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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  1585 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: “You Don’t Bring Bad News to the Cult Leader”: Inside the Fall of WeWork

It's more insidious than that. What you describe is Theranos - Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani started a company based on purest bullshit and conned people all along. Those who knew about it were threatened until eventually they couldn't keep things tamped down. It blew up and now we're all waiting for the Jennifer Lawrence Oscarbait. That, we can point to bad actors and gullible investors shined on by a willingness to believe that blood chemistry could be "distrupted".

WeWork is worse - Adam Neumann was a dude throwing ideas at the wall until he discovered that subletting desks to freelancers was lucrative. But you don't go from "subletting desks to freelancers" to "I can solve the Middle East" without a whole bunch of people convincing you beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're a genius. And from what I can tell, they did this not on the assumption that owning WeWork would make them rich, but on the assumption that selling WeWork would make them rich.

Theranos was people thinking they were getting in on the next Apple - the ur-company of healthcare, the place where the revolution would begin. WeWork was people thinking they were getting in on the next Uber - an iterative solution to a known problem that is somehow worth insane amounts of money because people keep piling the phantasm higher. If you look at it, the people at the heart of Theranos knew blood chemistry and knew what they were doing was effectively impossible. Holmes and Balwani kept them all siloed so they could reasonably believe that the problems they saw with their own two eyes were being solved by someone behind this, that or the other Chinese wall. The people at the heart of WeWork had no fucking clue what they were doing but if someone wants to reward you for buying pizzas at $13 and selling them at $12, are you going to let them? For how long? When do you say "stop"? When do you question the people throwing money at you? Jamie Dimon is your personal banker. One of the eight guys called in to bail out the economy in 2008 is the guy approving your mansion purchases. Do you say "Jamie I recognize that you run a financial services company with two point seven trillion dollars in assets but I kinda feel like maybe things are a little out of control and I mean, I oughtta know I tried to sell baby clothes with kneepads"?

To me, this is the venture capital industry looking for things they can sell to each other for no reason other than hype. And they hyped themselves out of $12b. And Gwynneth Paltrow's cousin gets a $500m parachute.