLMs that book hotel conference rooms ask attendees to dress accordingly.
There's a difference between the high and low quality versions of any amenities. I have learned some time ago that increased misery is not worth saving a relatively small amount of money. So I strongly prefer at least the decent versions of amenities such as coffee, conference rooms, natural light, desks, chairs, bathrooms, HVAC, etc.
I ended up renting a 1-person office for a discounted rate of about $450/month. At my last renewal, I was told that discount was no longer available because 1-person offices at my location were in such high demand. So I gave it up and switched back to the “All Access” membership for $299/month which basically grants access to the shared spaces and phone booths in the building.
The issue is that there’s nearly an entire floor of empty office space in the building. But it’s built out in the form of open offices for 30, 50, or 100-person companies. There just seems to be no interest in that but high interest from individuals who want a private office.
I’m curious to see if my location will be affected by the closures. If it isn’t, I can only shake my head and wonder how bad of shape some of these buildings are in financially.
I was with a company that moved from a larger space into a smaller one and they were perfectly happy to throw up some walls to make offices and take down a pair of walls to make a copier space - "for free".
WeWork is alright, but a lot of the design and stuff fades away and you’re just working on a small desk that’s like a coffee shop with good internet and some phone booths.
Places like this [1] are a short walk from where people actually live.
Some coffee shops in my area also have built in meeting rooms at very reasonable prices.
I wish my body handled laptop ergonomics better. I just can't deal with it for days on end, got to have my desktop, big monitor, fancy mouse and comfy chair.
Feed animals in the zoo
Then later, a movie too
And then home
Growing up on a hobby farm with chickens and horses, I never got the impression the animals were unhappy. I think if the option were given to most mammals, they'd choose life in captivity cage with fresh food every day and eventually a peaceful passing over a hungry life in the wild which eventually ends in becoming prey.
The "wild animal park" near San Diego has a 300 acre enclosure, for example. That's pretty darn big, and it houses various "compatible" animals.
https://sandiegozoowildlifealliance.org/sites/default/files/...
Of course, the depressing part of the little tram tour is the "and over here is the last male of this species". The good part is the park was started as a breeding ground for endangered species (animals don't breed well in small enclosures) and that has been pretty successful.
In addition, zoos are also responsible for re-populating vulnerable or endangered species. Zoos spend a lot of money on this. They also return healthy animals back into the wild in service of this.
See the AZA's standards on animal care here: https://www.aza.org/animal-management?locale=en
As far as looking at a tiger for the 200th time goes, I mean, I never get tired of the dumb shit one of our cats does, and we've seen him way more than 200 times now! (We got him at three months old; he's 8 now.) I love getting glimpses into other animals that you would normally never see!
Now, there are definitely shitty zoos that actually do capture and lock up animals purely for entertainment, with patrons none the wiser to it. The most popular "aquarium" in Houston, for example, is actually a restaurant and is not AZA-accredited, which is usually (not always) an indicator that the animals are abused and mistreated.
These manuals are INSANELY detailed. There is absolutely no question that the keepers who helped create these manuals genuinely care about the animals they tend to. (Some of the manuals specify how large exhibits should be depending on whether the animals are staying on exhibit for a while or are preparing for a transition back into the wild!)
Folks that are on engineering organizations (like IEEE) or working groups (like the Kubernetes or Bluetooth SIGs) might appreciate the nuances here!
I also learned that zoologists from Disney's Animal Kingdom are HUGE contributors to these manuals and that Walt Disney himself was key in inspiring zoos to shift away from entertainment and towards conservation!
Yes, popping down to the Memphis Zoo for a few hours gives me and my family great joy. The animals are not free to roam the plains, but they are free from constant predation. More importantly, Zoos can be wonderful cultural centers, animal research, preservers of at risk species, educational and environmental education, on and on. Does it really seem that weird?
HOWEVER, Memphis Zoo smells like… a zoo… and hard pass on that for a work day.
It's one of those things where you just need to flex some social and observational muscles, remember your priors, and make a decision.
What can you discern about the person you're asking? What kind of trends or aggregates can you use to decide if this is the kind of person who's going to steal your stuff? Are you in a nice part of Manhattan, or are you in the Tenderloin? Lots of factors, naturally. It's the kind of thing you have to decide for yourself in the moment, but I'd hope most people intelligent enough to be reading this have the social awareness to know when it makes sense to put your trust in strangers like that.
I've done this thousands of times in cities from New York to Los Angeles, and never had a problem. It's part of modern cafe culture.
If you're worried, you take your computer with you and leave your wires and stuff behind to mark your place.
You start the program and it counts down from 10. At zero it disables sleep, and displays a warning screen stating that the computer is alarmed and should not be moved by anyone but the owner.
When the owner returns, he enters a password to end the program.
If anyone tries to move the computer in his absence, the vibration sensor triggers a screeching alarm.
If there was ever a reason for news media to stop taking VC-reported implied valuations as gospel, this would be it.
At least that is what we are doing.
The terms really didn’t make it fun, though. I think it was 3x monthly rent as a security deposit plus the first month’s rent. Sounds reasonable, except it was going to take something like 60 days for the security deposit to be returned. How convenient that my check for the deposit takes days but theirs takes 60 days.
All I wanted was to stay in Chicago until the real winter hit. :(
I also don’t get the insanity of charging 3x rent as a security deposit for a shared office. It’s a square box with a chair and table. How do I cause $1,800 worth of damage to that?!
The economics of all this works great on paper but very badly in real life.
My guess is that they will move to expand drop-in and bookable spaces, and reduce the number of private offices. Already I've seen some private offices turned into bookable meeting rooms.
Thankfully, COVID shifted their WFH policy and not only could I WFH, they cancelled their WeWork lease.
Their competition seem much hungrier and willing to negotiate to get the business signed.