Friend of mine works for a huge global consumer brand. They decided to launch an online ordering platform for their trade customers, with the aim of eliminating a lot of call centres etc.

Developers were going to need paying more than even a 10-year served exec in the UK with 200 staff under them. They couldn’t run it within their existing organisation - the salary disparity would have been unpalatable. So they were advised to set up a subsidiary, rent a whole floor of Wework in London and run it out of there.

Burned through £20m in a year - a decent chunk on contractors from the sort of IT brand you know. Nothing shipped. Wrote it off after a year. Fired everyone and surrendered lease.

That was Wework’s target market - not freelancers or startups. Big companies with deep pockets who could have leased the whole building but never created the buzz. Work from home killed that market and it won’t return.