Anyone who has stepped into a WeWork office pre-Covid will have felt something in the air without being able to put their finger on it.
Be it the real (rather than fake) foliage, human attended (rather than automated) coffee machine or open (rather than cubical) plan desk layout - you felt like you wanted to be a tenant even if you were visiting.
This non-fictional account of the rise and fall of WeWork covers how they raised such large sums of money (spoiler, it was largely down to one man's enthusiasm) and how other companies have followed in its wake.
The book is well written, and within a few chapters, you are absorbed - however, at times, it can be a bit wordy.
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The Cult of We: WeWork and the Great Start-Up Delusion (English Edition) Kindle-editie
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‘An amazing portrait of how grifters came to be called visionaries and high finance lost its mind.’ Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of The Power of Habit
The definitive inside story of WeWork, its audacious founder, and the company's epic unravelling from the journalists who first broke the story wide open.
In 2001, Adam Neumann arrived in New York after five years as a conscript in the Israeli navy. Just over fifteen years later, he had transformed himself into the charismatic CEO of a company worth $47 billion. With his long hair and feel-good mantras, the six-foot-five Neumann looked the part of a messianic Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The vision he offered was mesmerizing: a radical reimagining of work space for a new generation. He called it WeWork.
As billions of funding dollars poured in, Neumann's ambitions grew limitless. WeWork wasn't just an office space provider; it would build schools, create cities, even colonize Mars. In pursuit of its founder’s vision, the company spent money faster than it could bring it in. From his private jet, sometimes clouded with marijuana smoke, the CEO scoured the globe for more capital but in late 2019, just weeks before WeWork's highly publicized IPO, everything fell apart. Neumann was ousted from his company, but still was poised to walk away a billionaire.
Calling to mind the recent demise of Theranos and the hubris of the dotcom era bust, WeWork's extraordinary rise and staggering implosion were fueled by disparate characters in a financial system blind to its risks. Why did some of the biggest names in banking and venture capital buy the hype? And what does the future hold for Silicon Valley ‘unicorns’? Wall Street Journal reporters Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell explore these questions in this definitive, rollicking account of WeWork's boom and bust.
- TaalEngels
- UitgeverMudlark
- Publicatiedatum22 juli 2021
- Bestandsgrootte1502 KB
Productbeschrijving
Recensie
“[The] ultimate portrayal of . . . an empire built on sand.”—Newsweek
“Like Bad Blood . . . The Cult of We is novelistic in detail and often thrilling. . . . It’s like watching a car careening toward a wall at 90 miles an hour.”—The Washington Post
“If I had to make a list of top five business books of all time, this would be on it. It’s just so damn engrossing.”—Christopher Mims, Wall Street Journal tech columnist
“A juicy guided tour through the highly leveraged, not-quite-rags-to-billion-dollar-parachute saga of WeWork and its cofounder Adam Neumann . . . Brown and Farrell show an agility for explaining key business dynamics. . . . It’s also very funny.”—The New York Times
“Absorbing . . . The Cult of We is both a ticktock of Neumann’s self-immolation and a primer on the ways and mores of a start-up culture populated by visionaries, grifters and moneymen. . . . Like Bad Blood . . . The Cult of We is novelistic in detail and often thrilling. . . . It’s like watching a car careening toward a wall at 90 miles an hour.” —Allison Stewart, The Washington Post
“Deeply reported and compellingly written.”—Harvard Business Review
“Only a handful of books capture the zeitgeist of a business era. Add this one, a wild saga that caps a decade when founder-worshipping investors threw billions at well-spun visions—even those of a megalomaniac whose new-age real estate enterprise’s losses piled up as fast as its valuation climbed. The duo who broke the story of WeWork’s rise and fall have now artfully fleshed it out in a book whose colorful narrative is undergirded by deep context about the times, and enablers, that made Adam Neumann possible.”—John Helyar, #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of Barbarians at the Gate
“The Emperor’s New Clothes of the Silicon Valley age.”—The Real Deal
“Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell owned the WeWork story as it was unfolding. And now, with The Cult of We, we finally get the chronicle we deserve of a madness that consumed venture capital, corporate America, and the world.”—Charles Duhigg, New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Habit
“The lines between vision, bullshit, and fraud are narrow, and if you tell a thirty-year-old male that he is Jesus Christ, he’s inclined to believe you. The idolatry of founders in Silicon Valley will rage until the music stops playing. The Cult of We is a cautionary tale and a crisp page-turner.”—Scott Galloway, New York Times bestselling author of The Four and professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business
“Whether you know a lot or a little about the fall of WeWork, you won’t be able to put down The Cult of We by Wall Street Journal reporters Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. Their book is teeming with incredible details. While heroes are in short supply, the schadenfreude you’ll feel about the spectacular downfall of those who deserve it is delightful.”—Bethany McLean, New York Times bestselling co-author of The Smartest Guys in the Room --Deze tekst verwijst naar een editie van deze titel die niet meer wordt gedrukt of niet beschikbaar is.
