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Re:WeWork Warns of Possible Bankruptcy by rapatel0 on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @09:06AM (#37062072)
Softbank vision fund was poorly designed. Because of how big it was, it needed to deploy a ton of money to create venture returns. Assuming a 10 year maturity and 5 years of investment period, they would need to deploy 20 billion per year into companies just to run the fund. if you invest in 100 companies then you basically need to write checks on the order of a few hundred million to billion.

*Implications:* They then pushed companies to expand way faster then was appropriate. This meant that companies made decisions that was not justified by the profitability, just because they needed to spend the money. Example would be that WeWork starts offices the best most expensive areas of manhattan and then serves them to customers at effectively a discount (fundamentally unprofitable decisions)

Basically, even solid companies would be forced to spray and pray money. Generally, speaking more money may bring greater velocity but you need to understand if the market is going to change at the same rate. For WeWork, the commercial office space market has leases typically for 5-10 years. Bottomline, there is not enough "liquidity" to absorb that quick an expansion.

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