We Crashed
The rise and fall of We Work had escaped me. I didn’t know much about the company beyond a fact I learned on the Pivot podcast that their CEO had negotiated one of the biggest severance packages ever: $1.7 Billion. He walked away with lots of money, all while losing tens of billions of investors’ money, and leaving many of his employees with little to show for in their bank accounts.
I also heard about the picture without shoes. However, that was not as shocking to me. My neighbor at Sun Microsystems used to come to work barefeet almost daily.
As much as Adam Neumann wanted to portrait his company as a Silicon Valley technology company, it wasn’t. The story about We Work is very much a New York real estate story that spread across other big cities in the world.
For the little I heard about We Work, I had put it into the same category as Plug ’n Play in Silicon Valley, an incubator providing office space. We Work provided the space, the furniture, the beer and the fun events. All that minus the startup incubator part. So, it was more a co-working space.
Apple’s We Crashed mini-series provides a much different picture: wild, fun, crazy ambitious, changing the world, growth at any cost. “A first physical social network” - huh?
Here’s to the crazy ones … could have included Adam Neumann, Rebekah Neumann, and their We-cult.
The series is excellent and continues a strong string of Apple shows: Ted Lasso, The Morning Show, 1971, Physical, Mr Corman, and now We Crashed.
“Adam is the best salesman ever” … “with a great reality distortion field.” The fact that Apple made the series seems fitting.
