World's Largest Shared-Workspace Startup WeWork Is Cutting About 7% of Staff (bloomberg.com) 51
Ellen Huet, reporting for Bloomberg: WeWork Cos., the $16B startup, plans to cut about 7 percent of its staff and has instituted a temporary pause on hiring, according to e-mails obtained by Bloomberg. The cutbacks come just three months after the New York company said it raised a round of $430 million led by Chinese investors. Managers were instructed to begin dismissals this week, said one of the e-mails. The startup, which lets members rent desks in an open office, ballooned from about 230 employees early last year to more than 1,000 today, according to research firm Mattermark. WeWork said it hired 175 people in May and expects to add about 500 employees by the end of the year. The company said it expects to lift the pause on hiring as soon as next week.
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How that economic recovery working out for ya now?
Sounds more like cutting deadwood.
Early (Score:2)
That's early. You usually start downsizing only after a business starts up.
Re: Early (Score:3)
Startups are defined by rapid growth. It is probably too easy to get uncontrolled and inefficient growth, too. Remember this is not a software company that can support millions of end users per employee. They grow at startup rates with lots of real world locally managed locations.
This is unfortunate but not really surprising.
A little confused by the summary (Score:4, Insightful)
which lets members rent desks in an open office
Couldn't you just go to the library and get a desk and computer for free?
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Re:A little confused by the summary (Score:4, Funny)
At $50 a day, I would have to drink a lot of beer for it to be considered "free." But hey, I'm up for a challenge.
Re: A little confused by the summary (Score:2)
You have to remember that it is $50 directly deductible as a business expense, so it's really more like $30 a day.
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They also offer gigabit, conference rooms, free coffee and beer, etc.
How many startups need gigabit? You need broadband to watch movies, but not for development. Normal Wifi is enough for cutting and pasting from Stackoverflow, and the library has that. For $50 a day each, you could team up with two other people and rent a three bedroom apartment (maybe not in Manhattan, but certainly in Brooklyn or Queens).
Re:A little confused by the summary (Score:5, Insightful)
i guess you could, but you'd have a lease term of a year and will generally have to pay at least first+last+security upfront (with bad credit it will be either more, or just not available at any price). in the better areas of Brooklyn and Queens, that's going to be about $10,000 upfront; in the ass-end of nowhere, it's still at least $6,000. then again, you don't need a three-bedroom. even better, if you're savvy you can still independently rent bare-bones workspace for much, much less.
the rational use of daily-term wework rentals is if you're in a city and professionally meeting with someone for a day, and want an office space to get your shit together and look at least semi-professional, rather than meeting a client in the hotel lounge or a starbucks. wework offers longer-term contracts for businesses. comparing the daily rate to a leased apartment is like saying you should buy a house instead of renting an apartment. it's solving a different problem.
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the free beer is empty most of the time. it's only reliably refilled when they're showing the place to prospective business clients. (wework offers daily access to individuals as well as short-term quasi-leases to businesses.) the internet also tends to be shit, depending on capacity. it is better than panera bread, i guess, but mostly only because it's cleaner and doesn't have as many poors wandering around. the privacy booths are nice though.
the conference rooms need to be booked and cost extra (though th
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which lets members rent desks in an open office
Couldn't you just go to the library and get a desk and computer for free?
Even more so .. there are groups dedicated to giving away shared workspaces so that people can collaborate and form new ideas: Gangplank [gangplankhq.com]
Re:A little confused by the summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Couldn't you just go to the library and get a desk and computer for free?
Yes, you could, but that's not going to generate a $16B valuation out of thin air.
A more interesting question is why do they need over 1000 employees.
Re:A little confused by the summary (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh don't be silly.
It's a co-working space. Going and getting a desk in a library is not suitable for about 99% of actual small businesses. Co working spaces provide you with the things you ACTUALLY need in an office, like a permanent desk, conference rooms, places to make phone calls without disturbing everyone, kitchenette facilities etc.
You know, office things not a library.
And running offices actually takes real people.
Re:A little confused by the summary (Score:5, Insightful)
At about $1,000 per person/per month that had better be one bitching kitchenette.
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450 GBP per month in London. It comes with nice facilities, free beer and coffee and stuff. You won't find a whole office to rent with lower per-employee costs than that in central London until you get a reasonable number of people.
Personally, I'm choosing to go for the 300 pcm place which is a little shabbier (WeWork is very slick), but well, quite a lot cheaper. If I had to meet customers I'd pay to use WeWork instead.
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Do you have any clue at all what office space costs?
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WeWork is generally located in prime real estate areas. There are lots of companies which need that location. For example, if you have a salesman in the SF territory, he can't work out of a home office in Walnut Creek. (And he can't take phone calls in a library or the other retarded locations suggested by other people here.) The closer he is to clients the more meetings he gets and the more deals he closes.
