The inside story of WeWork and its CEO, Adam Neumann, which tells the remarkable saga of one of the most audacious, and improbable, rises and falls in American business history.
In its earliest days, WeWork promised the impossible: to make the American work place cool. Adam Neumann, an immigrant determined to make his fortune in the United States, landed on the idea of repurposing surplus New York office space for the burgeoning freelance class. Over the course of ten years, WeWork attracted billions of dollars from some of the most sought-after investors in the world, while spending it to build a global real estate empire that he insisted was much more than that: an organization that aspired to nothing less than elevating the world's consciousness.
Moving between New York real estate, Silicon Valley venture capital, and the very specific force field of spirituality and ambition erected by Adam Neumann himself, Billion Dollar Loser lays bare the internal drama inside WeWork. Based on more than two hundred interviews, this book chronicles the breakneck speed at which WeWork’s CEO built and grew his company along with Neumann’s relationship to a world of investors, including Masayoshi Son of Softbank, who fueled its chaotic expansion into everything from apartment buildings to elementary schools.
Culminating in a day-by-day account of the five weeks leading up to WeWork’s botched IPO and Neumann’s dramatic ouster, Wiedeman exposes the story of the company’s desperate attempt to secure the funding it needed in the final moments of a decade defined by excess. Billion Dollar Loser is the first book to indelibly capture the highly leveraged, all-blue-sky world of American business in President Trump’s first term, and also offers a sober reckoning with its fallout as a new era begins. Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
WeWorks rise reads like a coked out 5 AM conversation between two tech bros.
“So, yeah, startup idea, we just like rent all these desks”
“Desks?”
“Yeah desks. Like people pay us to give them a place to work.”
“Bro I hate work, did I tell you I interviewed at Uber?”
“Yeah bro. That’s why we make work not suck. With like kegs, and ping-pong tables”
“Dude, that’s such a good idea. Everyone would sign up. Nobody like work but everyone loves beer”
“And music.”
And music. We could bump music so hard in our offices”
“That would be sick. Everyone would love that”
“Yeah man.” Grinds teeth “and well get like so much funding. 20 million..... No wait.... 20 billion dollars to buy all sorts of new property”
“Totally, and like yearly parties man, where the whole company can come and get super lit.”
“And like, what if....” snoooorrt “what if we also have like schools-And-houses-and-jets-and-wine-and-music-and-beer-and-the-mothafuckin-CHAINSMOKERS”
“Dude, I think we’re onto something here”
The book itself is all right. Definitely interesting. But, putting this book down after reading it, I’m not sure I’m that much more educated on anything related to WeWork. I found the rise and fall pretty closely with no small amount of shaudenfraude.
Adam Newman is a charismatic founder who shucked and jived his way to an absolutely ridiculous valuation. Saudi money channeled through SoftBank artificially propped up an unprofitable business. there’s some parallels you can draw to Theranos. Lack of relevant domain experts, centralized control with obscure oversight. A lot of talk about “secret sauce” but no real independent verification of that. I’d say many of the same red flags I see in the car company Nikola.
Beware the cult of personality. There were a lot of self interested people who benefited from WeWork‘s rise, noticeably New York and other major commercial real estate people. Self interest buys a lot of silence.
Biggest frustration with the book is that besides a few personal interviews, general reluctance to buy into Adams con of hype. I’m not sure there’s much more than a decently aggregated reporting job. 9780316461368 Here is another book where I kept thinking I was reading about a cult instead of a startup. As with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, you will marvel at how investors were so blinded by Adam Neumann's alleged charm that they were willing to sink zillions of dollars into his unproven business. Of course, the difference is that Holmes was promising something truly groundbreaking while Neumann was promising office space rentals. WeNeed to stop giving these charlatans such long ropes with which to hang themselves when short ones would work just as well and probably a lot faster. What would these people do if they actually had to work for it? Also recommended: Hulu's documentary, unimaginatively titled WeWork. 9780316461368 Billion Dollar Loser is the story of WeWork, and about one of the company’s founders, Adam Neumann.
This was an interesting read — In addition to profiling Adam and the rise of WeWork, the book details many of its challenges including an attempted IPO in 2019. It sounds like there was a lot of talk about “world changing” in the company’s early days and the environment could be volatile as employees were often summoned to scramble in opening new locations at breakneck speed, regardless of the role they were hired for. WeWork is still in business today, though Adam has since stepped away — 3.5 stars 9780316461368 Having lived through much of the experience described in this book, it was nonetheless a thrilling trip down memory lane that revealed new insights and detail that even I, as a former rank and file employee, was not fully privy to. Well written and excellently paced, finding the right balance between detours into juicy anecdotes and higher level reflections and lessons to learn, which is difficult to pull off sometimes in these business case study books.
This is well worth the read for the general public, but I strongly encourage any current or former employee to also pick it up--so long as they can stomach revisiting the rocky highs and lows of the experience! 9780316461368 Picked this up as a potential readalike for Bad Blood, and I was not disappointed. This story of the rise and fall of a unicorn startup is extremely well documented while still maintaining a fast pace and reading like a compelling page-turner. Jaw-dropping excess and financial maneuvering abounds. Even if you know nothing about WeWork this is fascinating stuff. 9780316461368
summary Ø PDF, eBook or Kindle ePUB ☆ Reeves Wiedeman
Maybe this says something unflattering about my character, but I am intrigued by books about the rise and fall of Silicon Valley startups, and the cults of personality that tend to build up around individual founders. I suppose it's comforting, somehow, to know that just because someone has millions of devotees, tons of wealth, and buckets of unwarranted confidence, they're not always destined for sustainable success. For those who, like me, frequently struggle with irrational self-doubt, it's bracing to know that quiet, understated talent matters, too.
