WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by philliphaydon on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @12:15AM (#21067547)

Haha, I had an interview many years ago in Australia, was a full 2 hour technical interview in MS technologies. Nailed all the C#/.NET/SQL Server questions. Nailed everything they threw at me. I felt really proud of myself because I thought I was doing very well.

After they were done with me I started asking questions. I asked what they would have me doing?

"Oh the back-end system & api is done by a different team, you would just be doing the HTML/CSS for the front-end team"

I was furious when I left...

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by metalliqaz on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @01:52PM (#21062824)

WeWork is basically a real estate company. Why would they need a data science engineer?

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by likpok on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @03:20PM (#21063608)

Real estate is a data play: figuring out which locations are going to be valuable. McDonalds famously does tons of research on locations, so much so that "be mcdonalds-adjacent" is an acceptable strategy.

I'm not entirely sure what a data science engineer does, but somewhere between "making it easier for the DS team to find what they need to find" and "figuring out where we should buy/lease next".

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by notfromhere on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @10:14PM (#21066908)

Burger King's strategy for the longest time used to be 'just build across the street from McDonald's'

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by bengale on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @10:47AM (#21071280)

Sounds smart, let maccers do the research.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by tgtweak on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @06:52PM (#21065508)

From what I heard they were doing some notable data engineering - leveraging 4square data to decide where to put locations based on optimisation algorithms, profiling potential lessees based on known good ones, optimizing workspace layout based on camera and keyfob data, lease price elasticity tests... Lots of interesting domains. Sadly I'm sure this was/is one of the first departments to get downsided post backdown.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by btown on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @08:53PM (#21066456)

Data science is one of the few areas where WeWork may achieve an economy of scale - your local coworking operator won't be able to have that in house, and their ops system SaaS provider probably doesn't have the margins to invest heavily in it. If they're this messy at it though, that's not a good sign...

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by ahi on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @10:39PM (#21067066)

Except the local operator will have a more intimate understanding of area dynamics than data science can provide.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by bduerst on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @04:48PM (#21064467)

Precisely - Real estate boils down to financial operations on assets that have a number of factors and signals that go into predicting market prices. This also includes demand for commercial space.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by ipqk on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @11:46PM (#21067418)

There's been a meme for decades that McDonalds is really a real estate company that sells burgers on the side.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by dreamcompiler on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @01:26AM (#21067880)

Ray Kroc actually said this. It's not just a meme; it's canon.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by dehrmann on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:38PM (#21063276)

Engineer? Harder to say. Data scientist--that's easy. Stackbucks is very good at looking at demographic data and recognizing where future demand will be new new locations. They basically mark gentrification.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by coredog64 on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @07:34PM (#21065877)

I used to work with a guy whose wife worked for Starbucks. He explained that they'll do seemingly crazy shit, like put stores across the street from each other, that makes sense when you look at the data. The store on one side of the street picks up traffic from point A to point B, while the other one gets point C to point D, optimizing for not making their customers walk across the street.

I think of it as similar to how UPS rigs their routes to avoid left turns.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by kevin_thibedeau on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @04:18PM (#21064182)

Starbucks has a long list of failed stores. They aren't that good at picking locations. They just saturate and keep what doesn't lose money.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by patio11 on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @05:48PM (#21064977)

Do you work in commercial real estate? My father does, and would pick them and Walgreens as the most effective scaled siting operations in the US.

Optimizing for absence of failed stores would be an interesting utility function for them to have, but since they own substantially all of the stores (and therefore don't have franchisee relationships to consider, where volatility for a partner might impact you disproportionately to economic loss), that would be a suboptimal utility function. They should calibrate their risk appetite to maximize profits; occasional failed stores are just a search cost.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by kevin_thibedeau on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @05:57PM (#21065062)

I've seen a Walgreens that was closed in less than a year because of poor location despite being across the street from a Rite-Aid. They aren't perfect either.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by patio11 on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @08:59PM (#21066496)

Walgreens will happily close a location and move it across the street to take advantage of a more advantageously shaped curb cut if they can't get the Illinois Department of Transit planner to approve the optimal curb cut from their current location. This is because they have extreme confidence in their ability to assess the business impact of curb cuts.

A market commenter who believes that Google is not one of the most sophisticated engineering organizations in the world is wrong. If you believe Walgreens is not one of the most sophisticated commercial real estate operations that exist, I would encourage you to talk to people who understand real estate as well as you understand Google and recalibrate based on what they tell you.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by JJMcJ on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @09:56AM (#21070794)

I know of Walgreens locations that have been profitable for 50 years or more.

