🏢💰 WeWork’s Neumann a New Man?
Happy Sunday friends!
I hope you’re all having a great weekend. In this week’s strangest headline, there’s a company selling a $340, wifi enabled toaster. Yeah. A toaster.
The company states that “Two slices don’t have to be the same, meaning that you can individually adjust the toast for each slot. Crucially, this means you no longer need to worry about who goes first – two people can have their ideal toast cooking away, simultaneously”.
Anyways, this week we saw:
Second Time’s the Charm?
In last Sunday’s newsletter, we talked about Masayoshi Son, the Vision Fund, and their infamous failed investment in WeWork.
Well, the controversial CEO of WeWork, Adam Neumann, is back with vengeance. This past week, one of the biggest names in venture capital, Andreessen Horowitz, put $350 million behind Neumann’s latest business venture, Flow.
The VC firm’s investment (the largest on record) puts a roughly $1 billion valuation on Flow, a company whose only online presence is a one-page website with a logo and the words “coming 2023”.
So what exactly is Flow and why is getting such a large valuation with essentially no product yet?
According to Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, Flow is “rethinking the entire value chain, from the way buildings are purchased and owned to the way residents interact with their buildings to the way value is distributed among stakeholders”.
Ehh. Seems like word salad. You can read the full announcement here, but it felt more “hype” rather than actual details about the business. But since that announcement, some more details have come out about what the company actually does.
According to Forbes, Flow “intends to launch a digital wallet that can store crypto – among other currencies, including U.S. dollars – in addition to the real estate management software”.
A spokesperson for Flow said that “the planned digital wallet cannot be used to make rental payments for Flow-managed apartments using cryptocurrency it may store, but can be used for outside purchases like any other wallet.”
He goes on to say that “Flow would not be receiving crypto payments for rental of its apartments, nor would the company be one of the largest implementations of blockchain in the economy.”
So they’re launching a crypto wallet and renting out apartments but how are the two connected? In January, the WSJ found that Adam Neumann had purchased over 4,000 apartments valued at more than $1 billion. So maybe Flow is the reason behind those mass purchases.
The whole announcement was really strange and prompted some backlash against Andreessen Horowitz and Adam Neumann.
As the tweets above mentioned, this isn’t the first business venture Adam Neumann has launched since the fall of WeWork.
In May 2022, Andreessen Horowitz led a $70 million funding round for Flowcarbon, a “Web3” project that offers a “Goddess Nature Token”. On its website, it states that the company “operates at the intersection of carbon and new technology to protect the earth's natural carbon sinks and scale quality carbon reduction and removal projects.”
Yeah, I don’t get it either. According to people close to Neumann, “He’s saying ‘I’ve learned my lesson: judge me by my actions.”
Only time will tell.
Chart of the Week
Hiring freezes and layoffs are becoming more common in 2022, as businesses look to cut costs ahead of a possible recession.
In June 2022, Insight Global found that 78% of American workers fear they will lose their job in the next recession. Additionally, 56% said they aren’t financially prepared, and 54% said they would take a pay cut to avoid being laid off.