I don't understand how that doesn't trip the bullshit detectors of anyone that still has money to invest in the first place. That's language I'd expect from someone flogging a pyramid scheme.

Most investors are smart enough to recognize BS and pass. But they don't issue press releases announcing "We just decided not to invest in this much-hyped startup." It only takes one deep pocketed investor to buoy a deeply flawed startup for a while.

They know, they just do it to inflate the valuation & exit at the right time i.e. before the company goes down; The investor just before that is the real looser.

I don't even know who their target audience was. Many people who work from home do so because they enjoy the privacy of working from home. People who want more social interaction go to coffee shops, and plenty of people do both.

I don't see who would want to pay a few hundred bucks a month to work on a conference table surrounded by strangers.

A lot of people do this – coworking spaces are a huge thing, especially when they can host small companies who can't afford their own office.

Outside of smaller independent coworking spaces and WeWork's existing customer base there is IWG which does the same (albeit more sustainably): https://www.iwgplc.com

Please don't give your opinion on something you don't know anything about. You've clearly never even seen the inside of a WeWork because the majority of them were office spaces. The audience was small companies who preferred short time leasing, which in large cities, there were plenty of. Every wework I've been to in Manhattan has been completely full. There are 1-5 person offices, and sometimes single larger spaces, and you rented the "offices", which were just rooms. It's not like it's just a table where people sit together, that's crazy. It's office space. The benefit was you could get a place for a few months and then move somewhere else if your company isn't stable yet and you don't want to sign a year lease.

As I understand it, the goal was also to network with other small businesses using the same space. The spaces were set up to encourage people to find opportunities to work together -- cross-marketing, sharing resources, new ideas. Kind of an incubator, without the financial support or design.

Not inherently a bad idea, though it's full of Silicon Valley optimism where one serendipity produces tons of money while a lot of other things just fail to gel -- but some people get paid regardless.

It is the office space equivalent of elastic cloud computing. Definitely a solid market, but you gotta be diligent about the bottom line costs.

I can't help but think that Neumann's taret audience was deep pocketed old-generation investors who've worked in corner offices for decades and fell hook, line and sinker for the "gig economy is the future" spiel.

Example - IBM rent WeWork space in London for some teams even though they have a London office.