Is This the Office of the Future or a $5B Waste of Space?
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I'm as dismissive of ridiculous startup valuations as anyone, but this seemed like a weird way to evaluate whether their value was justified.
For reference, here are a couple of other similar statistics:
* There are about 250M Apple devices in use (100M/yr * 2.5 yr lifespan). At 750B market cap, they're worth $3000 per i____ out there, or enough to buy every one of their users an iPhone and still have $500B left over.
* There are about 200,000 active Uber drivers, and they're valued at $50B. That's $300,000 per driver, or enough to buy every one of their drivers a Tesla and still have $40B left over.
I'd think comparing WeWork - a mid-sized player in a highly competitive workspace space - with the dominance of Apple and Uber is a little fanciful too. As the article points out, Regus (and the Workspace Group, and others) have been doing the same thing successfully on a larger scale for much longer, actually own many of their assets and yet still have smaller market caps. I'm not sure that beer on tap is that much of a defensible business model differentiator for WeWork...
I never understood why people who can choose to work from anywhere, choose to pay a monthly commitment to go to a co working space, instead of choosing to work in a low cost area where there money can go SO much farther.
As a mobile startup, you can opt to live outside of a major city being able to leech talent from the talent hub, and make your money go SO much farther.
Teach your kids boundaries young!
I know others that do, but salaried or not, I'm a 9-5er and I don't degrade my hourly rate by putting in extra hours unless they're absolutely necessary for an infrequent crunch. For me, seeing colleagues that put in 15 hour days at soulless BigCo detracts significantly from the bigger salaries they may be getting.
Making my home the office is no different from making the office my home, as makes it feel like I never mentally stop working.
Plus they have better chairs and internet than I'd care to buy
Brilliantly said. Leave home for living your life outside of work. As much as I am my work in so many ways, being able to have a zone that is (usually) free of work is very important.
To me, anyway :)
How quotable, I found it hard to separate work and home while working at home, took me a year to get it right, but after 1 year of doing so, I've found a few tricks and with a bit of discipline, I have been able to completely build a wall between work and home even though they are the same place. I will say it wouldn't have been possible if my boss didn't also work from home and encourage it. If my boss expected me to keep up with emails and phone calls after 5:30pm, I would probably hate the home office.
1. Young children don't understand daddy having to separate work time from home time
2. Wife that doesn't get that just because I'm in the house, it doesn't mean I can babysit or help with household chores
3. Crazy dog barking every time a car passes outside the front door
4. Lack of a dedicated space (in an already small Bay Area living space) for doing work
5. Commuting is my way to mentally get myself in and out of work mode, driving around the block doesn't cut it
6. Lack of regular, daily human interaction (even if it's just co-workers) is depressing after a day or so
7. My typical work role has me having to hunt people down who don't respond to E-mail/text/etc.. can't effectively do that from home
IMO the best usecase for WFH is to live in a lower-cost area. If I was in SF or SJ metro instead of the Bay Area suburbs I'd probably go to the office just to hang out with people, cause that's kind of the point of living in SV.
2. Wife also is a full time WFH, ironically we exchange very little dialog other then around lunch time during the day. I'm lucky that she "Gets it" in my case.
3. no pets,
4. we have no dedicated office, in fact my desk is in the living room, and hers is in the bedroom. We relish our frugality though and every time we are about to complain, we look at how much a 2 or 3 bedroom apt costs!
5. I'm impressed this does the trick for you. Driving / commuting just gets me all riled up, I cant stand how they let other people on the road!
6. This was SOO hard during my first year. I was definitely thrown into a slump shortly after I made the switch. I now have a regularly occurring social event 4 days a week that gets me around other people which helps me stay social.
7. Since all my co-workers are also work from home, Email, Phone or gchat usually extracts a reply immediately, even if its "On phone, will get back to you in 1 hour"
Then again, maybe the younger generation evolved to be able to sit uncomfortably for a long work day, ;p
In the first four paragraphs:
keg, keg, beer, bar, tap, bar, pub, microbrews, tap, happy hour, tequila, margaritas, "90,000 glasses of beer".
https://suegoestogermany.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/thursday-6...
