I'll share my own story about the time I met Adam. It was short and unexpected. I was at the Wework on Madison in an unrelated meeting. The community manager told me I should stay after because the founder was stopping by and "it would be cool". I thought to myself ok this is strange, why would he randomly walk around talking to people. That's not what happened at all. All of the sudden at exactly 5:30pm people started breaking out bottles of alcohol and office tables turned into beer pong tables. " interns" or models(?) All of the sudden swarmed the floor. It felt like I was in a well lit night club. Then Adam walked in through the elevator with like 20 more people and it really got crazy. A DJ came over the sound system out of nowhere. I thought to myself wtf is this... and a girl came up to me with a tray of shots and said "this is Wework". I'm not exagerating. It was strange but now I get why the company ended up the way it did. I thought Adam was a minor cofounder at the time I couldn't imagine he was leading the company. No hate. It was just peculiar.
Hopefully you were able to consciously decouple from that jackass before shit really started going down.
Thats what happens when you get money you don't deserve
This was in 2015. I had never seen anything like that before ever anywhere, especially not at a "place of business".
Why am I reminded of Wolf of Wall St?
If you think about it this is definitely a crazier story than the Wolf of Wall street. Jordan Belfort made $50mm in one year at his peak. Adam made $1.7bn at his. Movie definitely coming.
Who is gonna play Adam? I vote for Michael Fassbender
Eff that guy and eff Wework
I don’t have so much ill will towards him. He did plenty of good things too. I was one of the first Wework tenants and I thought it was the most amazing place for entrepreneurs. He really created a cool place for underfunded businesses and gave free rent to many startups (12 months). I am not discounting the bad stuff he did. Chiefly, letting down his people. I don’t feel bad for his investors at all. They knew better and they had all the leverage to require better governance.
Appreciate your insight but hard to overlook the bad stuff: potentially 4000 employees being let go, sunken emply stock options and he walks away with 1.7b. Maybe corp governance isnt enoigh, perhaps some, dare I say, govt regulations?
Paper money woes are a dime a dozen, everyone knows the risks of working for a startup. Investors are too savvy and in this case they were negligent. They nickel and dime the small guys asking for $1M so I feel no sympathy for them. No one in this story deserves pity. None of the losers want regulation. VCs are capitalists who want open markets and employees want the ability to freely negotiate
It's unbelievable to me that one could run a company this way, get terrible results, and still end up with 1.7 billion as an exit package. WTF.
That’s a sad part but vision fund is paying for it .
Count our blessings they didn't hit IPO, can't imagine the damage to investors in the public market otherwise.
It begs the question: what was SoftBank thinking? Too drunk on unicorn koolaid?
Dude got paid 10 figures for hanging out saying inane shit and presumably banging those tequila models. Btw many of his early investors probably made a shitload too. Sounds pretty sweet to me, way better than doing fucking LC all day.
It’s what we all expected. It’s not a tech company but he faked it as a tech company and acting all “cool”. I wonder how many of unreported shenanigans happened there.