“Like Bad Blood . . . The Cult of We is novelistic in detail and often thrilling. . . . It’s like watching a car careening toward a wall at 90 miles an hour.”—The Washington Post
“If I had to make a list of top five business books of all time, this would be on it. It’s just so damn engrossing.”—Christopher Mims, Wall Street Journal tech columnist
“A juicy guided tour through the highly leveraged, not-quite-rags-to-billion-dollar-parachute saga of WeWork and its cofounder Adam Neumann . . . Brown and Farrell show an agility for explaining key business dynamics. . . . It’s also very funny.”—The New York Times
“Absorbing . . . The Cult of We is both a ticktock of Neumann’s self-immolation and a primer on the ways and mores of a start-up culture populated by visionaries, grifters and moneymen. . . . Like Bad Blood . . . The Cult of We is novelistic in detail and often thrilling. . . . It’s like watching a car careening toward a wall at 90 miles an hour.” —Allison Stewart, The Washington Post
“Deeply reported and compellingly written.”—Harvard Business Review
“Only a handful of books capture the zeitgeist of a business era. Add this one, a wild saga that caps a decade when founder-worshipping investors threw billions at well-spun visions—even those of a megalomaniac whose new-age real estate enterprise’s losses piled up as fast as its valuation climbed. The duo who broke the story of WeWork’s rise and fall have now artfully fleshed it out in a book whose colorful narrative is undergirded by deep context about the times, and enablers, that made Adam Neumann possible.”—John Helyar, #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of Barbarians at the Gate
“The Emperor’s New Clothes of the Silicon Valley age.”—The Real Deal
“Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell owned the WeWork story as it was unfolding. And now, with The Cult of We, we finally get the chronicle we deserve of a madness that consumed venture capital, corporate America, and the world.”—Charles Duhigg, New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Habit
“The lines between vision, bullshit, and fraud are narrow, and if you tell a thirty-year-old male that he is Jesus Christ, he’s inclined to believe you. The idolatry of founders in Silicon Valley will rage until the music stops playing. The Cult of We is a cautionary tale and a crisp page-turner.”—Scott Galloway, New York Times bestselling author of The Four and professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business
“Whether you know a lot or a little about the fall of WeWork, you won’t be able to put down The Cult of We by Wall Street Journal reporters Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. Their book is teeming with incredible details. While heroes are in short supply, the schadenfreude you’ll feel about the spectacular downfall of those who deserve it is delightful.”—Bethany McLean, New York Times bestselling co-author of The Smartest Guys in the Room --Deze tekst verwijst naar een editie van deze titel die niet meer wordt gedrukt of niet beschikbaar is.
Over de auteur
Eliot Brown covers startups and venture capital for The Wall Street Journal. He previously worked at The New York Observer and is a graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Maureen Farrell joined The New York Times in 2021 after eight years at The Wall Street Journal. A graduate of Duke University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she is based in New York. --Deze tekst verwijst naar een editie van deze titel die niet meer wordt gedrukt of niet beschikbaar is.
Maureen Farrell joined The New York Times in 2021 after eight years at The Wall Street Journal. A graduate of Duke University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she is based in New York. --Deze tekst verwijst naar een editie van deze titel die niet meer wordt gedrukt of niet beschikbaar is.
Fragment. Herdrukt met toestemming. Alle rechten voorbehouden.
Chapter 1
The Hustler
Adam Neumann believed he would be the man to reinvent baby clothes.
It was 2006, and he was twenty-seven years old. Neumann was already running his own fledgling business that aspired to mass-produce pants and onesies with built-in knee pads for crawling babies. He named it Krawlers. Despite his sincere belief in the brilliance of his concept, Neumann was still hunting for ways to get the business moving, let alone to turn a profit. He flew to China to meet with suppliers. He pushed his product on baby retailers.