And WeWork in particular is flipping expensive. Most of what they offer can be had by buying $5 lattes every hour at your local coffee shop. I'm a member at a more bare-bones competitor to WeWork[0] that, if you price it out, is cheaper than going to coffee shops. And it's also quiet, there's a printer, and the wifi works all the time. And you're still getting coffee out of the deal.
For WeWork's prices, I want to start having some private locker space or something, so I can maybe leave a laptop, lock up my papers, etc., not have to hump it around on the metro all day. If you want that level at WeWork, you have to pay such an exorbitant fee that you might as well just get three of your closest friends together to rent your own office.
At least then I wouldn't have to deal with a bunch of overgrown children having nerf battles.
[0] http://www.cove.is, though I'm pretty sure they're only available in the DC Metro area.
EDIT: I just checked, and they've recently dropped their prices. WeWork's entry level used to be in the $100/mo range. Cove is still cheaper, and the private storage levels are still very expensive.
It seems to be one facet of a theme of infantilization and youth glorification in work culture and society at large. I am not sure whether it has any relationship with the rise of the "social" plague in industry, and the widespread infiltration of VC onto college campuses (and now elementary school playgrounds), where the youth are increasingly primed for dependency through the advertising and systematic denial of experiences.
Offices for adults these days are becoming more like playgrounds, and playgrounds for kids are becoming more like jails. I can't understand all the psychodynamics at play, but something is clearly broken with the way we treat our youth and our narrowly defined notions of "fun".
Work culture is not about the worker or the work anymore, it is about creating an interdependent unit of labor. But if neither the quality of work nor the quality of life for the worker is emphasized, I am not sure what the purpose is besides to maintain social order.
There's not as much drinking done as you would think and really it's either an after work hours thing or someone is coming in checking the place out and has a beer. It's really not a big deal. It's actually just more convenient because alcohol can loosen you up and means you don't have to go across the street to an expensive bar.
I believe you're taking an overly hard-lined approach to this. I work very hard, and so do many others. There's some who just dick around, but that's going to be in any office. I would ask you though, what's more conducive to meeting new people around the office? A light-hearted 5:00 / 6:00 drink at the bar right outside the work area where there's already other people drinking OR organizing everyone to go to a bar across the street and hope people show up OR just going to the bar?
WeWork is a great place because of the community it builds and you might very well argue it does that on the back of its kegs with taps labeled WeWork. Is this really so bad? Think about your typical startup who's struggling to get along. Isn't it better that they have others to talk to especially others who are going through the exact thing they are?
I genuinely think you can't understand all the psychodynamics at play because you're stubbornly holding onto your perception of a workplace should be. Hey to each their own, but I see a lot of positives in WeWork's approach.
If employees want to hang out with each other, that's fine. I just don't think it's a good idea, in the long run, for companies to be pushing like this.
Should I be equally bothered by lack of whites in the NBA or the NFL?
RE: the NBA and the NFL: Should the bad behavior of anyone be an excuse for others to behave poorly? Also, why has the MLB gotten more white, less diverse in recent years?
I can see how we ought to have government mandated equal access. Ie someone should not have worse chance of being hired in SV because they are black or Mexican. But if the numbers of qualified candidates vary by a factor of 100 (how many black vs white or asian CS PhDs are coming out of the pipeline) - why is the lack of diversity a problem of the industry?
Where one of the driving factors beyond product development in the industry is "scratch your own itch and scale it out", lack of diversity of background (of which sex and race/ethnicity are components, but not the only important components) means lost potential markets, so its in the interests of those who want to invest in the new markets for the industry (e.g., most of the big players in the industry, and most of the investors in big and small players in the industry) to invest in broadening the funnel. It is, if not a problem of the industry, a problem for the industry.
(It also could be a symptom of a problem of the industry in which the industry itself takes action, without realizing the effect, which narrows its funnel, reduces the supply of talent attracted to the industry, and drives up costs.)
But is there any proof for it that makes it more than a hypothesis? Is there any example of a company staffed by minorities that is more successful at serving those minorities?
Because all we really have are counterfactuals - I can't think of a single SV company that did well because it made a point of hiring from the underrepresented groups.
