WeWork’s roller coaster-like valuation experience just proves that it is not an Internet high-tech enterprise, but a real “second host”. This article comes from public micro-channel number: new Weekly (ID: new-weekly) , author: Hexi Pa, thematic map From: Figure Worm
EMI is an ordinary white-collar worker in Tokyo, Japan, but because of “co-working”, her daily life is completely different from the one who closes herself in the cell every day.
At ten o’clock in the morning, Miss EMI, who is sleepy in the office, will go to the building ’s gym to wake herself up. After enjoying the net red restaurant downstairs at a discounted price for employees, she will use the lunch break to go to the real pasture in the building Suck a soft adorable lamb.
All these perfect working environments originated from the concept of “co-working”. Co-working, that is, people from different companies work together in a shared office space, which not only reduces the cost of office leasing, but also increases the chance of communication and collision between teams.
Flexible mode without fixed stations, slides connecting upstairs and downstairs, art gallery-like meeting rooms … more and more scenes that do not belong to the working environment appear in the office. In the office, you are sitting opposite the block chain expert, the emerging director, or the celebrity blogger.
Even more encouraging is that benefits are just some by-products, and these designs are aimed at: truly efficient.
Co-working space, the value must be able to play. / 图 虫 创意
Because of this perfect concept, the co-working industry giant WeWork was once worth 47 billion U.S. dollars. However, it is like a rotten routine. The more impeccable it looks in the first half, the easier it will be to prove that it is in vain later.
In October 2019, after WeWork publicly submitted its IPO documents in preparation for listing, everything changed. The company’s valuation is only a fraction, dropping to 8 billion, the listing plan is completely cancelled, and even the founder Neumann has given up the position of CEO.
Yes, WeWork lost a lot of money. The rapid change in the direction of public opinion afterwards is beyond expectation. Yesterday, I also firmly believed that this was the investor of the future model, and immediately began to attack the lie that the joint office was the most expensive concept in the Internet economy.
How good is the cake that the joint office once painted
“Life is free, but everywhere in the grid.”
Nigel Savar’s book “The Cellar: A Secret History of the Workplace” shows that “60% of Americans work in the cellar, and 93% of them don’t like their office space.” The 90-degree angle is more effective in the use of space, so the grid is born.
To this day, the utterance of the office environment has never stopped.
The compartments always feel “constrained.” / “Ode to Joy”
The logic of the traditional office environment is arranged according to functions, which virtually makes space an obstacle to work. The netizen @ 杨 不 上 that works at the public institution said that the reimbursement process is tortuous, because she rushed to and from different departments to modify the information, and she even wanted to pay for it herself. Even the daily printing is very difficult. It takes a few floors to get away,Every day was loudly disturbed by the sound of printing.
This physical separation increases communication costs and emotional consumption. @ 一 _SunshineBoy mentioned that cross-department cooperation is very painful. When she is working, she is often interrupted by unexpected news or phone calls from other departments, and she also generates a lot of unnecessary repeated communication.
Whitman once described the staff as “thin legs, pale faces, and sunken chests.” Not only that, we were too lazy to talk for a day in this depressed atmosphere. Netizen @ 翟 喵 has a An An is a lively and active person, but in the working environment of the state-owned enterprises often do not say a word a day, “really uncomfortable.”
At this time, the concept of co-working has emerged, solving all these problems. It was quickly sought after and recognized by all parties.
Bloomberg’s founder Bloomberg, who wants to kick Trump out at any cost, said in the US presidential campaign that if elected, the White House East Hall will be transformed into an open office. And he himself “stays where a leader should be: with the team.”
WeWork bar space in the United States. / wiki
Now we know that co-working is not as good as the cake it draws for employees. So it is necessary to re-examine the advantages it claims.
The most attractive thing about coworking is breaking the “interactive space” of the workstation. Easy, flexible, fun, and creative, these adjectives that were incompatible with work immediately jumped out. Standard Chartered Bank of Hong Kong reorganized its office with co-working giant WeWork to achieve “combining meaning with individuals.”