MacDonalds is similar. If they have a franchise that is doing badly, they will pay to move the franchise to a new location. A suburban McD closing is rare, usually only the oldest ones on lots that are too small for contemporary usage patterns.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by the_watcher on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @12:41PM (#21072472)

Chipotle's former CEO (and I believe founder) often mentions that Chipotle's time under McD's ownership hammered home that the single most important element of the company's success was excellence in real estate. It's also why getting a McDonald's franchise is generally very expensive - they'll give you as de-risked a location as possible and a proven operational playbook. It's not easy to run a franchise at all (you have to be available on days your manager calls in sick, deal with vendors, inventory, etc), but you don't need to figure out the business model at all.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by JJMcJ on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @04:40PM (#21075162)

McD requires franchise holders to be involved in day to day operation, and the investment is quite large, well north of 1 million.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by ypzhang2 on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @06:22PM (#21065252)

The point is that failed stores is not a good metric to optimize for.

You can have 0 failed stores if you open 0 stores. A successful operation will inevitably have failed stores. Having a long list of failed stores doesn't mean anything in of itself. You have to look at the rate of failed stores vs successful stores among other metrics.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by edmundsauto on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @06:11PM (#21065167)

It's not that useful to say they aren't perfect. The better measure would be how they compare to other stores, and/or how their own churn rate has changed over time.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by vcxy on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @08:16AM (#21069981)

This also misses the point. The point was that optimizing for number of stores closed is the wrong metric to begin with. Who cares how they rank on a metric that doesn't matter?

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by edmundsauto on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @02:57PM (#21074029)

The original point wasn't that # of stores closed is an optimization problem, but that it was a valid way to judge the abilities of the people making the decisions.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by spookthesunset on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @04:46PM (#21075238)

And the counterpoint is the number of closed stores is not a good metric to judge the people making these decisions. In fact, judging the number of closed stores may well be the entirely wrong metric to judge them by.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by bduerst on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @04:49PM (#21064475)

Historically Starbucks has been used as a market indicator for other companies' expansion. If a starbucks opened in a location then it was assumed that there were growth factors at play in the market since that was the north star for Starbucks.

Starbucks in 2019 is the McDonald's of coffee shops, so it's not the same, but if you track their Starbucks Reserve locations you'll find the same predictions being used.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by cure on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @05:24PM (#21064788)

The NYC Starbucks Reserve location is certainly in a hot spot, right next to the Google offices and Chelsea Market.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by aaronbrethorst on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @01:56PM (#21062867)

How else would they be able to determine that people like to drink coffee in the morning?

https://twitter.com/modestproposal1/status/10855834347880202...

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by RandallBrown on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:21PM (#21063131)

I mean, that's not what the writing said at all. The data said that the line for coffee was too long, so they hired a barista to help out with the line.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by mrguyorama on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @04:44PM (#21064420)

I think the tweet is really pointing out that offices all over the world have managed and figured those things out without building out a complex sensor network and platform for 50 years.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by aaronbrethorst on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:28PM (#21063183)

I’m exaggerating for comedic effect.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by komali2 on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:51PM (#21063396)

I had a remarkably intense series of frontend... ish interviews for a really difficult to define project. As in, I was working very hard in the little 5 minute slices of time I got for "do you have any questions" figuring out just wtf the job was and what the team was doing, and nobody could really explain it.

It was some sort of "connectivity and identification team" working to identify people/customers/tenants/whatever. Something like, you'd walk in, and WeWork would know it was you, and like, turn your office lights on or some shit. It was going to start off with keycards and I remember someone talking about bluetooth or wifi recognizing your phone, eventually doing face recognition.

I couldn't figure out the point. A HUGE team. The questions I was being asked were wild system design questions and android app stuff (what? I'm frontend lol). All so that people's desks would be at a certain height or whatever when they came in the room.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by mandevil on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @04:41PM (#21064385)

"WeWork used [a sensor network that tracked everyone throughout the building combined with machine learning] to learn that people drink coffee in the morning so they should hire a barista."

Source: https://twitter.com/modestproposal1/status/10855834347880202...

Sounds like a reasonable use of tens of millions of dollars of VC money.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by coredog64 on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @07:38PM (#21065914)

Not a fan of WeWork, but there actually is something to this. We have two coffee makers in the break room at work, and there's always a line. If they brought in a barista who could work the machines, it's theoretically possible that you'd get better efficiency as there wouldn't be the dance of "who is next in line" or "sorry, gotta block the machine while I get sugar" or "I just want some hot water". I'd love to be able to point building management at some data that says that a barista costs $100/hour for 2 hours, but having them would unlock $1000/hour in lost productivity.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by roymurdock on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @08:37PM (#21066366)

Tell your WeWork employed office manager (there is one in every office right?) to look at the line every morning when they're getting their coffee for two weeks. If the line is too long buy another 2 or 3 espresso machines, or supplement them with a few keurigs.

I just saved you $20M per year in sensors, IoT platform subscription, and data scientist salaries for an investment of $5k. Pretty insane how much money is wasted on dumb BS just because there's so much money to waste and it's a trendy way to waste money

Or more likely they wanted an innocuous reason to track all their office users at all times for other reasons

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by ckorhonen on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @02:45AM (#21068340)

But I’ve never actually seen a barista in any of the WeWork’s I’ve used (including the one which doubles as their HQ).