Neumann had arrived in New York from Israel in the fall of 2001, landing in a city reeling from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Yet, in times of boom and bust alike, New York always beckoned dreamers like Neumann. His reason for the move, he told his friends, was simple. He wanted to get rich. New York was “where opportunity happens.”
He moved in with his younger sister, Adi, and lost no time making connections. Adi, a model who appeared on the covers of magazines including international editions of Elle, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan, brought in plenty of money to support a flashy lifestyle. The two shared an apartment, which doubled as Adam’s office, on the fifteenth floor of a building in Tribeca that attracted a gregarious crowd. Twentysomethings flitted in and out of one another’s apartments or socialized on the roof.
While Neumann had flirted with modeling himself—he had a distinctive look, lanky with long, flowing dark brown hair and a face marked by high, rounded cheekbones—he opted to pursue dreams of another sort.
Neumann had launched Krawlers while a student at Baruch, a public college in Manhattan known for its business program. The budding entrepreneur had tested out a string of business ideas, including a collapsible high heel, before eventually landing on padded infant clothes. Friends say he got the idea by seeing a similar product in Israel. He took to Krawlers with his trademark intensity, dropping out of Baruch to work on it full-time. He talked about how big the company would become—how they’d be selling millions of dollars of Krawlers clothes a year. He borrowed money from his sister, raised more from a wealthy hedge fund manager she was dating, and invested $100,000 he’d received from his grandmother.
Neumann knew little about children. He was young and single, and his time was dominated by working, drinking with friends, chain-smoking cigarettes, and churning through dates with different women. And the business logic of Krawlers had obvious holes: typically babies crawl for only a period of months.
Yet Neumann proved to be a gifted salesman, particularly when face-to-face with a potential buyer.
At trade shows where many of the clothes were sold, Neumann was a magnet for the small-business owners. His dramatic appearance, his booming voice with its emollient accent, and his vibrant energy stood out amid rows of infant clothing purveyors—so much so that a small crowd often huddled around him. He conjured a world in which a baby couldn’t be happy without built-in kneepads. He’d walk potential buyers through the experience of being a parent and having children crawl. Your child will love you more because of these clothes, he’d tell them, with a smile. The company’s slogan became “Just because they don’t tell you, doesn’t mean they don’t hurt.”
At a trade show in Manhattan’s Javits Center around 2006, Daniel Rozengurtel spotted Neumann’s head above a swarm of people at the Krawlers booth. Rozengurtel and his wife had started an e-commerce website called Spiffy Baby. It didn’t take long for Neumann to convince the couple, who had recently had a baby, that the kneepad-lined clothes were something they’d need for their child—as would their customers. Within a single conversation, Neumann struck Rozengurtel as amazing. He put in an order.
On a good day, Neumann sold thousands of dollars of baby clothes at a time. He bounced off the walls with energy and ideas, constantly hustling and calling prospective investors and retailers. He struggled to sit still for long periods; he constantly paced around his office as he talked on the phone. He loved the negotiating, the banter, and the sport of it all. He would even haggle with bewildered department store salespeople.
Neumann wasn’t rich yet, but he was having fun and learning the ropes of deal making. And his twenties in New York, in all their kinetic glory, were stable—at least when compared with what came before them.
Neumann was born in April 1979 in the southern Israeli city of Be’er Sheva’ to a pair of medical students at Ben-Gurion University. He and his sister relocated each time his parents switched hospitals as part of their training. His parents divorced when Adam was seven, and he and Adi went with their mother, Avivit, to the United States, where she secured an oncology fellowship in Indianapolis. Neumann’s childhood, by his own account, was “shitty.” A bright child, he suffered from severe dyslexia, making reading difficult. His mother, who would go on to be one of Israel’s top oncologists, was often exhausted from her work ministering to cancer patients. She would often scream at him, he later confided to friends. She had a habit of spending well beyond her means, which would periodically leave the family short on money.
After two years in Indianapolis, Neumann and his family returned to Israel, where his father had remained. The siblings lived with Avivit. She lined up a job at a hospital in western Israel, as well as a part-time gig on a kibbutz—one of numerous socialist-inspired communities scattered throughout the country, remnants of a utopian movement started decades earlier. Because of her work as a doctor there, the Neumanns got housing within the kibbutz’s gates.
