#Benchmark capital bruce free

Neumann likes to present WeWork as a star of the sharing economy, a technology platform that connects consumers to office space, just like Uber and Airbnb connect them to cars and homes, respectively. Writing in the Commercial Observer last month, Charles Clinton, CEO of the real estate investing company EquityMultiple, called it “ perhaps the most polarizing recent valuation … many industry insiders find the gaudy valuation to be completely insane.” CompStak, the commercial real estate database, said it felt compelled to investigate WeWork’s margins, because “ike many in the CRE industry, we were curious to understand the math behind WeWork’s fast growth.” “ Believe It” read Wired’s dubious headline about the company’s $5 billion valuation last year.

#Benchmark capital bruce free

The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and even random bystanders on Medium have scratched their heads wondering how free beer and flexibility could add up to a $10 billion business model. At that price, WeWork is one of the most valuable startups to emerge from the tech boom, more valuable on paper than Slack, Draft Kings, Lyft, 23andMe, and Warby Parker combined.Įven in a technology cycle whose “ defining characteristic” is mega-financing rounds - where investors pour hundreds of millions in funding into a company on the chance that it will be worth billions - WeWork's rapidly multiplying valuation (an appraisal of a company's worth by its investors) has perplexed and alarmed observers. Half a year later, most of those same investors injected another round of funding that doubled WeWork's valuation to $10 billion. In December 2014, a new set of financiers pumped that number up to $5 billion. In February 2014, WeWork’s financiers said it was worth $1.5 billion.

The company has raised $1 billion in less than half a decade, and its valuation has grown commensurately. It’s that promise of personal fulfillment that allows CEO Adam Neumann to claim that his company’s short-term subleases are ' changing the way people work.” Business is going so well that soon, the five-year-old company expects to change the way people live, too, by offering shared residential micro-apartments under the brand name WeLive. For WeWork - which leases office space, divvies it up into desk-sized chunks, and rents it out month to month, largely in fashionable cities like San Francisco and New York - the narrative revolves around catering to a new generation of young workers who want to be creators and collaborators, not office drones. Startups don’t turn into unicorns - the buzzword for companies valued at a billion dollars or more - without a good story attached.