Billion Dollar Loser reads like fiction in the best way. Prepare to stay up way past your bedtime, and to end the journey with very few answers and a whole lot of questions. You may come away still confused about how any of this was allowed to happen with so many adults in the room, but I can just about promise you'll at least have fun while you're wondering. 9780316461368 I have a soft spot for books about troubled unicorns - the corporate kind. Books on Theranos, Uber, Tesla, and now WeWork (obviously Uber and Tesla are not fallen, but have had their growing pains). Part of this is because as someone who lived through the 90s internet boom, I am more thoughtful about Internet 2.0. So I read this in 24 hours.
WeWork is not quite as awful as Theranos, but is a failure nonetheless. The book, which grew out of a NYMag piece that the author wrote on WeWork, covers the origin story, Neumann's bio, through all of its funding rounds, to its collapse.
WeWork is not a technology company. And the tension at the core of the company is that it was unwilling to admit that, as it would have cost executives and investors the billions invested in it. Real estate is a very old business, almost the world's oldest profession. So the idea that a college dropout whose last business was baby clothes would completely reimagine it should raise eyebrows. And it did. But the book does a good job at conveying Neumann's sheer charisma, which allowed him to raise successive rounds, increase the valuation, and pull out enormous riches, despite a business model that was at best, hollow, and at worse, a massive Ponzi scheme.
Neumann comes across as a New Age jackass, who claims to be interested in bringing the world together through office space, yet at the same time accumulates an enormous amount of high-end personal real estate and flies in a Gulfstream G650 that the investor-funded company bought for his use. And his profligacy, well-documented, extended to the company as well, where they spent enormous sums on offsite parties with high-end entertainment. His wife, if that's possible, comes across worse - a spoiled wannabe failed actress who's empowered by her husband's wealth and power to actualize a bunch of nonsense that belies her worthlessness. But again, underlying it is a business model that was pissing money away.
But Wiedeman is clever enough to understand all the dynamics at play here - between the company, its customers, its investors, its competitors, its employees, its executives, its bankers, and the public markets. He understands that at its core, the company was playing a game, where investors put in capital in successively increasing valuations, while executives burn through capital, competitors are beaten up by predatory pricing, and the bankers try to take the company public so that public investors would end up holding the bag when the music stops.
Fortunately for public investors, the company's S-1 was an utter travesty, invoking widespread ridicule and leading to the demise of the executive team. And the company's future remains in question.
I would say that the only area I wished the book had investigated more is how VC investors, who pride themselves on being both clever financial experts as well as technology experts, could have found themselves funding this obvious narcissistic jackass. They are backed with billions in capital, have access to some of the best technologists in the world, yet still find themselves funding into an embarrassing story like WeWork, allowing themselves to feed a beast like Adam Neumann, who is more a legend in his own mind than anybody who should be looked upon in the future as a keen businessman. Wiedeman could've asked the obvious question: is VC expertise essentially a fraud, and just a way to make money by laying off the risk on unsuspecting public investors? That would've earned the last star.
Because anybody who tells you that they lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume, is not the right horse to back. No matter what the zeitgeist is. 9780316461368 Ohhhh damn. Never has a hate-read looked so good! 9780316461368 This dude makes me nauseous. I have experience in M&A/Distressed workouts, etc. Working in those environments made so many things about this tool, Adam, ring familiar.
I'm always impressed with the ability of a CEO (salesman #1) to get in front of a group of smart business people and give a pitch of something like:
But this is where there's a twist in the usual story. We finally just started questioning everything about the process. Is the process actually congruent with our customers desire for contentment? So this isn't about any one particular service. It's about us. It's about where we're from. It's about who we love. It's about the need to connect. This is what dictates our beliefs and goals. Believing in love is really what we do.
Haha, it's so easy to make that silly stuff up, but it's pretty much what this guy and so many others do. And they get away with it! They'll leave the meeting with a check for a new round. It might actually be a real monster that has been created - or, as the book and tech investors have called them, Unicorns - companies with huge valuations and promises, all without a business plan that makes it clear how the company will ever be profitable.
Oh, and usually a lot of creative accounting. In this example, it was the manipulation of what most accountants know as contribution margin. WeWork had no problem giving investors financial data that left out critical items...like large liabilities.
When it comes to creating a revenue model, why not use the assumption of 100% capacity in your buildings? I mean, why not let the investors rely on that? Sounds reasonable.
Meanwhile, for like 8 years leading up to the cat being out of the bag, SO MANY supposedly credible, well known people of all backgrounds were fawning over this CEO and this company. The dude cashed out over $70mm of seed investment money, and did it faster and in a higher total amount of stock sold than any other startup CEO. Just jaw dropping gall.
Hope everyone is doing well, flipping pages with a favorite beverage. (waves) (runs) (laughs) 9780316461368 Come for the schadenfreude and stay because it's even worse than you think it's going to be. I think so much of the founder myth is marketing and fluff and most people know it, but they want to believe it. WeWork was just an intense collective self-induced delusion. I think most people were always skeptical of Neumann but also believed that if other people were duped, that they could pretend too. It's just so incredibly offensive to the majority of humans in the world who worked their butts off to not have enough money for food and shelter for this man to walk away with billions without doing shit ever and for ruining other people's livelihoods. 9780316461368