Runaway Story or Meltdown in Motion? The Unraveling of the WeWork IPO

Re:Runaway Story or Meltdown in Motion? The Unraveling of th... by ollerac on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @11:33AM (#20929324)

You're promoting a logical fallacy that's especially dangerous to people with entrepreneurial drive. You're assuming that things done once will always be done that way — that some things are always destined to have the same outcome no matter the context or time they arise in — and that the world, at its base, is distinctly resistant to change.

This is strongly related to the the Hindsight bias [1], which "refers to the common tendency for people to perceive events that have already occurred as having been more predictable than they actually were before the events took place."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

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Re:Runaway Story or Meltdown in Motion? The Unraveling of th... by SeeDave on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @11:16PM (#20936272)

I think you're onto something; which is why I tend to keep my neckbeardy know-it-all skepticism to myself. I've got an angel on one shoulder (ALL ABOUT THE EXECUTION, BRO!) and a devil on the other (who more closely resembles 'Comic Book Guy' from The Simpsons) and would tend towards optimism and hope that the founders pull it off.

With that said... I see Amazon Fresh/Prime Now and think... "WebVan" I see UberEats/DoorDash and think... "2 Go Services" formerly "Dinner Delivery Plus" I see Carvana and think... CarMax

But then there are the exceptions which have turned out to be truly exceptional. Think Facebook/Myspace, Instagram/Flickr, Google/AltaVista, AirBNB/Couchsurfing, reddit/digg, AWS/Rackspace.

With that said... I'm really not so hot about WeWork. I hope it works out but there is so much weirdness around the company and founder that I will not be investing. Very entertaining to see article after article about it, I hope things work out for the honest rank-and-file, but I really do suspect that the WeWork IPO (or lack thereof) will have a much needed chilling effect on the overheated tech economy of the last decade.

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Re:Runaway Story or Meltdown in Motion? The Unraveling of th... by magna7 on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @01:25PM (#20930734)

A perfect example of this is Facebook. There were several social media platforms before Facebook, but they succeeded where others didn't because of a few distinctive features. They also benefited from improved internet infrastructure, and increased user adoption of the internet. So it was really just a matter of right place, right time.

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Re:Runaway Story or Meltdown in Motion? The Unraveling of th... by cityzen on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @05:59PM (#20934286)

And a willingness to sell out users at all costs...

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Re:Runaway Story or Meltdown in Motion? The Unraveling of th... by kmlx on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @06:10PM (#20934378)

how much money you are paying facebook for using their services?

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Re:Runaway Story or Meltdown in Motion? The Unraveling of th... by cityzen on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @09:56PM (#20935854)

i don’t use Facebook

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Re:Runaway Story or Meltdown in Motion? The Unraveling of th... by JohnJamesRambo on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @08:18PM (#20935311)

Has WeWork shown us that they are different in any way than the attempts in 1956? If anything they are doing it in an even more shady manner. Some business ideas just can’t survive no matter how much “entrepreneurial drive” you have because doing so would break the laws of mathematics.

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