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Comment by goatinaboat | Hacker News Reader

every company will pay for WeWork reimbursements more readily than some random local expenditure

But why would they? Even wealthy companies now insist that most business travel is done in economy class. Big airlines can’t sell business-class seats just by making expense claims easy to file. So why does WeWork think it can sell flashy office space?

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Yeah this is the argument I don't get. Tons of companies just give employees who travel a per diem for travel expenses. A per diem for remote work expenses to spend on whatever shared office space you want is not that hard. Filing expenses is trivially easy now and there are tons of apps/services out there that do text recognition on receipts and credit card statements to make the value addition of something like this very close to zero.

Imagine you work for, say, IBM, and your badge grants you a desk, on-demand, at any WeWork office. Or, let’s pretend that you, still at big blue, want a dedicated space for a small project, you work with your WeWork rep to secure a secure dedicated space for the timeline.

At no time in those examples did I have to exchange funds, pass my corporate card, etc.

Speaking as a home remote worker (Salesforce/Heroku not IBM or WeWork) that likes to visit offices sometimes and travels quite a bit, having the option of on-demand access to working spaces with other humans, and a facility-access processes I can rely on, and a facility I can mostly assume will work would be a pretty great upgrade to my work experience.

Expense reports suck. It’s not just the process burden, but making that the norm rather than an exceptional process means that today’s automated-scanning systems will probably put more false-positive-powered issues onto your already full plate.

Removing the process makes it a tool that more people will use. That’s the value prop I see.

The problem is WeWork would end up being just one of a ton of possible vendors who do this. The only thing that's hard to replicate about that business model is the up-front cost of acquiring the properties, but if it turns out to be a thing people value then CBRE and every other big commercial real estate company will dive in. In that environment where your IBMs now have competing products to choose from I don't see WeWork able to pull much in the way of margins.

I agree with you. Which is why I find the companies valuations to be, uh, silly.

Following your analogy, wouldn't WeWork want to be the economy class of office expenditure, rather than the business class?

One of the points of uncertainty though is whether they can keep up the flashiness, ie, they might be selling business seats at economy prices.

They are economy class. I don't find them flashy at all. Their offices are tiny, glass enclosed, like fish bowls. I can't imagine working in one of them, and I've heard nothing but terrible feedback from others.

I like my wework office space ...

Indeed - they can’t have their cake and eat it, in other words. A high valuation can only be justified by a high margin.

Not taking a position for or against WeWork but I'm not sure that they are particularly flashy, especially when it comes down to the actual office space away from the common areas stocked with beer. What they do offer is some level of consistency and predictability, and there's something to be said about that.

As a side note: The airline analogy isn't correct. Business and Premium Economy products are doing quite well with growth of those two offerings having been quite robust over the last 20 years. I'd say belt tightening did happen, but with respect to first class fares. Easy fix...just rebrand your old first as business!

just rebrand your old first as business

BA’s first class is on a par with Emirates business class, actually...

Your business is still putting you on AA/Southwest/Delta/Etc. though, they're not putting you on some random regional airline. That's the argument as I read it.

I'm not sure flight paths really work as a comparison. There's a limited number of routes and flights. Regional airlines tend to have fewer flights and very specific routes.

Office space seems a bit more eclectic.

Perhaps a better analogy is that your company is giving you a Dell/HP/Apple laptop, not a clevo or ibuypower (or even an inspiron vs a latitude)

Maybe but for expense type stuff... I've done a fair amount of travel and they didn't really care what car rental place I used, airline, etc.

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