Was WeWork Ever Going to Work?

When WeWork came into being nine years ago, it arrived as a fresh idea — a company that would retrofit empty office and loft spaces for start-up entrepreneurs, all working in isolation. For upward of several hundred dollars a month, renters — “members’’ in WeWork argot — would not just be getting a place to work; they would be buying the camaraderie of conventional office life.

The model, though, was problematic from the outset. For one thing, most start-ups fail. And the freelance writers, graphic artists, videographers, and so on who were logical WeWork clients were seeing their livelihoods decimated by technology.

In smaller cities, one real estate developer who had tried to buy a building occupied by WeWork told me, bankers were skeptical of underwriting the purchases precisely because of this obvious volatility.

By 2016, WeWork began to focus more intently on attracting institutional “members,’’ companies with 500 employees or more who would take over whole buildings or floors leased by WeWork. Those clients now make up 40 percent of WeWork’s business. But that shift has the effect of making WeWork seem unnecessary, given that so much of what it is selling is community, an enlightened version of a corporate culture.

I.B.M., which occupies a whole WeWork building in New York, has had its own corporate culture for 108 years.

What generated so much excitement about WeWork in the beginning was that it offered the semblance of security at a time when the median length of a job with one employer in this country had fallen to approximately four years, down from 10 years in the 1980s.

It was bound to feel less stressful, if you were working to execute your vision in the same place every day, rather than dragging your laptop to Starbucks on Tuesday, holding meetings at your grandmother’s half-empty apartment on Thursday. You would see people just like you; you would feel a part of something larger. The coziness, the fruit-water, the comfortable furnishings would all mitigate the sense of uncertainty and risk.

From the beginning of his career as an entrepreneur, Mr. Neumann looked at the culture and saw anxiety in the foreground. Before WeWork, he had a company called Krawlers that made baby pants with kneepads, because the world was full of painful obstacles, wasn’t it? That company did not end up dominating the toddler-gear space as he hoped. If WeWork winds up laying off thousands of employees and heads toward bankruptcy as some analysts speculate, it may be because delusion finally runs dry.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/nyregion/wework-Adam-Neumann.html?emc=rss&partner=rss