We work's losses more than doubled last year to about $1.9 billion, even as its total revenue also doubled to about $1.8 billion.
Trending Content - Real Estate Forum
Career Resources
WSO Free Modeling Series - Now Open Through
July 31, 2026
9 Free Financial Modeling Lessons
Get instant access to lessons taught by experienced private equity pros and bulge bracket investment bankers including financial statement modeling, DCF, M&A, LBO, Comps and Excel Modeling.
+Bonus: Get 27 financial modeling templates in swipe file
+Bonus: Get 27 financial modeling templates in swipe file
High Finance Applications
Guaranteed
Get at least one offer GUARANTEED
- 1:1 support
- 92% success rate
- 2,000+ mentor network
- Unlimited Live bootcamps
- AI for resume + LinkedIn
- Networking automation tools
- HireVue simulation tool
- Full course library
- Private Slack community
- 20hrs of mocks
- + much more...
Amazing marketers/fund raisers that prove VCs are sheep most of the time.
Airbnb is the only one of these ipos I think look interesting.
Lyft/Uber lack any kind of moat in an autonomous vehicle world. There’s going to be 10 apps that fiercely compete on price.
WeWork - I would love to see a great write up on them and how they can have margins not seen in the real estate game. I guess for commercial real estate maybe they can minimize loss to lease and price more like apartments? But I don’t see the huge valuation creation.
Airbnb though I think might have something sustainable. In many ways it’s like Uber/lyft. Big difference is an Uber/lyft app competitor you spend 20 min in the car and is repeat business. For a week long house rental brand name I think can matter more and they have a chance to maintain margins.
Sometimes you have great new ideas that sound amazing. Then you look out 20 years and the idea was realized by the competitors never gained any margins. Think about airplane investing in the ‘50s. Would have looked very sexy. Then they basically lost money non-stop for 60 years. You need something in a business that limits competitions. Fb had it because you could only have a couple social networks that everyone would be on. No one is going to use 20 networks so was a market that would find a winner.
A lot of these IPOs to me just feels like industries that will have a ton of companies and no margins. Ride-sharing doesn’t feel like a winner take all market to me or WeWorks current shared-work space model. If there’s 20 players in a market no one gets huge profits.
Like I said I’m open minded Airbnb might be the exception,
Ride-hailing feels kind of like a scammy roll up situation right now, yes?
Long term, I think it boils down to a duopoly, with Tesla owning the high-end Apple like experience and Google owning the low-end.
The most talented people I know at Uber all shifted to the Eats side of the business, so maybe they can put together a monopoly in an adjacent market...
That said, I think long term Amazon owns the stuff delivering space.
Lots of smart people (Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, etc.) think AirBnB is the exception.
When I'm staying some place longer than a week, I'll pick an AirBnB over a hotel (I've personally used AirBnB to book places for 2-3 months at a time when moving to a new city), and I know quite a few people that use the service to rent out spare bedrooms or residential property they're not using.
There is also lots of cool experiential shit you can find on AirBnB (i.e. renting a compound in the Costa Rican jungle with some friends for 2 weeks) that really isn't available elsewhere.
I still like the service high end hotels provide, and I don't see how AirBnB replaces that without changing their model.
Maybe AirBnB ends up as the ultimate middleman, sitting between residential owners and renters globally?
I've been telling people for almost two years that WeWork is a textbook ponzi scheme. Free rent periods are burning off, and they have no cash flow to cover the surging debt service.
Profitability is meaningless, while revenue is king. Sad times.
And then there is “community-adjusted Ebitda,” which excludes those expenses — as well marketing, administrative and other costs of growing the business. By that measure, WeWork earned $467.1 million last year, double what it earned in 2017.
What the hell is this? On what planet does this even make sense, for anyone to report on and/or any self respecting person think is a viable measure. It's not even the fact that everyone can make up whatever measures they want, but that someone thought it was even worth thinking this way - that's what terrifies me. Even if the intention is not to be a viable measure - what the fuck is that!?
I understand adjusting things, eliminating accounting shit that hits you, etc. I get it. But this type of shit just makes me so angry on so many levels.