The kibbutz, Nir Am, had roughly six hundred residents and sat ten miles inland from the Mediterranean Sea, just on the northern edge of the Negev Desert. The ethos of the kibbutz movement was one of sharing and egalitarianism. For decades after its founding in 1943, Nir Am residents supported the kibbutz by picking grapefruits and potatoes in the fields or working in the on-site cutlery factory, a low-tech maker of forks, knives, and spoons. Salaries were equal. Cars were shared—with driving hours controlled by a sign-up sheet. In Nir Am’s brutalist concrete dining hall, families would join together to eat meals of cereal, chicken, or falafel.
Neumann, then eleven, struggled to make friends. The children in Nir Am had grown up in the community and knew one another like siblings. Neumann and his mom and sister, on the other hand, were outsiders: they were simply renting space there. But Neumann eventually endeared himself to the others. He was loud and fun and invited peers over to his room, where he showed off American trinkets, like his Nintendo video-game system. Outside, they’d play basketball, or sometimes with a baseball Neumann brought from America. As years passed, his friends became the center of his community; he slept in the house designated for teenagers, where he had a sizable room of his own.
Neumann’s time in Nir Am coincided with sweeping changes in the kibbutz structure. Throughout Israel, the idealistic dreams of the kibbutz had begun to falter. These communities were designed to be self-sustaining, but decades into their existence they relied heavily on government subsidies. The vision wasn’t working, and as finances deteriorated, Nir Am began to change—to introduce capitalistic reforms to the troubled socialist structures. More residents took jobs outside the kibbutz, while all residents began to pay for meals and air-conditioning; food waste and electricity use plunged. (Later the cafeteria would shut down and be converted into a co-working space.)
Neumann loved the sense of community at Nir Am and the close bonds he made, but the economic egalitarian spirit didn’t rub off on him. He told friends he wanted to leave and make millions of dollars. He would later carp about the inherent unfairness of kibbutz life. Slackers and hard workers received the same pay, he’d say.
In Israel, military service is compulsory, a rite of passage during which men and women, usually serving in their late teens and early twenties, often forge lifelong friendships and vast peer networks. Neumann, aiming high, scored a spot in the naval academy, an elite placement within the Israel Defense Forces, second in prestige only to fighter pilot training. The position required seven years of service rather than the mandatory three. The navy screened cadets with rigorous tests, seeking candidates who could combine physical agility with problem solving.
Neumann, athletic and sharp, completed the initial training—a stage where attrition is high. Still, his leadership showed itself more on days off, when he would corral friends for windsurfing expeditions on the Sea of Galilee. As he moved into the next phase of his naval training—serving on boats and helping coordinate operations on land—he made it clear to friends that the rigid, rule-bound hierarchy of the military wasn’t for him. --Deze tekst verwijst naar een editie van deze titel die niet meer wordt gedrukt of niet beschikbaar is.
The Hustler
Adam Neumann believed he would be the man to reinvent baby clothes.
It was 2006, and he was twenty-seven years old. Neumann was already running his own fledgling business that aspired to mass-produce pants and onesies with built-in knee pads for crawling babies. He named it Krawlers. Despite his sincere belief in the brilliance of his concept, Neumann was still hunting for ways to get the business moving, let alone to turn a profit. He flew to China to meet with suppliers. He pushed his product on baby retailers.
Neumann had arrived in New York from Israel in the fall of 2001, landing in a city reeling from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Yet, in times of boom and bust alike, New York always beckoned dreamers like Neumann. His reason for the move, he told his friends, was simple. He wanted to get rich. New York was “where opportunity happens.”
He moved in with his younger sister, Adi, and lost no time making connections. Adi, a model who appeared on the covers of magazines including international editions of Elle, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan, brought in plenty of money to support a flashy lifestyle. The two shared an apartment, which doubled as Adam’s office, on the fifteenth floor of a building in Tribeca that attracted a gregarious crowd. Twentysomethings flitted in and out of one another’s apartments or socialized on the roof.
While Neumann had flirted with modeling himself—he had a distinctive look, lanky with long, flowing dark brown hair and a face marked by high, rounded cheekbones—he opted to pursue dreams of another sort.
