Recently, Flow, a start-up company that claims to create a “rental utopia”, has begun to be frequently reported by foreign media.
Migrant workers all know the pain of renting an apartment in a big city. Every step from finding an apartment to moving in is a pitfall. But this start-up company claims to create a completely different rental life, making the layout of the house specific to everyone's living preferences.
sounds pretty reliable so far, but the strange thing is that Flow, a company that has not officially launched any products, has already been valued at US$1 billion...
Flow’s latest investment comes from the most prestigious investment in Silicon Valley. A16z, one of the venture capital companies, directly hit 3.5 small targets for Flow with a wave of its hand.
was founded just over a year ago, and Flow's "empty glove 1 billion" has soared so fast that people are stunned.
Well-known people in the industry couldn't sit still and said, "If a startup is worth $1 billion before launching a product, it is probably a big scam."
The industry's worries are not unreasonable. The reason why Flow is attractive The reason for so many eyes is not on its own business model, but on the founder of “Crazy Idol” behind it, Adam Neumann.
Adam was once an entrepreneurial myth, an entrepreneurial idol for young people around the world who aspire to step onto the throne.
He single-handedly built the world-famous WeWork (friends who have worked in first- and second-tier cities should be familiar with it). It rose rapidly in the shared office track and was valued at US$47 billion (approximately RMB 337.4 billion) at its peak. A company with such a promising future,
, fell rapidly in just a few years, and was driven bankrupt by Adam's strength.
Looking back on Adam’s entrepreneurial history and WeWork’s bankruptcy, it’s no wonder that everyone feels that what Adam did is like a “high-end fraud” that emptied tens of billions of dollars.
Adam was born in 1979, grew up in Israel, moved to the United States at the age of 22, and started his entrepreneurial career from then on.
At first, he tried foldable high-heeled shoes and baby crawling protective clothing, but because people's demand was too small, the performance was bleak, and they didn't cause any splash.
The financial crisis of 2008 became a turning point in Adam's life. At that time, the small companies and start-ups that were affected did not have much money, and they were reluctant to spend a whole year or even several years of rent to rent an office.
From this, Adam discovered that the demand for small co-working spaces began to skyrocket.
He tried to rent an entire office building for a long time, renovated it to make the interior look more advanced and classy, and then divided the entire office building into pieces, and each piece could be sublet to small companies and teams for a short period of time.
has a high-end decoration style, flexible rental time limits, and a large shared area. In this way, small companies can not only solve the problem of office space, but also control the overall cost budget.
In 2010, Adam founded WeWork with this model, and its core business model continues to this day.
At the same time, he also began to market some concepts to create an image of WeWork as a technology-rich company that brings new ways of working to an ever-changing world.
Adam has expanded the "We" brand from office space to other categories such as housing and finance, and also launched an APP to promote the construction of a "physical social network." At the same time,
also claimed that it would improve the design of the building and create a better office space based on user data and artificial intelligence algorithms.
is not just content to be a "second landlord" who rents out space. WeWork's goal is to become a high-end "technology company".
Under Adam’s deception, investors began to spend money.
In 2013, WeWork received tens of millions of dollars in financing. By 2014, Adam took full control of the company. Based on shares, he had 10 times the voting rights of everyone else.
The market is beginning to believe that what WeWork represents is the future of office work.As Adam said, WeWork has revolutionized the office field just like the iPhone has revolutionized the mobile phone industry.
At this time, the person who further pushed the WeWork carnival to a climax was the "taken advantage of" Masayoshi Son.
Everyone is familiar with Masayoshi Son. He is the founder of Japan’s SoftBank Group, a well-known investor, and one of the richest people in Japan, with a net worth of US$22.5 billion.
From the time Masayoshi Son invested in Alibaba in 2000 to the time Alibaba went public in 2014, the US$20 million he gave that year turned into 60 billion. But here at WeWork, Son miscalculated.
