wwthrowaway

Sustainable in the sense of better managing the 500+ locations they’ve already got and easing off the ridiculous growth for a while.

I don’t see Softbank have the option to continue feeding capital into the company so they might need to reassess their end-game with this investment. The alternative is possibly a spectacular crash into bankruptcy.

Converting a capital intensive and inflexible office lease commitment to monthly payments and the ability to scale is very useful to many companies that manage their real estate prudently.

WW could be successful without all the rah-rah about changing the world. Like Uber, I’m sure they could afford to shed a few thousand employees (who were hired for growth) and continue to run a more sustainable business.

As an ex-employee I am indifferent to WW’s success or failure, but to set a few things straight, very few of their members are on month to month deals. The larger deals they do for corporates are often multi-year commitments.

As long as a sophisticated large corporate sees a net benefit of being in a wework they will stay.

As an analogy, everyone knows running servers on AWS is more expensive per unit of compute than running your own hardware, however, there is a genuine value for a company to hand off the running of an office space (and the capital investment on buildout) to a third party in exchange for predictable monthly opex.