Neumann had launched Krawlers while a student at Baruch, a public college in Manhattan known for its business program. The budding entrepreneur had tested out a string of business ideas, including a collapsible high heel, before eventually landing on padded infant clothes. Friends say he got the idea by seeing a similar product in Israel. He took to Krawlers with his trademark intensity, dropping out of Baruch to work on it full-time. He talked about how big the company would become—how they’d be selling millions of dollars of Krawlers clothes a year. He borrowed money from his sister, raised more from a wealthy hedge fund manager she was dating, and invested $100,000 he’d received from his grandmother.
Neumann knew little about children. He was young and single, and his time was dominated by working, drinking with friends, chain-smoking cigarettes, and churning through dates with different women. And the business logic of Krawlers had obvious holes: typically babies crawl for only a period of months.
Yet Neumann proved to be a gifted salesman, particularly when face-to-face with a potential buyer.
At trade shows where many of the clothes were sold, Neumann was a magnet for the small-business owners. His dramatic appearance, his booming voice with its emollient accent, and his vibrant energy stood out amid rows of infant clothing purveyors—so much so that a small crowd often huddled around him. He conjured a world in which a baby couldn’t be happy without built-in kneepads. He’d walk potential buyers through the experience of being a parent and having children crawl. Your child will love you more because of these clothes, he’d tell them, with a smile. The company’s slogan became “Just because they don’t tell you, doesn’t mean they don’t hurt.”
At a trade show in Manhattan’s Javits Center around 2006, Daniel Rozengurtel spotted Neumann’s head above a swarm of people at the Krawlers booth. Rozengurtel and his wife had started an e-commerce website called Spiffy Baby. It didn’t take long for Neumann to convince the couple, who had recently had a baby, that the kneepad-lined clothes were something they’d need for their child—as would their customers. Within a single conversation, Neumann struck Rozengurtel as amazing. He put in an order.
On a good day, Neumann sold thousands of dollars of baby clothes at a time. He bounced off the walls with energy and ideas, constantly hustling and calling prospective investors and retailers. He struggled to sit still for long periods; he constantly paced around his office as he talked on the phone. He loved the negotiating, the banter, and the sport of it all. He would even haggle with bewildered department store salespeople.
Neumann wasn’t rich yet, but he was having fun and learning the ropes of deal making. And his twenties in New York, in all their kinetic glory, were stable—at least when compared with what came before them.
Neumann was born in April 1979 in the southern Israeli city of Be’er Sheva’ to a pair of medical students at Ben-Gurion University. He and his sister relocated each time his parents switched hospitals as part of their training. His parents divorced when Adam was seven, and he and Adi went with their mother, Avivit, to the United States, where she secured an oncology fellowship in Indianapolis. Neumann’s childhood, by his own account, was “shitty.” A bright child, he suffered from severe dyslexia, making reading difficult. His mother, who would go on to be one of Israel’s top oncologists, was often exhausted from her work ministering to cancer patients. She would often scream at him, he later confided to friends. She had a habit of spending well beyond her means, which would periodically leave the family short on money.
After two years in Indianapolis, Neumann and his family returned to Israel, where his father had remained. The siblings lived with Avivit. She lined up a job at a hospital in western Israel, as well as a part-time gig on a kibbutz—one of numerous socialist-inspired communities scattered throughout the country, remnants of a utopian movement started decades earlier. Because of her work as a doctor there, the Neumanns got housing within the kibbutz’s gates.
The kibbutz, Nir Am, had roughly six hundred residents and sat ten miles inland from the Mediterranean Sea, just on the northern edge of the Negev Desert. The ethos of the kibbutz movement was one of sharing and egalitarianism. For decades after its founding in 1943, Nir Am residents supported the kibbutz by picking grapefruits and potatoes in the fields or working in the on-site cutlery factory, a low-tech maker of forks, knives, and spoons. Salaries were equal. Cars were shared—with driving hours controlled by a sign-up sheet. In Nir Am’s brutalist concrete dining hall, families would join together to eat meals of cereal, chicken, or falafel.
Neumann, then eleven, struggled to make friends. The children in Nir Am had grown up in the community and knew one another like siblings. Neumann and his mom and sister, on the other hand, were outsiders: they were simply renting space there. But Neumann eventually endeared himself to the others. He was loud and fun and invited peers over to his room, where he showed off American trinkets, like his Nintendo video-game system. Outside, they’d play basketball, or sometimes with a baseball Neumann brought from America. As years passed, his friends became the center of his community; he slept in the house designated for teenagers, where he had a sizable room of his own.
