> And I don't know about you, but I'm immensely enjoying WeWork's fall. It never made any sense, and since the wheels came off before the IPO, it's not retail investors who are taking the loss here.

I agree with everything else, but I'm not a fan of this modern era of schadenfreude that seems to be ever present on tech sites. Theranos and WeWork were certainly fraudulent enough to laugh at, but it's created this effect of fraud-voyeurism that feels more tabloid than news; more celebrity gossip than business news. It also encourages shallow misunderstandings. Real estate can be a profitable business, and certainly many developers turn a profit by reasonably financing and pricing their offerings. But a lot of people are opining about WeWork being unprofitable. Unprofitability is not the same as an exaggerated market cap.

Still, I hope Theranos and WeWork are good, cautionary tales of the downsides of easy money.

You may not be a fan, but that's not going to stop me.

I have spent years having to endure the horseshit from places like Theranos, WeWork, and the entire cryptocurrency industry. I knew it was horseshit. The people spouting it could have known it was horseshit if they had bothered, but they did what was in their short-term interests without regard to harm to others.

I am going to enjoy seeing them get whatever paltry and belated comeuppance that karma visits upon them. If they ever suffer as much pain as they've inflicted, I might change my tune, so feel free to come back to me then. But in the meantime, I will enjoy whatever sense of justice served I can extract.

How exactly have you had to endure anything from these companies other than voluntarily reading about them?

Was it voluntarily, or was it the fraudsters polluting the news channels (such as this site) with their horseshit as a result/part of the hype they built around itself?

For sure. The whole "yet you participate in society" [1] retort doesn't impress me. Is my participation in society, in my profession, in my industry voluntary? In the sense that I have chosen not to fuck off to a remote cabin and live via backbreaking subsistence agriculture, sure. But I don't think I should have to cede my life, both professional and intellectual, every time fraudsters come around.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

> I have spent years having to endure the horseshit from places like Theranos

You can just not read the articles. Your sense of mistreatment seems out of proportion.

People had to endure the hero worship of people like Adam Neuman and SBF on the way up. Being as some people called it out as a bubble on the way up, they are probably entitled to a little bit of ‘schad when the wheels come off.

Except Neumann's a billionaire and isn't involved with WeWork anymore after all that, so I'm not sure there's even that much to be had. What's left is the little people who eked by to get a job at WeWork and then got boned by Neuman as well.

The schadenfreude is reserved for the geniuses at A16z and other 'vibes' VCs that continue to throw money at him.

The best heist Neumann pulled was blackmailing SoftBank into buying out his WeWork shares.

It was fairly obvious the musical chairs had stopped, and yet he managed to sell his standing-only-spot at chair-valuation.

SoftBank should be sued by its investors over that farce.

The bit with him renaming the company We, while owning we.com and then leasing it back to the company was a pretty good one though.

don't worry, he will lease you your next flat. You don't deserve to own it:

https://nypost.com/2022/08/15/wework-founder-adam-neumann-sc...

The issue I have is that both were not really tech companies but rode frothy tech hype and marketed themselves as such. Apps and pretty websites, by themselves, do not magically make a sector more profitable, and that era was peak “everything needs to be disrupted by tech.”

WeWork is unprofitable, but mostly because we’ve known for hundreds of years that paying long term liabilities (e.g. leases) with short term funding is a model that quickly goes belly up.

You are claiming that Theranos, which claimed to be using novel technology to revolutionize medical diagnostics, was not a tech company? That seems very "no true scotsman" to me.

Tech, and biotech, have one big major difference, namely the FDA and other equivalent regulatory agencies, which have strict standards and approval timelines measured in years. You see this in the differences in their balance sheets and valuations, and biotech is not generally part of the tech conversation from an investment perspective.

> but I'm not a fan of this modern era of schadenfreude that seems to be ever present on tech sites.

I equally don't like the schadenfreude as you, but I also equally don't like the propping up of ridiculous business models like WeWork and Juiceros of the world that the media does.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

I agree. I think these business models do more harm than good for the variety of actors involved with them (employees, equity holders, real estate, naive investors, etc.) I just find a sober look at why they're injurious is a lot more instructive than sneering schadenfreude.

We can do both! I have written serious analyses and swear-loaded mockery. I will continue to do both, and more besides. You can too.

> but it's created this effect of fraud-voyeurism that feels more tabloid than news; more celebrity gossip than business news.

Publicity giveth, publicity taketh away.

The schadenfreude does not happen in a vaccuum. Silicon Valley is addicted to the Steve Jobs messiah narrative, which is why they constantly deify 'personality' CEOs like Holmes, Neumann, Kalanick, Musk, even out and out frauds like SBF.

You do not see gloating about people getting busted for PPP fraud, because those are anonymous nobodies, that have not had a PR machine behind them pushing Galt-esque tales about their exploits and soapboxing their bizarre ideas about the future of millions, dreamed up from their NYC penthouse bubble.

If you dress someone up as Superman, there will be chuckles when he's found out to be a guy in muscle suit wearing his underwear on the outside.

I have an unpopular opinion that tech workers, especially in the west, are increasingly being perceived by everyone else like investment bankers or consultants were in the 90s (or forever, honestly).

There's not a lot of clarity about what value they bring to the table (since the companies that pay their salaries are often unprofitable) and it's not always obvious what work they actually do (hence the prevailing meme that no one works at FAANG).

Of course, the reality is that numerically, most tech workers don't work for FAANG or hot startups, but public perceptions are usually colored by the most visible subgroup, which happens to be overpaid startup bros.

i'll repost here the twitter worker who does nothing at work and i suppose now has been fired: https://www.theblaze.com/news/twitter-day-in-life-video

forgive the link, i guess the original tiktok was deleted.

I would have less “schadenfreude” if it wasn’t Saudi blood money being lit on fire. Happy to see oil money from Saudi Arabia being flushed down the toilet.

s/era/cycle/

The period of exuberance will return wearing different clothes.

It always does!

It's worse than that. VCs are mostly investing other people's money and earning management fees. Even if all the investments go bust they do well If they've managed to amass a big fund.

> And for the VCs it has often worked out. If you're fast enough to get something IPOed before the bubble pops, who cares if there's a real business model?

It sure does give me a really good and warm fuzzy feeling about the stability of our economy to see VCs repeating the same hyped up exaggerated valuation and bubble that was already done in the 1995-2000 era "dotcom 1.0" boom and bust cycle.

> Personally, as somebody who thinks actually delivering value is important, I'm delighted that this era of easy money and massive hype might be ending. Hopefully companies soon will have to be able to actually turn a sustained profit before IPO.

You sound like me in 2001 or shortly thereafter.

2001-2004 or so was one of my favorite periods in tech. Most of the extractive people fucked off to wherever they came from and the people left were the ones sincere about building things. May we have another time like that, but longer!