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by semi-extrinsic on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @03:34PM (#21063726)

They were trying to find more secret sauce that's less expensive / more cheaply scalable than the Kombucha.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by adrr on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:06PM (#21062978)

Data allows people to make more informed decisions. You don’t need to be a tech company to benefit from a data science department.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by onlyrealcuzzo on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:13PM (#21063047)

You do need data, though. And if you don't have a lot of customers, or a lot of skus, or a lot of transactions -- you probably don't have a lot of data.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by adrr on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:56PM (#21063437)

I assume we work spends tens of millions on marketing that could benefit from optimizations through data science.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by cgearhart on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:05PM (#21062962)

From what I understand they wanted to instrument their offices (with cameras, microphones, thermometers, etc.) to collect data on the occupants ostensibly because they’re trying to be a tech company. Felt Orwellian, but it sounded interesting enough to at least hear them out.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by dictum on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:27PM (#21063177)

Not that it's novel — there are corporations specialized in tools to monitor employee activity — but there's no bamboozling in that claim: monitoring nearly every activity, no matter how intrusive, is what almost software and hardware does now.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by orblivion on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @01:09AM (#21067786)

On the one hand it seems like a new level of creepy. On another level, it's kind of funny to have tech companies be the ones getting spied on.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by TrackerFF on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @06:05AM (#21069283)

At my old company (energy company), they've now installed sensors at every desk - to track whether or not someone is sitting at the desk, and their activity level.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by AgloeDreams on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @04:01PM (#21064011)

I never felt it was so black and white as people make it which is part of WeWork's problem.

WeWork's long game and eventual income is Real Estate, but their short game, their bread and butter, their brand, and their marketing is and always has been services and transactions. They compete much closer to a Starbucks than a Real Estate company but it's like neither side quite got it. (esp considering the CEO was a scam artist abusing the Real Estate side of the business while misdirecting everyone towards services)

WeWork is (to most) a company whose focus was on people and atmosphere, and on service. I would argue that they are MUCH closer to a hospitality chain like Marriott than a Real Estate firm or a tech co.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by silasdavis on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @05:39PM (#21064914)

Yes hospitality and they're pretty good at it as far as I cam tell.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by mandeepj on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:24PM (#21063151)

> WeWork is basically a real estate company. Why would they need a data science engineer?

data science is a tech agnostic role. Wework might want to play with various data models for predictive modeling.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by rm_-rf_slash on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @01:56PM (#21062866)

My guess is to model the supply of available real estate and demand for scalable office space and then optimize their leases accordingly.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by luckydata on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @03:08PM (#21063522)

it's more about facilities management. Collecting data about who (and how many) go in and out the doors, who's where when to optimize things like heating or air conditioning, meeting room occupancy etc... I have a friend working on their data platform and the concept is pretty cool, I can see if I was managing an office I would want that data but the rest of the business is just awful.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by puranjay on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @03:04PM (#21063495)

All dumb money needs some smart titles to keep attracting more dumb money

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by nerfhammer on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:13PM (#21063051)

to be fair "data scientist" means different things to different companies, and for some may be just synonymous with "business analyst" but sounds cooler

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by samsonradu on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @03:08PM (#21063520)

It also helps with the evaluation. Looks good on a pitch to investors.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by barce on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @11:35PM (#21067360)

The same reason a real estate company needs data science. To find correlations that no human can find given their vast stores of data for co-workers.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by miguelmota on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @05:41PM (#21064934)

Real estate companies also need data science since they heavily rely on data for making decisions.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by megaremote on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @05:52PM (#21065011)

Are you kidding? Is there any industry that can not be helped by data science?

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by tootie on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @03:52PM (#21063916)

Why do taxi companies like Lyft and Uber need so many engineers? And why have they been utterly helpless to improve rider experience?

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by LargeWu on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @01:54PM (#21062844)

Because they are cosplaying as a tech company.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by metalliqaz on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @01:55PM (#21062857)

I guess that's how you get those SoftBank billions.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by hef19898 on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:13PM (#21063046)

Only thing missing is a plan to get as much of these billions out of the company into your own pocket then, I guess. Not that stupid from a purely self-serving perspective. Ignores every aspect of corporate governance and business ethics, so. Not that SoftBank seems to care if they can get an IPO.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by Wellrowed on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:16PM (#21063081)

The email I received after applying for a job many months ago:

“Thanks so much for taking the time and interest in applying to WeWork Global Technology. Your application has been received and we will review it as soon as possible.

Once we've had a chance to review we'll be in touch on possible next steps, thanks again for the time!

Regards, WeWork Global Technology”

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by theferalrobot on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @01:58PM (#21062897)

I had a similar experience a month or so back with a large consulting firm I was interviewing for in the DC area. It was also a data science role and they kept asking me webdev questions. In this case they knew it was for a data science role but I could also tell the guy hadn't a clue about most machine learning and data science topics. He was probably just as uncomfortable as I was. I didn't take the job.

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Re:WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO by scottlegrand2 on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:21PM (#21063135)

A friend interviewed there and they dismissed him as overqualified for DS.

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