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Re:Critics say WeWork is an overvalued real-estate play by cratermoon on Thursday October 19, 2017 @02:43PM (#15510495)
It's a reasonable office services model -- every company would like to have (at least) fresh coffee, internet, print/copy services, meetings rooms, janitorial service, etc. All the unsexy things that make a workspace into a place to get stuff done. Depending on the size, the companies may do it themselves, or may contract with one of the many vendors for that.

With WeWork, though, the sweet spot is for companies that are in between the solo entrepreneur (or the 2-3 friends) and about say 20-25 people. There is a good value for the hot desk or reserved desk for individuals.

At least in the locations I'm familiar with, once the number of people in a company gets too big then costs per square foot soar above regular office real estate in the same area. We found that having a meeting for 3-4 people couldn't happen on a whim, you had to book a room and if none were available you had to delay the meeting. Also, our meetings could never run long because inevitably someone else had booked the room afterwards and needed us out.

A lot of small things that might matter for some sorts of companies never really gave us much value like printer and copier services. While there's no true paperless office, the amount of printed stuff we generated (not counting marketing materials, which went to a graphic print service anyway) was negligible.

Re:Critics say WeWork is an overvalued real-estate play by pentae on Thursday October 19, 2017 @03:01PM (#15510644)
I find printing/scanning to be one of those things that I almost never do, and desperately try to avoid - but when I need to do it it's usually super important paperwork that has to be done right away. And having to go hunt down a print and scan place is a lot of friction. So reluctantly, we have an all in one at my office.
Re:Critics say WeWork is an overvalued real-estate play by sillysaurus3 on Thursday October 19, 2017 @02:57PM (#15510611)
FWIW, the WeWork I'm at has been trying to lease a massive 40+ person office for the last 6 months or so. That monster of a room occupies ~1/5th of the whole floor. In that situation you'd be able to set up a roundtable in a corner for meetings like that.

(Sounds kind of miserable, being an open office and such. But again, almost nobody uses the phone booths, so you're always free to peace out and shut yourself in for ~2h to power through a task.)

No idea how much it costs though, so you're probably right that the numbers might not make sense.

Re:Critics say WeWork is an overvalued real-estate play by lmm on Friday October 20, 2017 @05:34AM (#15514565)
> We found that having a meeting for 3-4 people couldn't happen on a whim, you had to book a room and if none were available you had to delay the meeting. Also, our meetings could never run long because inevitably someone else had booked the room afterwards and needed us out.

Every company I've worked for (none of which were WeWerk) has had this issue.

Re:Critics say WeWork is an overvalued real-estate play by timdierks on Friday October 20, 2017 @03:26PM (#15518534)
Yeah, this is the state of affairs at Google, for example.