How can we say that Flow is a bad idea if Andreessen Horowitz invested a third of a billion dollars in it?

“Here’s my idea for a new business.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. The business model is crap. The potential market is tiny. And it’s not even original.”

“It’s a tech company.”

“Can I invest $350 million?”

Though it never had the straight out punchline business model of MoviePass and it never approached the eye-watering overvaluation of Tesla ($1.5 trillion at its peak), there was a certain purity about WeWork that made it perhaps the definitive dumb money enterprise of its time. 

God knows, we've said our share of mean things about Uber and Lyft and Netflix and Tesla, but for all of the confusion and myth-making that drove those valuations to their current sky high values, even I have to admit that there was at least the possibility of the promise of something big behind each of those companies. The rise of the smartphone made new models of personal transportation possible. We can argue whether the dominant business model will be all-you-can-stream or a la carte or heavily tiered or advertiser-driven, but there is little question that more and more video viewing will be done online. The future of cars is both electric and autonomous.

By comparison, you almost have to admire the pure distilled bullshit of WeWork. There is nothing to ground this business model, no recent or even promised technological advance, no big innovation, nothing but the CEO babble and Ted Talk happy speak so in vogue in Silicon Valley these days.

But perhaps the most impressive thing about this con is that Adam Neumann pulled it again.

WeWork co-founder lines up $350 million A16Z investment for a new billion-dollar real estate venture

If there were ever a story that demanded the talents of Patrick Boyle...

The Inevitable Decline of WeWork





Adam's Back!