Book looks at the hubris of We Work

WeWork founder Adam Neumann made his first foray into entrepreneurship developing highheeled shoes that could transform into flats and then, baby clothes with padded knees. It must hurt to crawl, the thenbachelor thought. Beginning with that first flawed venture, he demonstrated how masterful he was in creating his own reality — and in getting others to pay for it.

In 2009 at a meeting with a potential investor, Neumann, asked what WeWork was worth, brazenly threw out the amount of $ 45 million. Instead of balking at this valuation — the company hadn’t even begun operating — that investor committed to $ 15 million. This transaction was the “original sin of WeWork’s runaway valuation,” writes Reeves Wiedeman, author of “Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork.”

You might see Neumann’s behavior in that meeting as confidence, or you might see it as arrogance. Either way, you’ll probably find “Billion Dollar Loser” a rollicking Hyperloop of a ride.

WeWork’s actual business is stunningly unsexy: It’s an office leasing company that makes money by renting office space. The Tshirted, Tequilashotoffering Neumann brought charisma, working on guts and charm rather than strategy. Early employees described their time with the company as building an airplane while flying; upon their departure, many described the experience as something they had survived, like Waco or Jonestown. Yet so many

bought into his vision, the now cliched Silicon Valley exhortation to make the world a better place.

If you’ve followed the WeWork saga, you’ll already be familiar with a lot of Neumann’s shenanigans, but Wiedeman does a good job demonstrating repeating patterns of hubris, hedonism and bad management. Neumann aggressively acquired — or threatened to acquire — nearly every competitor. He had pissing matches with another notorious CEO, Uber’s Travis Kalanick, over things like who employed more engineers ( WeWork: 1,000, Uber: 5,000). By all accounts, he treated employees terribly. Like so many other tech CEOs, Neumann looked to Steve Jobs as a role model. But just as Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes thought black turtlenecks would transform her into her idol, Neumann believed emulating Jobs’ notoriously aggressive behavior would do so. But where WeWork’s valuation has fallen from $ 47 billion last year to $ 2.9 billion, Apple recently reached a $ 2 trillion market cap.

WeWork was and remains a good idea. But in his insatiable desire for more buildings, more locations, more power, just more, Neumann ran it into the ground. Despite the drumbeat of changing the world, members of WeWork spaces complained of bad coffee and noise — just like in any other office. No doubt they would have balked at experiments with microphones and cameras to track their workday behavior in the service of efficiency while the advertised virtues of community and collaboration fell by the wayside.

WeWork branched out, even as it was increasingly leveraged, first to the somewhat kibbutzinspired housing scheme known as WeLive. Then came perhaps the ickiest incarnation, WeGrow, a network of schools run by WeWork. Imagine just for a moment Neumann’s kindergarten pedagogy.

Though many of Neumann’s colleagues, peers and past and present employees grew increasingly skeptical of the venture, they were equally hesitant, says Wiedeman, to do or say anything about it. This sort of blind trust is no stranger to Silicon Valley But Wiedeman shows how Neumann’s strategies may have even more in common with our current president.

Trump is an apt comparison. Both men excel at weaving outlandish narratives. Both are plagued with a staggering myopia and utter lack of empathy. Wiedeman cites a prominent venture capitalist who says the right response to Neumann, in the end, “was to recognize his faults while acknowledging the unbelievable thing he had done.”

Neumann exited his empire with at least $ 1.6 billion. He’ll be back.

“Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork”

By Reeves Wiedeman ( Little, Brown and Company; 352 pages; $ 28)