Synopsis
Fake it until you break it.
Explore the rise and fall of one of the biggest corporate flameouts and venture capitalist bubbles in recent years – the story of WeWork, and its hippie-messianic leader Adam Neumann.
2021 Directed by Jed Rothstein
Explore the rise and fall of one of the biggest corporate flameouts and venture capitalist bubbles in recent years – the story of WeWork, and its hippie-messianic leader Adam Neumann.
Ross M. Dinerstein Kyle Kramer Jed Rothstein Travis Collins Ross Girard Randall Lane Tim Lee Michael Cho
I once dated a guy who spent 95% of his life in a WeWork. In unrelated news my best friend calls him the Antichrist
Plays like a decent one-off podcast about this subject, and about as visually interesting. (Other than showing what WeWork offices actually looked like for those of us who never went to one, there’s literally nothing in here you need to actually see; you could “watch” this movie without the images and pretty much follow the story just fine.) It’s an okay summation of an interesting business story — at least until the ending that strains to connect the “importance” of WeWork to the pandemic. That feels so out of left field, and so in opposition to everything we’ve seen about the company, it may as well have been edited by Adam Neumann himself.
Are you telling me that for $550 a month I can have my very own desk? But it's not just a desk. It's a WeDesk.
"If you tell a thirty-something male that he's Jesus Christ he's likely to agree with you" -Some smart dude,
- 2021 Ranked: boxd.it/aL2Ys
When can we finally start eating rich people?
I'm a sucker for stories about corporate dumpster fires and falls of business messiahs so I knew I would like this. Add the cult-like quality of the company and the fact that no one can explain what the hell WeWork does and you've got yourself a pretty interesting story. The telling of the story is pretty standard documentary style but the interview access is pretty good and the editing and general presentation is solid.
I wish the makers had done a bit more to bit the story in a larger context but it's an interesting story reasonably well told.
A decent overview of all the things that went wrong at WeWork, but doesn't really go deeper to explain the bigger underlying causes that allowed things to get so bad (and where those forces stand today).
Also: what a totally bizarre ending that almost undermines everything that came before it.
This is becoming a routine for me as we’re nearing the finale of the WeCrashed series, I thought I would check out its fellow documentary. It’s another rise and fall story, this time it’s about the company WeWork, cofounder Adam Neumann and broad strokes of the downfall. With thousands of employees, I’m surprised they couldn’t find more people to interview, who can give us the juicy details of work and party life there. They had a filler interview with someone who was whining about a party he was forced to attend. The only interview I liked was the assistant, her story was crushing. They pulled information from archive articles and footages while journalist weighs in. And what about Adam’s cultish mentality? Let’s look into that more. We barely dove into his wife Rebekah Neumann and the other cofounder Miguel Mckelvey’s story. This was all surface-level information. It’s an hour and 45 minutes long and was not particularly interesting.
Really fun doc!
It’s a pretty wild story and interesting to hear firsthand accounts of how it all went down. This doc did a good job digging into the details of a story I already knew the basic outline of, especially how cultlike the WeLive people were.
I was working in valuations at the time this was going down so it was interesting to be valuing companies at the time, and see how this had no comparable companies. The fact that they made up a new definition of “EBITDA” is hilarious, and it doesn’t even get into Neumann trying to IPO closer to 100 billion just because he liked the sound of it.
Pretty wild stuff, worth checking out.
I never know how to rate these kinds of docs that are informative and entertaining but not like some mindblowing work. So they all get 3 stars. 3 stars if you want info on WeWork.
At the end of this there are several people who are basically like "this was a beautiful dream that got fucked up by this erratic dude" but for real this was a nightmare concept from the jump. There is no version of this thing that isn't a scam.
Edit: the ending of this thing really is quite weird. I'm honestly not sure what they were even going for. Are the masks symbolic of not being We? Are they being We by wearing the masks?
WeWork was all over the place,
With one person as the company's face.
People can be members,
But must always re-member,
It's just a co-working space.