Explaining Adam’s Neumann’s Flow

You may have heard of Adam Neumann, founding CEO of WeWork, the coworking company that raised $13 Billion in funding, peaked at a value of $47 billion, went public at a total value of $9 billion and it trading today for $120 million. Here’s the track record of WeWork as a public company:

Source: Yahoo Finance, 10/10/2023 (Stock price prior to Sept 2023 adjusted for 40-to-1 reverse split)

Remember: Of that $13 billion invested, the total that is left is around $120 million. While some of it did essentially appear in leases of empty buildings due to the pandemic, it did not all up in smoke. Neumann, The founder of WeWork, cashed out $700 worth of stock prior to the IPO, and took a $445 million buyout to leave the CEO role.

So what is he doing now?

Andressen Horowitz, a silicon-valley venture capital firm, has invested $350 million in Adam’s new play, Flow, which he claims will distrupt real estate. In public interviews, Neumann claims to have invested at least as much of his own money. There is a one-hour video where he discusses flow, which is a community apartment company, but you won’t be surprised to learn he doesn’t really explain how the magic will happen or what the innovation is. I’ll drop the video here, but also provide a simple analysis in a hundred words or less.