We Moves Fast to Unbreak Things

At some point they should change the name, right? The We Co., formerly known as WeWork, postponed its initial public offering just 11 days ago in the face of emphatic investor pushback, and since then it has been working with really quite astonishing speed to change everything about itself that investors don’t like. Controversial co-founder and chief executive officer Adam Neumann is no longer CEO, though he’s still non-executive chairman, and his super-voting stock has been cut back from 20 votes per share to 3. His wife and co-founder Rebekah Neumann, who ran We’s experimental-school division (WeGrow), is out, and the school might be on the chopping block. Several other businesses are also up for sale; the bankers who thought they’d be closing an IPO by now are instead scrambling to sell an events business and an office-management company. There are plans “to purge nearly 20 friends and family members of Mr. Neumann,” including the vice chairman and the chief product officer, and thousands of layoffs are contemplated. To save cash, WeWork won’t sign any new leases, meaning that its rapid growth will pause. They’re selling the private jet.

If you didn’t like We two weeks ago, when it was a fast-growing money-burning startup run by a charismatic founder-CEO who had lots of whimsical side projects in a bid to “encompass all aspects of people’s lives,” maybe you’ll like We now that it’s a fast-shrinking money-hoarding startup run by two professional co-CEOs who are frantically paring the side projects to focus on the core business of renting out office space for more than they pay for it. Or maybe you won’t; maybe you just don’t like the business of office-landlord intermediation, or don’t think that We can do it sustainably with good margins.1 But really it seems to me that pretty much every public-investor complaint about We that could be addressed, every problem that was fixable rather than intrinsic, is being addressed.