$12,000/year is a very typical price per person in these real estate markets. If you don't need the l
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A multi-billion dollar valuation is easy to get in Silicon Valley these days. Just throw around a lot of hip buzzwords and phrases (like "open shared collaborative space" and "idea incubator") and VC's will throw money at you like a new stripper. And if you throw in some shit about being eco-friendly and "listening to the voice of the millenial generation" too, they'll just straight-up give you a cargo container filled with gold bars.
Re:A little confused by the summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Couldn't you just go to the library and get a desk and computer for free?
No not really. Most businesses want a proper office to work out of, for a variety of good reasons. Small businesses are no different, but if you only have a few people, it's much cheaper to pool resources and rent only a desk or two while the less used but essential facilities (conference rooms, phone rooms, kitchen, showers, toilets, etc) are pooled.
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Why not work from home with a conference type system (chat, voice, etc. as appropriate)?
Because if I work from home too much, I get cabin fever.
I would love working from home every day and never dealing with seeing the backstabbing SOBs plaguing the typical office.
They're all in different companies in a cow-orking space, so backstabbing really isn't a part of it. Besides if you've got to that state in a company small enough to be using such a space then you've messed up your company.
It's more than that. (Score:4, Interesting)
which lets members rent desks in an open office
Couldn't you just go to the library and get a desk and computer for free?
It's more than that. You get dedicated network services, and in some cases, a business number with a receptionist/secretary, PO boxes, etc. You can have a business presence on-demand, or a-la carte. This is more important when you have to meet with customers. You can book conference rooms, pay-as-you-go, to meet your customers while doing most of your work from home, let's say.
It is a balance. For some people it might be better just to lease an office. For others, shared workspace might be the way to go. It's all a matter of your specific accounting and cash flows needs.
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Couldn't you just go to the library and get a desk and computer for free?
Usually rented desks have 24 hour access and no kids, teenagers or old fat lady hanging out.
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Well, with my desk, if the old fat lady starts to hang out, I just stuff her back in the drawer.
Re: A little confused by the summary (Score:2)
But you can't synergize your thoughtspace by babbling while people are trying to work at the library.
What? (Score:2)
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It sounds more like a deep-cover slashvertisement to me. But at $50+ a day for a single desk with no computer provided, I imagine they need all the help they can get.
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deep-cover slashvertisement
deep-cover?
I think slashvertisements stopped being subtle a long time ago. Some are too much for an actual commercial ad.
Re:Startup? 16 billion dollars?! (Score:4, Interesting)
I saw an interview with Mike Judge recently where he said that he had originally intended Silicon Valley to be a parody of the real thing, but quickly discovered that the real thing is much more bizarre and insane than he had imagined even in his comic fictional universe. The biggest criticism he said he got from real "angels" and VC's was that it wasn't realistic that these characters even had to work at all to get funding. In real life, Silicon Valley investors would be pushing each other out of the way to throw money at them, just on the PROMISE of an idea.
Valuing a corporation (Score:2)
Someone gave them $430 million in exchange for ownership of 2.5% of the company. Therefore, they can claim that 100% of the company is worth 40 times that amount.
seems like a dangerous environment (Score:3)
obviously they have too much paper passed about if 7% of the staff is getting paper cuts. they should really move to a paperless workplace. #OnlyReadTheTitle
Is it really the world's largest ? (Score:1)
Looks like Regus have more location worlwide
http://www.regus.com/business-... [regus.com]
First ugly reality (Score:2)
Worse than "onerous"! (Score:2)
If you want to see the contract, go to ZIP Code 10007 [regus.com] and click on a location. Then, in the lower right-hand corner of the pop-up box, download the contract.
If I just want to know some prices, I don't want to get on their telephone call list!!!
Some of the terms of the contract:
"You agree to receive telephone calls from Regus at the telephone number you provide to Regus, even if you have registered this number on a Do-Not-Call list."
"You agree to receive telephone calls
Fly By Night Incubators. (Score:3)
We have a couple of these places in my city and EVERY SINGLE "business" that is based in them is typically a single person that is trying to make the clients think he/she is bigger than he really is. Once the address is realized as to what it is, the effect wears off and then all the businesses in town starts dogging on it.
Sorry but if all your business exists in a 13 inch laptop you carry in your backpack and you go and rent a random desk, I'm not going to trust you to be able to do the job.
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Ok, bud. These places are very valuable for remote offices which are very common at real companies. E.g. Company X has a headquarters in SF with 200 people, but they need to sell to clients in Chicago, NY and LA. They use WeWork or Regis to station a couple salesmen in each of those cities. They're not going to lease an actual office for god knows how much money just for 1-3 salesmen. Alternatively, they have an engineer working away from the main office. Could be that he was the best guy they could find an
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And yet, you pr
Shared office environment (Score:1)
Fuck office, fuck window, fuck shared, fuck we, fuck cold brew coffee, and FUCK YOU!!!!!
It's getting to where there are no more new ideas? (Score:2)
Is this it? Have we hit Peak Capitalism?