The so-called open office is not a fully open, non-partitioned office, but a free partition, or multiple independent office environments created through furniture, glass, and light control. Listen, it’s great.
In sharedIn the environment, the traditional power structure of the office is also broken. It turns out that bosses are often afraid that too much communication with employees will lose the authority he deserves. For example, the netizen @ 新 缘 结 益 达 said that the communication with the boss was so small that he didn’t even know he had been promoted.
And in co-working and open-plan offices, your boss may be working face to face with you every day. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s desk is a regular white desk in public areas, just like all other employees.
This design is said to also improve work efficiency, because whether or not someone actually passes behind you, you will feel that others are watching your screen and dare not touch the fish. The bosses are naturally happy about this.
Leave the independent office still dominated by the executives? / “Ode to Joy”
Not to mention the well-designed “light pink on the ground”, “industrial bare ceiling pipes and metal plates”, exquisite carpets, fabrics, paintings, colored walls and spaces from color psychology Color matching, as well as new office areas: library, restaurant, terrace, gym, sauna, meditation room, game area …
Adding other hourly renting stations, booking shared offices around the world at any time, and providing administrative, cleaning and other services in one hand are really very desirable.
How does an open office environment step down from the altar step by step
In fact, the joint office has not changed, and its problems have been there since the beginning.
In 1999, the concept of “joint office” for renting open offices was proposed. In 2005, a Google software engineer created the first co-working space. But to really ignite this trend, we have to wait for the emergence of WeWork and its founder Neumann.
WeWork believes that it is creating a working space that not only survives but also creates life. / WeWork Official Website
After the failure of WeWork, everyone accused Neumann of his absurdity and ambition. But that’s what initially made this company stand out and become a symbol of future work models.
In 2010, after the economic crisis, there will be no change. All large offices and office buildings are quietly waiting for the Internet entrepreneurship curtain to open. A tall, long-haired man who does n’t eat meat and likes tequila, who also studies Jewish mysticism, has just rented an idle office building from a low price, re-separated, and then made money from the sale. So he had a crazy idea.
He founded WeWork and even wanted to establish WeSleep and WeBank to manage all aspects of people’s lives. You can hardly imagine that other companies become as attractive as WeWork after finishing the office decoration, because this company does not rent desks, it sells atmosphere, satisfaction and participation in the grand historical process.
Everything in the market was growing at that time, and the demand for office space was gradually picking up. And WeWork benefited from the halo of “future life model”, coupled with Neumann’s ability to sell its wild vision, taking more shares from it.
“Creating something for the future” sounds very goodnice. / WeWork Official Website
Since then, it has opened stores at an unreasonable speed, and even SoftBank said when it provided financing to it, “In battle, crazy is better than smart.” It is precisely because we believe that this transformative company can rule the world, and WeWork’s valuation reached $ 47 billion.
Perhaps those middle-aged investors only voted for WeWork’s enthusiasm for building a “300-year sustainable ecosystem”.
But at the end of 2019, when faced with the “skinning” process of IPOs, investors realized that they had to treat it as an ordinary company and re-evaluate its vacancy rate, cash flow and cash back. Wait for the data to ask its founder to behave like a qualified CEO, and these indicators that are unusual for ordinary companies are so incompatible with WeWork.
In the end, people find, or finally admit, that this mythical company has lost so much money, and this overwhelming founder is just a landlord of commercial real estate.
A co-working space in Hong Kong. / Wpcpey
When the co-working model began to be strongly questioned in the United States, China’s co-working industry achieved rapid growth. From 2015 to 2018, a large number of co-working companies with domestic and foreign backgrounds such as Youke Factory, 氪 Space, and SOHO 3Q appeared. According to data from the National Information Center, China’s joint office turnover in 2018 increased by 87.3% year-on-year.
Like WeWork, China’s joint office can develop rapidly thanks to the dividends of the opportunities of the times. The main target customers for co-working spaces are start-ups that do not yet have independent office environments. Just now, under the policy environment of encouraging entrepreneurship in 2015, the number of newly registered companies in China exceeded 4 million, a year-on-year increase of 21%.
For these young companies, they are the most