WIRED UK/Victor Turk: How WeWork became the most hyped startup in the world

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How WeWork became the most hyped startup in the world

With a $20 billion valuation and 250,000 members in 72 cities worldwide, WeWork is on a mission to take over the workplace. This is the story behind the hype
By Victoria Turk
4 days ago

The WeWork Gas Tower in Downtown LA
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On a Thursday morning in March, a group of young professionals file through the security gates of a co-working space in Moorgate, tapping their membership cards as they enter. Receptionists greet them cheerily, sometimes by name, welcoming them into a large, wood-floored communal lounge. A mural on the back wall, painted pink and peach and blue, proclaims: “Make It Happen!”

The space belongs to WeWork, a US company that provides shared workspaces and offices to startups, freelancers and, increasingly, global corporations. WeWork’s model is simple: it takes on large commercial leases, does the space up in its signature style of hip decor and prosecco on tap, then rents it out in smaller chunks and on shorter terms.

WeWork launched its first shared workspace in New York in 2010, leasing office space to startups and small businesses on a monthly basis. Since then, the company has grown at a rapid clip. It now has 253 locations in 22 countries and manages more than 1.3 million square metres of office space. London is the company's second-largest market after New York; WeWork operates 23 locations across the city and has plans for ten more, including a colossal 26,000-square-metre space on the South Bank. According to US-based commercial estate agent Cushman & Wakefield, the company is now London’s largest office occupier after the UK Government, leasing 240,000 square metres across the capital.

WeWork Moorgate occupies a large portion of a tall, glass-windowed building just off London Wall, across the road from the Brutalist facades of the Barbican Centre. With 3,377 members across eight floors, it is currently WeWork’s largest London location.

The ground floor interior is designed along WeWork’s trademark aesthetic, lit with warm lamps and furnished with a mix of tables, chairs and squishy tan leather sofas. A food counter run by Le Pain Quotidien sells baguettes and fresh-pressed juices; coffee is on the house.

One level up is a popular hangout for breaks, with tables for ping-pong, pool and foosball. A poster advertises the week’s upcoming events: there’s a breakfast club called “Thank God It’s Monday” and a yoga and pilates session for “Wellness Wednesday”. Today, WeWork members (WeWork calls its users “members”) are invited to take advantage of a pop-up hairdressing service that accepts payment in bitcoin.

Leni Zneimer, WeWork’s general manager for the UK and Ireland, gives me a brief tour of the building, stopping by a hot-desking area on the seventh floor. Here, members are spread across desks in ones and twos, working on laptops or holding impromptu meetings. Most appear to be in their 20s and 30s; some wear blue jeans, others are in suits and ties.
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When signing up to WeWork, you can choose between membership types. The cheapest option is hot-desking, which grants access to communal areas but no private workspace. Pay a little more and you can reserve a desk. The most expensive option is a private office, which can range in size from one person to capacity for hundreds of people. Prices vary a lot depending on location; at Moorgate, hot-desking memberships start at £390 per month, while a reserved desk is £460. Private offices start at £770 per month for one seat, up to £41,100 for 50 seats, with bespoke deals for larger teams. Here on the seventh floor, a large space is reserved for American financial corporation Citigroup, which opened an innovation lab in February.

All members using the floor share meeting rooms, phone booths and a communal kitchen, which is kitted out with a coffee machine, microwave and two beer taps. Cold-water jugs flavoured with sliced fruit are regularly refreshed; the fridges are stocked with milk and a variety of non-dairy alternatives. Zneimer says that each WeWork tries to be sensitive to local cultures and preferences. In the US, there is more of an appetite for filter coffee, but London members prefer an espresso machine. WeWorks in the UK are also sure to offer a wide selection of tea. “We know that offering biscuits is important, and that’s not just an afternoon thing,” she adds.

It may sound like a silly detail, but this focus on forging an agreeable communal space is central to WeWork’s mission. The company is now valued at $20 billion, making it one of the five most highly-valued private companies in the US, alongside Uber, Airbnb, Palantir Technologies and SpaceX. By the end of 2018, WeWork projects that it will have increased its number of workspaces to 400 and its members to 400,000. Ask WeWork CEO Adam Neumann what makes WeWork so special, however, and he will say that it is about so much more than office space. It is about what he calls the “We Generation” – a largely Millennial workforce who demand more from their work than just a job. According to Neumann, they value experiences over material goods, crave a sense of community and fulfilment, and want to be part of something greater than themselves.

WeWork co-founder and chief culture officer Miguel McKelvey at the company's New York HQ
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Adam Neumann first met WeWork cofounder Miguel McKelvey through a mutual friend. At the time, Neumann was running a baby clothing brand, called Krawlers, but it wasn’t doing very well – “I was doing about $2 million in sales and $3 million in expenses,” he says.

McKelvey had a job at a small architecture firm in Brooklyn, where he worked on a few early American Apparel stores. One of his colleagues was Neumann’s room-mate. When McKelvey first went over to their apartment, he was taken aback by the casual vibe of the place. The door was left open and people were hanging out, chatting and playing guitar. “I didn’t know Israelis at the time,” he says. “Now, looking back on it, this was a very Israeli environment – just open-door policy.”

Both cofounders had unusual upbringings. Neumann was born in Israel and moved to Indianapolis with his mother after his parents divorced. He travelled around a lot as a child, including spending some time on a kibbutz. McKelvey grew up in a commune-style environment in Oregon, where his mother was part of a group of women who raised their children collectively. He recalls once, at the age of seven, losing sight of his mother at a music festival and falling asleep alone in the grass. “To me, that seemed totally normal,” he says. “I now have a seven-year-old son. And the idea that I would leave my son in the middle of the forest and just go to sleep in the car and leave him out there is mindblowing to me. I can’t even fathom it.”