Many years later, facing the collapse of WeWork, Son will probably recall that distant afternoon when Adam took him to see WeWork.
Rumor has it that in 2017, Adam took out $3.1 billion from Son’s pocket in just 12 minutes. The investment in WeWork by Masayoshi Son and the SoftBank Group behind him gradually grew to more than 10 billion in the following years.
Adam claimed, "Masayoshi Son appreciates my craziness, but he thinks I need to be crazier."
Facts have proved that he is indeed "not the craziest, only crazier" person.
Now it seems that WeWork’s take-off is basically due to Adam’s “cheating”. One of the reasons why
can "deceive" many investment giants is Adam's personal charm.
His personal image is good and lovable. His ideas are wild and unconstrained, he can draw cakes and create dreams. He is a master storyteller who can convince investors and employees alike within minutes that the company has a great future.
He is not like the traditional "boss image". He will party at the company, hang out barefoot in the office, and play Rihanna's songs loudly. He is approachable.
As long as we follow WeWork, we can achieve the "dream entrepreneurship circle". This is a very firm belief of many people.
In fact, under Adam’s good image, there is a crazy heart hidden.
His dream was for three things: to amass a fortune of over $1 trillion, to become a world leader, and to live forever.
For a long time, he has lived in the pleasure of squandering wealth, using investors' money to buy luxury homes, luxury cars, and private jets. During a carnival trip on a private jet with his friends, a large amount of drugs was found on the plane.
In order to live forever, he invested money in Life Biosciences LLC, a start-up company focused on "extending life." The most outrageous thing about
is that he once used his company to purchase the right to use the word "We" for nearly $6 million. Public pressure led him to cancel the deal.
But then he came up with a more "hidden" operation: borrowing money from companies at very low interest rates, buying office buildings and then reselling them and leasing them to companies to earn rent.
The limit of sucking one's own blood is this.
In terms of company management, Adam's behavior is also a disaster. The company is engaging in a chicken culture, printing outrageous slogans such as “It’s Monday, Thank God” on company T-shirts.
Adam himself is the epitome of nonsense, with a new idea in his head every day. Either he wants to build a swimming pool in the basement of the company's headquarters, or he wants to start an airline, and he even threatens to launch WeWork on Mars.
In 2018, he once announced that meat could not be eaten in the company, and that he would also engage in personnel optimization, so that the company would lay off 20% of its employees every year.
Management chaos and corruption are on the one hand, and WeWork’s profit model is also unsustainable. In recent years, due to the sluggish macroeconomic situation, fewer start-ups, fewer people renting offices, and reduced cash flow, WeWork began to suffer huge losses year after year, and it soon became riddled with holes.
Perhaps no one believes that WeWork has been losing money every year for the past eight years.
claims to be the future of the office field, but in essence, under the concept of "technology company" that Adam wildly boasted about, WeWork is still the "second landlord" who collects and sublets properties.
(blue: income; red: net loss)
In 2019, Adam was kicked out of the team, but at this time WeWork was already at the end of its strength.
In June this year, WeWork’s stock price had fallen 98% from its highest point. By November, WeWork’s market value had fallen by 99.7%, leaving only $40 million.
On November 7, WeWork officially filed for bankruptcy protection. The short-lived giants, so-called unicorns, fell.
But no one could have imagined that as soon as Adam ran out of money and went bankrupt, Adam was already trying to make a comeback with the new project Flow. After learning of his misdeeds, there are still investors who are willing to spend a lot of money to make a company that has not yet produced any results reach a valuation of US$1 billion.
No one can say whether the investors who spent 350 million US dollars on Flow were taken advantage of, or whether they can rely on Adam's storytelling ability to gain another wave of leeks. At present, judging from the concept of Flow creating a "rental utopia", it seems that it is still a story of second landlords who "change the soup without changing the medicine".
From the collapse of WeWork, we can only lament that perhaps the circles of entrepreneurship, investment, and concept hype are the places where the ability to defraud can be brought to its fullest...
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