Neumann’s time in Nir Am coincided with sweeping changes in the kibbutz structure. Throughout Israel, the idealistic dreams of the kibbutz had begun to falter. These communities were designed to be self-sustaining, but decades into their existence they relied heavily on government subsidies. The vision wasn’t working, and as finances deteriorated, Nir Am began to change—to introduce capitalistic reforms to the troubled socialist structures. More residents took jobs outside the kibbutz, while all residents began to pay for meals and air-conditioning; food waste and electricity use plunged. (Later the cafeteria would shut down and be converted into a co-working space.)
Neumann loved the sense of community at Nir Am and the close bonds he made, but the economic egalitarian spirit didn’t rub off on him. He told friends he wanted to leave and make millions of dollars. He would later carp about the inherent unfairness of kibbutz life. Slackers and hard workers received the same pay, he’d say.
In Israel, military service is compulsory, a rite of passage during which men and women, usually serving in their late teens and early twenties, often forge lifelong friendships and vast peer networks. Neumann, aiming high, scored a spot in the naval academy, an elite placement within the Israel Defense Forces, second in prestige only to fighter pilot training. The position required seven years of service rather than the mandatory three. The navy screened cadets with rigorous tests, seeking candidates who could combine physical agility with problem solving.
Neumann, athletic and sharp, completed the initial training—a stage where attrition is high. Still, his leadership showed itself more on days off, when he would corral friends for windsurfing expeditions on the Sea of Galilee. As he moved into the next phase of his naval training—serving on boats and helping coordinate operations on land—he made it clear to friends that the rigid, rule-bound hierarchy of the military wasn’t for him. --Deze tekst verwijst naar een editie van deze titel die niet meer wordt gedrukt of niet beschikbaar is.
Achterflaptekst
The definitive inside story of WeWork, its audacious founder, and what its epic unraveling says about a financial system drunk on the elixir of Silicon Valley innovation―from the Wall Street Journal correspondents (recently featured in the WeWork Hulu documentary) whose scoop-filled reporting hastened the company’s downfall.
“An amazing portrait of how grifters came to be called visionaries.”―Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit
WeWork would be worth $10 trillion, more than any other company in the world. It wasn’t just an office space provider. It was a tech company―an AI startup, even. Its WeGrow schools and WeLive residences would revolutionize education and housing. One day, mused founder Adam Neumann, a Middle East peace accord would be signed in a WeWork. The company might help colonize Mars. And Neumann would become the world’s first trillionaire.
This was the vision of Neumann and his primary cheerleader, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. In hindsight, their ambition for the company, whose primary business was subletting desks in slickly designed offices, seems like madness. Why did so many intelligent people―from venture capitalists to Wall Street elite―fall for the hype? And how did WeWork go so wrong?
In little more than a decade, Neumann transformed himself from a struggling baby clothes salesman into the charismatic, hard-partying CEO of a company worth $47 billion―on paper. With his long hair and feel-good mantras, the six-foot-five Israeli transplant looked the part of a messianic truth teller. Investors swooned, and billions poured in.
Neumann dined with the CEOs of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, entertaining a parade of power brokers desperate to get a slice of what he was selling: the country’s most valuable startup, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and a generation-defining moment.
Soon, however, WeWork was burning through cash faster than Neumann could bring it in. From his private jet, sometimes clouded with marijuana smoke, he scoured the globe for more capital. Then, as WeWork readied a Hail Mary IPO, it all fell apart. Nearly $40 billion of value vaporized in one of corporate America’s most spectacular meltdowns.
Peppered with eye-popping, never-before-reported details, The Cult of We is the gripping story of careless and often absurd people―and the financial system they have made. --Deze tekst verwijst naar een editie van deze titel die niet meer wordt gedrukt of niet beschikbaar is.
“An amazing portrait of how grifters came to be called visionaries.”―Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit
WeWork would be worth $10 trillion, more than any other company in the world. It wasn’t just an office space provider. It was a tech company―an AI startup, even. Its WeGrow schools and WeLive residences would revolutionize education and housing. One day, mused founder Adam Neumann, a Middle East peace accord would be signed in a WeWork. The company might help colonize Mars. And Neumann would become the world’s first trillionaire.
