I have on occasion written about the infamous coworking startup WeWork here. And most of the time it has been with my snark antenna tuned to the highest available frequency. Making fun of the excesses of Adam Neumann and his once-in-a-generation level of grandiosity was just too easy. And let’s face it, it was too much fun as well.
We even had a former WeWork executive on our This Week in Local podcast. Michael Hershfield came on to talk about his fintech startup Accrue Savings (which is taking on buy now, pay later, another hobby horse of mine). And while the conversation stuck mostly to fintech, I couldn’t resist asking Michael one question about Adam Neumann.
This is roughly how that exchange unfolded.
Me; So did Jared Leto nail it as Adam Neumann?
MH: If I close my eyes, I would think it was him.
My takeaway was that Jared Leto doing an Israeli accent sounds a lot like Adam Neumann.
To recap, WeWork was famous for many things. Chief among these was trying to turn the mundane process of renting desks to freelancers and pre-seed startups into a mission to change the world. As long as the new world had tequila and an EDM soundtrack.
The Post Adam Industry
While Adam Neumann is long gone from WeWork (but not from proptech), WeWork isn’t gone. At least not quite. Right now the company is busy shedding as many leases as it can (to rightsize its balance sheet) hoping to live to fight another day.
You might be tempted to think that in WeWork’s wake, the coworking industry would carry on as a more sober, less conspicuous figure on the commercial real estate landscape.
Eh, kinda. But not entirely.
Take Codi for example. This San Francisco-based coworking startup (founded in pre-Covid era 2018) appears to be trying to fill WeWork’s void. And while in some ways it has positioned itself as an anti-WeWork (without using that cringy framing), it has also shown a little Adam Neumann-level brashness.
According to a story this week in the San Francisco Standard, over the summer Codi employees set up in front of WeWork locations in New York and San Francisco and held up signs saying “WeWont”. The context was WeWork had just signaled it was likely to pursue bankruptcy. The message from Codi was, essentially, “If WeWork is going to shut down and kick you out, ‘WeWont!’”
Feels like a deleted scene from WeCrashed.
The actual WeWork (“I’m still here!”) was not amused and sent a cease-and-desist letter in October, according to the Standard. This was shortly before the company entered bankruptcy.
A Case to Continue
While this is an amusing story from the commercial real estate front lines, there is a case for a functioning coworking (or flexible office) industry. And that industry may well include a buff, post-bankruptcy WeWork.
We are in the hybrid work era (or “distributed work” if you want to be precise). This means that there will always be a combination of WFH and in-office. My view has long been that coworking will be an important element of this post-Covid world of work with some sub-segment of solopreneurs, early-stage startups, and corporate satellite offices opting for flexible leases of small spaces at places like Codi vs. taking on less flexible leases at one of the many half-empty office buildings scattered across LA, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, etc.
On its website, Codi makes the case for choosing coworking office life. Just done a bit differently. Essentially it pitches all the culture-building benefits of working face-to-face as a team without downsides like long-term leases and office management headaches.
But the coworking company also seems to keep in mind that 100% remote companies are out there. And it has a pitch for them as well.
Codi has designed spaces specifically for offsites, a staple feature of fully remote startups that need the odd dose of face-to-face connection.
