Well I'm not exactly jumping to conclusions as I've shopped for office space for multiple startups and toured multiple WeWork locations as well as dozens of other co-working space and sublets over the past few years, and IMHO WeWork is cashing in on easy money from boom-time founders. Clearly they are doing something right, but I don't know what data they would be analyzing that would protect them from a downturn.

You seem amazed by their secret sauce, but fundamentally, are they that much better than their competition in terms of the product they offer? Is it 10x better in price, service, quality?

McDonald’s is by far more successful than other burger chains; Starbucks than coffee chains. WeWork is trying (and at this point seems to be succeeding) to be the equivalent for coworking spaces.

Also note McDonald’s burgers are not very different than burger kings, and Starbucks is not better than any other chains. The secret sauce doesn’t have to be in the actual product.

McDonalds is a franchise; it doesn't acquire or run restaurants.

In case anyone was curious, I have collected some context from McDonald's 10-K filing on March 1, 2017 available at http://corporate.mcdonalds.com/mcd/investors/financial-infor... :

At year-end 2016, McDonald's had ~37k restaurants, of which ~15% were company-operated and 85% were franchised. (The filing expresses a long-term goal to be ~95% franchised.) Of the franchised restaurants, ~70% were "conventional franchisees". Under both the company-operated and conventionally franchised models, McDonald's "generally owns the land and building or secures long-term leases".

I believe it is this real estate-focused setup that drives the comparison between WeWork and McDonald's in various comments.

Which is what the movie "The Founder" drives home near the end (besides that Ray Kroc screwed over the McDonald brothers). It's a real estate company that owns buildings that are occupied by fast food burger restaurants. How well those restaurants do doesn't really matter all that much because the value of the real estate is most likely going to increase over time. If the restaurant does well, it's just a bonus.

I mean is it any different in sophistication from what McDonald's has been doing expertly for decades now?

Do you know if there is a video or slides for that talk? I tried Googling but couldn't find anything,

It was an in-person talk at CARTO from their Spatial Data Science conference. I remember seeing that the talks woulds be uploaded, but I don't know where.

Thanks! If anyone else is interested, the speaker was Carl Anderson (https://twitter.com/leapingllamas). The talks aren't on YouTube yet. I've messaged him and CARTO on Twitter asking if the videos will be uploaded.