Each month, “Ammirati on Innovation” episodes will look at ways that the disruptive-startup mentality is spreading beyond young entrepreneurs to big established corporations. Serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist and Carnegie Mellon B-school professor Sean Ammirati, who sits at the intersection of these high-change dynamics, provides insight.
Episode 6
In this episode, Sean and I discuss the pain and suffering at WeWork. WeWork once had roughly a $50 billion market cap; it’s now struggling to do one-third that much. The company’s CEO Adam Neumann recently voted to oust himself amid various scandals. And Sean shares why he calls their “community adjusted EBITDA” a made-up metric.
SoftBank, WeWork’s largest investor, was poised to push for an IPO, but Sean says WeWork was a $10 billion great idea—not a $50 billion great idea. According to Sean, WeWork was always a real estate business. And he compares it to CB Richard Ellis, although with a 5x valuation. (It turns out that beer and kombucha on tap is expensive, and there’s a lot of that in WeWork spaces!)
Watch the full episode to hear me tell Sean about my experience eating seal meat (!) with SoftBank.
You can also stream this episode in audio-only format:
Highlights
'If you think about entrepreneurship as making the world as it ought to be, the world needs solutions like WeWork.' #CloudWars Click To Tweet 'You've got to make sure that the metrics that you're using to provide insight into how the business is run tie back to the way that all businesses are judged, right? Which is their ability to make a profit.' #CloudWars Click To Tweet 'I think you're going to see more and more public companies want to put people who really can help support transformative innovation around the board table.' #CloudWars Click To Tweet
Cloud Wars Live Digital All-Stars
Sean Ammirati is one of our regular Digital All-Stars. These experts appear in regular video podcasts. The conversations focus on the critical themes shaping (and re-shaping!) the business world in the digital age of 2019. Our intention is to provide regular chunks of timely ideas and insights about high-priority subjects from industry veterans with diverse backgrounds.
