It's a property company that's planning tracking everything people do in their buildings.
>WeWork's latest acquisition is a small software company with 24 employees. Euclid is a spatial analytics platform...Euclid's website says the company is "focused on redefining the workplace experience of the future." Translation: optimizing every aspect of the physical workplace so workers are their most productive. Euclid does this by tracking how people move around physical spaces. Its technology can track how many people showed up to a meeting or to that after-work happy hour. The company can see where employees tend to congregate and for how long. It's all done over Wi-Fi.
Yeah, I don't see that providing the outsized gains they're hoping for. I've talked to a number of entrepreneurs who business plan is basically
1. Collect data
2. ???
3. Profit
And every time I quiz them on point 2, they get squirrely. They can never explain exactly how it works; at best I get hazy references to Google making lots from data, which is at best a partial truth.
In this case, I doubt having that data will do much; humans are already natural optimizers. Really, the things workplaces should be optimized for are unlikely to be easily measurable, so at best these systems will optimize for the wrong thing.
And really, the reason workplaces aren't particularly optimal now is that most decisions are made not for maximizing business value, but for maximizing the power and comfort of those high up. As an example, when businesses relocate their headquarters, it is generally to move closer to the CEO's home. Or we can look at all the decisions made to optimize a visible metric, like cost, to the harm of invisible ones. E.g., the open office plan, which is cheap and lets managers supervise by looking out their office window, but significantly harms productivity and employee happiness.
> And every time I quiz them on point 2, they get squirrely.
Well, sure, but all they're being told is that data is the new gold. [0] And gold is valuable, so data must also be valuable. They tend to forget that not all data is gold, because 'some data is gold' isn't what they were told and also isn't fun.
This right here. Most humans will do whatever they can to achieve minimal work. However, they aren't great at gathering all the necessary data and often find local maxima, so there is still some value in "AI augmentation".
Yeah, I don't think tracking this type of data would improve worker productivity, and I think it could actually have the opposite effect of demoralizing employees.
However, I can definitely see some unethical companies being interested in this type of tracking, so I'm guessing there's a market for it.
I'm sitting in a very similar situation.The company I work for provides relatively basic service, however the operational( we are brokers) model is challenging. We have tons of reports and dashboards measuring things from A to Z, sometimes it feels like we are some sort of analytics company. While some metrics are useful and help steer the ship either way,the rest simply becomes noise. Also a lot of data is not being interpreted correctly because of lack of statistics/math skills within the company.
I'm part of an almost entirely remote company, where the headquarters is stationed in a coworking space. If the company offered a WeWork membership for us remote-workers, I'd occasionally like to visit the space for the atmosphere of working around other working people and the conveient coffee, booze, and views.
But as it stands WeWork is far too expensive for me to justify paying out of pocket for considering how noisy the shared areas are compared to any of the cafes down the block from my home, where I can get the same work done in a similar environment for a fraction of the daily cost.
Don't rent in some hipster corner,where you'd have 9/10 doing anything but work.Find a slightly run down office space and get a desk or a tiny room there. I've been to so many non A+ office buildings and most of them are dead quiet because most tenants in such buildings have to work their asses off to make living because they don't operate in high margin,low competition markets.
Sure- and if they report which employees attend meetings and who spend more time at the water cooler, their rent and valuation will go up. That is some serious stretching of possible ways to make money
> We have approximately 1,000 engineers, product designers and machine learning scientists that are dedicated to building, integrating and automating the complex systems we use to operate our business
To do what? I'm not too familiar with them but what more do they have other than a website to look at potential spaces with some photos and a description and sign up for one? Maybe process payments as well?
The biggest tech challenge they have is figuring out how many conferences rooms to build out per X number of offices.
Not enough, and you have a huge queue to use them, too many and you have lost office space rental.
Outside of that there isn't much tech to go around.
We used them before they were WeWork, when they were still GreenDesk in Dumbo.
Overall it was great, and it's a great product given the flexibility and move in ready amenities that it provides and if you ever step foot inside of Regus you will immediately notice the difference.
Though now there is a lot of competition from smaller companies and of course I'm sure Regus has stepped up their game in response.
Their growth is amazing, but ultimately it's still a real estate holding company. The same is true for E-commerce. Though their volume is immense, they trade no where near their multiples for revenue as other tech companies given the different margins they have, cyclical sales cycles, and many other factors that make that sector much less attractive than a pure software play in the B2B space.
But looks like we will see how this all plays out.
Really the exposure that Softbank has here is the real worrying issue. It's a massive stake, at a massive valuation, and if this IPO doesn't perform well (and most people think it won't), this maybe a real red blot on their performance.
> The biggest tech challenge they have is figuring out how many conferences rooms to build out per X number of offices.
How is that a tech challenge?
The only actual tech they have is their swipe card access and room/desk booking systems
They might use some tech internally to optimise certain aspects of their business, but that would be like calling a coffee shop that does their finances in Excel a tech company
I'll see if I can dig up the article, but I think they're planning on tracking everything that workers do in their buildings and giving that data to employers.
>WeWork's latest acquisition is a small software company with 24 employees. Euclid is a spatial analytics platform...Euclid's website says the company is "focused on redefining the workplace experience of the future." Translation: optimizing every aspect of the physical workplace so workers are their most productive. Euclid does this by tracking how people move around physical spaces. Its technology can track how many people showed up to a meeting or to that after-work happy hour. The company can see where employees tend to congregate and for how long. It's all done over Wi-Fi.
There are a couple of issues with this. It's a well-known effect in management theory that workers behave differently when they know they're being observed. Also, presumably most of their tenants employ knowledge workers not factory floor workers, and so data about how often they go to the bathroom or how many steps they take in an hour is probably a lot less relevant than tracking what they're doing on their computers.
Measuring every single second of how it gets spent- That's idiotic. Knowing that everything you do can be easily checked and measured- sometimes it works miracles.
Especially at their scale. A team of 20 could run a Facebook-like experience for 1 million people. Things get much harder after that, but Wework isn't close to the scale where you need more people because things are harder.
One would think that if you have that much invested in engineering business operations that, ya know, your business operations would be profitable. This is the gamble and is based on a volume play, since technology that enables business operations can have tailwind effects.
> including some that the CEO owns and they lease from him
Did you see the part of the filing where, in case of death or incapacitation in the next ten years where the CEO is unable to fulfill his duties, a group of two board members _and_ his wife will select the next CEO, and if those named board members are also not available anymore then his wife will solely pick the two board members who will pick the next CEO with her, and if _she_ is unavailable then the estate of the CEO and his wife will pick the next CEO?
Page 198
I've never seen a company like this transfer to successive control via the private estate of the CEO in case of a vacancy. There's a lot of WTFs in here.
A school I attended once had a similar arrangement with one of its board members. I also vaguely recall that board member defrauding the school of several million dollars and being federally charged...
Under "Properties Leased to The We Company," this is very interesting:
"As of June 30, 2019, future undiscounted minimum lease payments under these leases were approximately $236.6 million, which represents 0.5% of the Company’s total lease commitments as of June 30, 2019."
Page 28 discusses it. They have an interesting approach to managing the conflict:
> Pursuant to our related party transactions policy, all additional material related party transactions that we enter into require either (i) the unanimous consent of our audit committee or (ii) the approval of a majority of the members of our board of directors.
I was pretty impressed when I read "unanimous consent of our audit committee" but then it all went out the window when I saw or the majority of the Board. The company CEO/landlord is the person with the major conflict of interest. He also has the majority voting power of the company stock and will control the board. WeWork's attempt to mitigate this conflict of interest is nothing but smoke and mirrors.
