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WeWork founder remains a billionaire even with firm’s bankruptcy | The Straits Times
(www.straitstimes.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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I worked in Tech Startups in London a few years ago, and what was overwhelmingly the main goal of Founders was to make a company that IPOed or was bought out by a larger company.
Not one's company to lead and guide to achieve some kind of vision (like Steve Jobs with Apple) and which one could pass one to one's children, but rather something one could quickly sell for tons of money.
And, guess what, something which is basically a scam whose numbers can be beautified and which only works during a period with very specific and historically unusual conditions, absolutelly achieves such a core objective as long as one's "exit strategy" (one of the main things Founders and Early Investors cared about) is executed before conditions change.
It's not by chance that the domain is riddled with all sorts of scammy business ideas, up to and including outright scams.
So this article is not at all surprising for me.
I was a founder once and I had a very lofty vision for the future. I was very surprised when people started asking me for my exit strategy. What the hell, yo? I am trying to make the world a nicer place, not just fill my pockets.
What happened in the end?
I kept pushing for my vision, which would have taken a bit of patience, but the shareholders kept pushing for faster returns within unreasonable time frames. The other founder was CEO at the time and he didn't dare resist the shareholders impatience.
The other founder kept changing the company strategy after pretty much every prospect he talked with, because he wanted to make a faster return, which, against my constant back-pressure to get stuff properly done, made us move in all directions without ever really committing to a single strategy or even properly finishing work. We had a period of fast growth for a while, mostly due to a smart sales strategy and a slick story (based on my vision), but then all the unfinished loose ends kept creeping back and we lost a lot of customers to quality issues and an inability to deliver on our promises. Every customer wanted something else and since we were building a platform we could in theory do everything, but in practice we had only a certain amount of developers, so we just couldn't make them all happy. There was also a real pressure from sales to make prospects and POCs work, but there was very little pressure to make actual production systems produce value, so it seemed we were never really working on the things that our customers actually wanted, but always on features that prospects like and may sell well.
After years of fighting to get the company aligned on a single product strategy, the other founder and I finally got it to that point, but we had lost a lot of business and had to fire nearly 30 people (half the company size). A relatively new power hungry product manager basically did a bunch of shareholder ass kissing behind closed doors. He then got elected as the new CEO, when the old CEO (who really wasn't very good) got demoted. His true narcisistic/sociopathic nature was then revealed. At that point I couldn't handle it anymore. The company still exists and I wish them well, but I am so happy to not be involved with it anymore.
It all got started with a lofty vision, but greed for money, status and power basically fucked it over from all sides.