My WeWork has three kinds of clients. The first kind sit in the dedicated desk area, work 10-12 hours/day and rarely leave the space for community events. They're either serious consultants/freelancers or just starting their own startups.
The second kind sit in the shared desk area and basically dick around all day. They attend all the community events and use WeWork as mostly a networking/dating hub. Who they network with, I have no clue.
The third kind are companies with satellite offices in WeWork. GoDaddy works out of my space and has taken over an entire floor. Curiously, these are now the largest client type by far. Three floors in my space were earlier dedicated to independent workers and small startups.
But now, WeWork opened three more floors of space, and of the six floors, four are occupied entirely by large companies.
At the same time, just because large companies are renting space doesn't mean they are still profitable. In fact one can argue that WeWork may be underpriced enough that it attracts said companies to exploit it.
Reminds me of when Michael Scott tried to start his own paper company and was selling paper so low it was bankrupting his company. He didn’t understand it until an accountant consultant type pointed it out.
But hey, he got a $60k exit and landed back in an "executive" role at the company. Now that I think about it, that episode was prophetic of the startup scene
> But now, WeWork opened three more floors of space, and of the six floors, four are occupied entirely by large companies.
This was interesting to me. I've seen wework turn corporate often. Startups are great candidates: they want to offer good offices and not worry about big moves, contract negotiations, get good branding, etc.
Yahoo also thought it was doing well when most of its profit was coming from unprofitable startups funded by VCs. Guess what happened when VCs stopped investing in startups in 2000?
I will never forget hearing a software consulting shop had been around for 20 years until they picked too many customers who went under simultaneously.
My naive view is that it's similar to the reason some companies use AWS rather than running their own data center. That is, it's worth it to pay the premium to not have to manage their own space, and have the flexibility to scale up/down their usage a bit more quickly than locking into multi-year leases.
Real estate is a real pain in the ass for small startups; it eats up like several man-months of companies that have no people dedicated to stuff like this. I do think wework is bullshit, but thinking back to the process of moving a company your point makes sense. And in earlyish-stave companies the CEO / bigwigs are most involved with moving and corporations' decisions are no more economically rational than those of the people in charge.
WeWork is better than opening a satellite office in pretty much the same way that renting a hotel room is better than buying a house in a location that you're visiting.
Once you've proven you have traction and it's going to be sustained, it makes sense to transition to your own real estate (owned or leased), but in the early days, it's better to wildly "overpay" for temporary, flexible, easy space.
WeWork, at least in my area, has also picked office spaces right next to metro stations. This real estate is hard to find and several of the companies working out of WeWork advertise how they're located right next to the metro exit.
I'm just saying that this entire community feels very bearish on WeWork, but there is some method to their madness
Office space is sort of a commodity, though there's a lot of friction in lining it up. But the thing about datacenters is you need three with independent networks and power and cooling, and that's crazy expensive before you can actually fill three halls.
Given the office makeup others have described (small startups and freelancers), and the networking events, it might give them an opportunity to convince their neighbors to host with them. Probably not entirely worth it, but if you need office space anyway, that is a slight marketing advantage. And given that GoDaddy hosting is really just reselling AWS servers, they need all the help they can get.
There’s a bunch of internatonal companies using wework apparently. My guess would be the same as yours: nice location in the cities, modern looking offices, the brand value, and not having to find a good office manager.
I worked in a recently furnished office two years ago, there was a sizeable effort to make it an attractive work place but it still slightly paled compared to wework in terms of pure office space.
Amazon also uses WeWork in a few locations, including Seattle. I would imagine since they're renting out multiple floors, they're getting a better than market price.
The second kind sit in the shared desk area and basically dick around all day. They attend all the community events and use WeWork as mostly a networking/dating hub. Who they network with, I have no clue.
The third kind are companies with satellite offices in WeWork. GoDaddy works out of my space and has taken over an entire floor. Curiously, these are now the largest client type by far. Three floors in my space were earlier dedicated to independent workers and small startups.
But now, WeWork opened three more floors of space, and of the six floors, four are occupied entirely by large companies.