Hacker News Reader

Comment by _Nat_ | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know what sort of "moral compass" Neumann may've been imagining his great-great-granddaughter imposing in 300 years?

I mean, that's just a really weird scenario. Even ignoring the implausibility of modern offices being a thing in 300 years from now, much less being controlled by the same company, what exactly would've motivated Neumann's great-great-granddaughter to walk into an office space in which she'd apparently be an unknown stranger to critique the behavior of someone in it?

To be clear, I'm not asking for someone to make this sound reasonable -- just, what sort of scenario, reasonable or otherwise, might Neumann have been imagining here?

View on HN

In fairness, this is kind of how people expected great media dynasties (like the Bancrofts or Sulzbergers) to work. And this is also a bit weird, because while now the idea of publishers as having a critical democratic function—and being more than just profit-seekers—is well-established, fifty years ago they were also brash big businesses, a bit like tech companies now.

I guess my point is that “changing the world” vs “making a buck” seem to be weirdly in the eye of the beholder.

Neumann seems to have either believed or tried to convince others that WeWork had some sort of greater mission beyond merely short-term office space. I think it’s nuts, frankly, but this is the logical extreme of the more well-established phenomenon of trying to convince investors your food/cookie/pot-delivery website is a “tech company” to justify insane PE ratios.

I don’t know my point. Maybe there are just a lot of idiots out there. But is it the founder, the VC, or the customer who’s the idiot? Seems to generally depend upon timing.

My theory is when you are trying to run a business that doesn’t generate cashflows and have no idea how you are going to get to that point, you start wasting your time with crazy stuff.

Everyone knows there is a big difference between a company like WeWork and Apple. There is also a big difference between other money losing unicorns that have a path to generating positive cash flow, albeit perhaps at a much smaller valuation.

Consider this is a person who was operating a company with a (SoftBank granted) valuation of a company that should have been throwing off billions of dollars in free cashflow. Instead, this guy had never run a successful or positive cashflow company in his entire life. If you pulled the average person off the street, told them they were extremely smart and successful, and put them in the exact same position as Mr Neumann, I’m going to guess they would be doing things as weird as he was if not much, much stranger.

I think the simple explanation here is that he's just an idiot.

I have another theory: he went from zero to a company valued $47,000,000,000. That's a drug...

Sounds like it was just a fantasy, rather than a scenario with internal detail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com