This was the vision of Neumann and his primary cheerleader, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. In hindsight, their ambition for the company, whose primary business was subletting desks in slickly designed offices, seems like madness. Why did so many intelligent people―from venture capitalists to Wall Street elite―fall for the hype? And how did WeWork go so wrong?
In little more than a decade, Neumann transformed himself from a struggling baby clothes salesman into the charismatic, hard-partying CEO of a company worth $47 billion―on paper. With his long hair and feel-good mantras, the six-foot-five Israeli transplant looked the part of a messianic truth teller. Investors swooned, and billions poured in.
Neumann dined with the CEOs of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, entertaining a parade of power brokers desperate to get a slice of what he was selling: the country’s most valuable startup, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and a generation-defining moment.
Soon, however, WeWork was burning through cash faster than Neumann could bring it in. From his private jet, sometimes clouded with marijuana smoke, he scoured the globe for more capital. Then, as WeWork readied a Hail Mary IPO, it all fell apart. Nearly $40 billion of value vaporized in one of corporate America’s most spectacular meltdowns.
Peppered with eye-popping, never-before-reported details, The Cult of We is the gripping story of careless and often absurd people―and the financial system they have made. --Deze tekst verwijst naar een editie van deze titel die niet meer wordt gedrukt of niet beschikbaar is.
Productgegevens
- ASIN : B08M153JXN
- Uitgever : Mudlark (22 juli 2021)
- Taal : Engels
- Bestandsgrootte : 1502 KB
- Tekst-naar-spraak : Ingeschakeld
- Schermlezer : Ondersteund
- Verbeterd lettertype : Ingeschakeld
- X-Ray : Ingeschakeld
- Word Wise : Ingeschakeld
- Printlengte : 464 pagina's
- Plaats in bestsellerlijst: #182,929 in Kindle Store (Top 100 in Kindle Store bekijken)
- #206 in Handels- & bedrijfsrecht
- #555 in Rechten in het Engels
- #575 in Andere talen juridische boeken
- Klantenrecensies:
Klantenrecensies
4,6 van 5 sterren
4,6 van 5
1.328 wereldwijde beoordelingen
Hoe klantenrecensies en -beoordelingen werken
Klantenrecensies, inclusief sterbeoordelingen voor producten, geven klanten meer informatie over het product en helpen bij de beslissing of dit het juiste product voor hen is.
Om de algehele sterbeoordeling en procentuele uitsplitsing per ster te berekenen, gebruiken we niet een gewoon gemiddelde. Maar ons systeem houdt rekening met zaken als hoe recent een recensie is en of de beoordelaar het item op Amazon heeft gekocht. Het systeem heeft ook recensies geanalyseerd om de betrouwbaarheid te verifiëren.
Meer informatie over hoe klantenrecensies op Amazon werkenBeste recensies uit andere landen
Yonni.I
4,0 van 5 sterren
Something Special - Or Just A Con?
Beoordeeld in het Verenigd Koninkrijk 🇬🇧 op 22 april 2022Een iemand vond dit nuttig
Overzicht
Vertaal recensie in het Nederlands
James Eves
5,0 van 5 sterren
Fascinating read
Beoordeeld in het Verenigd Koninkrijk 🇬🇧 op 12 januari 2022
Bought this book for my partner for Christmas. She is part way through it and clearly enjoying it from some of the bits she shares with me. Worth watching the documentary of the same name on Netflix too.
Patrick Nielsen
4,0 van 5 sterren
Great read, although a bitrepetitive
Beoordeeld in het Verenigd Koninkrijk 🇬🇧 op 25 september 2021
Overall a great book and easy read, just feel it was a bit ‘here we go again’ when it came to raising money without much to it. 50 pages less would probably have made it a better read.
IronTag
5,0 van 5 sterren
Awesome
Beoordeeld in het Verenigd Koninkrijk 🇬🇧 op 30 maart 2022
Brilliant from start to finish. Highly recommended
DS
5,0 van 5 sterren
Brilliant
Beoordeeld in het Verenigd Koninkrijk 🇬🇧 op 18 september 2021
Nicely written couldn’t put it down, should be read by anyone interested in start ups or business more generally. Brilliant