I would prefer if everyone just worked from home, or in a shared community workshop, or private studio, or coffee shop, or bar, or wherever they fucking want. WeWork is nothing more but a modern spin on Office Space culture. If people like that, I am happy it is another option available to those who enjoy working in that kind of space. Just make sure you don't think you have stumbled upon the holy grail of work spaces, and push it on everyone who is looking for work.
The solution to this problem is to revolt. Stop taking your kids to the playground. Get them helmets and a kickbike and go to the local skateboard park. Go out hiking with them, even if it's just 300 yards in a park. Run on the beach. Let them eat the sand. Give them proper rain clothing and boots so they can jump in puddles for hours on end. Teach them that there is no bad weather, just bad clothing. Show them how a socket wrench works. Let them "help" whenever you're doing something, if it's cooking or cleaning or repairing stuff or whatever. And for gods sake don't buy them a tablet.
DISCLAIMER: said activities may require physical exercise and actual parenting.
As a compulsive eater, I HATE it when offices have free snacks. It's mentally taxing to know there's free snacks only meters away all day long. When I switched from a place with free chips and candy to a place with free apples and pears, I lost a decent amount of weight.
It must be really difficult to be an alcoholic in a workplace environment where people drink regularly. But being an alcoholic in general must be really difficult because of the emphasis that our society puts on social drinking.
I'm vocal with my coworkers that I don't drink and that's why I do not attend many of the social outings. We have a lot of outings that don't center around or involve alcohol (ie. Gokarting) and I attend those. I make it a point that I'd rather they go have fun at a bar and I'll "sit this one out" rather than turning all events into "sober-friendly" events.
E:
Since it might be brought up... I politely decline offers to attend the bar gatherings and "just don't drink". I dislike being around drunk people - I find them annoying and having to repeat myself 20 times in conversation to be frustrating. Instead of ruining their fun experience with my irritated and increasingly unfriendly attitude - I stay at home and let them enjoy their time.
I'd love to have a glass of beer with lunch and not have an arbitrary taboo about alcohol at work. I'd love not to worry about drinking in public. It's treated like an ugly bodily function! I'd love not to be hassled for ID everywhere I can drink. I'd love (or, more accurately, would have loved) a more reasonable drinking age.
But no, US culture makes casually drinking alcohol—something that should be entirely reasonable—awkward and difficult. In practice, all it means is that I can't responsibly enjoy a nice glass of wine at the park and college students still end up binging on cheap beer and liquor.
It's not an "anti-alcohol culture". It's simply power-hungry officials. The US drinks like there's no tomorrow.
Neither everyone nor every job is optimized for close proximity with others. Nor does everyone want to extend the dormitory study room culture indefinitely into adulthood. I think this kind of space works for some job types and industries, but definitely I do not see it as the one future for all office spaces.
But congratulations on trying to make this popular and succeeding so far. The more choice the better.
So you take all that with a grain of salt. Founders are always talking about how they're doing something completely novel and groundbreaking, even if they're not.
And then you hit some little details: "…valuable benefits like access to a group health insurance plan…". In the US that is a big thing. If they're offering group health insurance, they really aren't just another real estate company!
In fact, I'm pretty enthusiastic about the idea now. I've always thought that many of the benefits offered by large corporations did not have to be tied to a single monolithic entity. Nothing about well-managed office space, group health insurance and shared infrastructure is inexorably tied to having a top down autocratic organization, but historically it has been.
Wouldn't it be cool if somebody supplied the same infrastructure not to business teams in a rigid hierarchy but to a loosely federated network of startups and freelancers?
Looks like exactly what WeWork is offering.
The current 5x5 feet of open office space I have has led me to mostly work from home.
I worked out of WeWork’s SoHo office in NYC for a while and was pleased with the details they got right to make themselves attractive to startups (no pesky sales team, short notice to cancel, no nickel and diming on Wi-Fi, printers, etc.).
Before WeWork, I also worked in a Regus office (their competitor mentioned in the article) and they managed to get all the same things wrong. Perhaps they have adapted since. I’m unaffiliated with either company but wish WeWork well. It was a fun vibe they cultivated and everyone seemed to enjoy working there.
Neumann doesn't understand what socialism is.