McKelvey is tall and slim, with brown hair and a soft voice. He describes himself as shy, and says he was initially intimidated by Neumann’s exuberant personality. “I definitely had a level of discomfort right off the bat with his energy being so outgoing,” he says.

Nevertheless, the two soon became friends. When Neumann needed new office space, McKelvey convinced him to move into the same building as his architecture firm. They would take breaks together and throw around business ideas. That’s how they conceived of Green Desk, a shared-workspace business with a focus on sustainability.

Neumann recalls the struggle to get the first Green Desk building. He was arguing a lot with the cofounder of his baby clothing business, and whenever he needed an escape, he’d head to a nearby building that was standing empty and try to convince the landlord to lease it to him.

“What do you know about buildings?” the landlord would say. “You don’t know anything about real estate.”

“You don’t know real estate!” Neumann would riposte. “The building’s empty.”

Several months passed, then one day the landlord asked Neumann what he would do if he gave him one floor of the building. Neumann laid out the plan: he’d bring in 15 small businesses, which would share a receptionist and other services. The landlord was intrigued. Say he let them take the whole building?

That night, McKelvey didn’t sleep. He got to work building a website, designing a logo, writing a mission statement and making business cards. It worked: the landlord agreed to partner, and the first Green Desk space opened in May 2008.

A year later, Neumann and McKelvey sold their part of Green Desk; the landlord was keen to expand across his buildings in Brooklyn, but they had their sights set further afield. “What we wanted to invest in was building a community, and we saw it as a global opportunity,” says McKelvey. “From the beginning, we saw this as an emerging mentality of people who want to be more connected – who want to find purpose and meaning in their work.” They launched WeWork in 2010.

As with Green Desk, it was initially difficult to convince landlords to lease their buildings. People thought that co-working was a passing fad, says McKelvey, and they were wary of the crowd it would attract. “And also we had no credit,” he adds. “We had no business history.”

A landlord took a risk on them, and the first WeWork opened. The building was narrow, with exposed brick walls and iron pillars. McKelvey recalls fitting it out with residential furniture and incandescent lighting, with the aim of making it look and feel more like a boutique hotel than a conventional office space.

“When we designed it, it was a very inexpensive build-out, down to the last cent,” he says. “But it had a kind of romantic quality to it that people were attracted to, and at the time there just wasn’t any other workspace that looked like it.”

They put a sign on the building and posted ads on Craigslist to get the first tenants in. McKelvey says that the building attracted a broad range of customers – film-makers, tech companies, architects, lawyers – and once a couple of floors had been filled, they enticed others to the next couple. “It was almost as if we cast it like a movie, but we didn’t,” he says.

That first WeWork location is still open today; it’s now one of five WeWorks within a six-block square in New York’s SoHo.

Pictured (left-right): Design team Adam Sheraden, Hayley Slavitt, Sharmila Chaudhuri and Devin Vermeulen
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WeWork’s headquarters occupies most of a building on West 18th Street in the Manhattan’s upmarket Chelsea district. On arrival, guests check in through a touchscreen, which takes their photo and issues a temporary building pass. In the lift, a woman travels from floor to floor with a plastic watering can to feed the many potted plants.

The main communal lounge is on the sixth floor, through glass doors with “WeWork Galactic Headquarters” emblazoned on them. One side of the room is taken up by a kitchen area with large, American-style refrigerators. On a weekday morning in December, the queue for the coffee machine is eight-deep.

Motivational slogans are everywhere. My oversized coffee mug tells me to “Always Do What You Love”. My reusable metal water cup beseeches me to “Make a Life, Not Just a Living”. When I visit the loo in one WeWork, the wallpaper inside the cubicle shouts “Never Settle” and “Hustle Harder” in big black letters.

Adam Neumann has a room towards the back of the building. Unlike most WeWork offices, which are carefully configured to get the most out of every square metre, he luxuriates in space. There’s a leather sofa on one side, a punch bag and an exercise bike on the other. When I meet him, he’s eating hummus and flatbread at a wide wooden desk adorned with a few family photos (he has five young children with his wife Rebekah Paltrow Neumann, who is also a founding partner in WeWork).

Neumann, 39, has wavy black hair that falls past his ears, and a face dotted with dark stubble. He has a reputation for being high-energy; one of his colleagues advises me to have an extra cup of coffee before our meeting. He speaks impatiently and with a slight Israeli accent, talking with his hands and occasionally banging the table to make a point.

WeWork’s mission, he says, is the same as it was eight years ago. “WeWork was, and still is, a company that’s making its best efforts to create a world where people make a life and not just a living,” he says, echoing the WeWorkism on my cup. “The biggest shift is, we’ve grown up a little bit.”

As the company has grown, so have its customers. Originally aimed at startups and small businesses, it is now making a concerted effort to court companies with employees in the hundreds or even thousands. In 2016, Microsoft moved 300 of its New York-based sales team into WeWork spaces; in 2017, IBM signed a deal to take every desk in one WeWork office. Today, more than 24 per cent of WeWork desks globally are occupied by enterprise clients, which WeWork defines as companies with 1,000 employees or more. (Calling WeWork a co-working company is actually something of a misnomer; the majority of users have their own private space within a WeWork building.)

“Enterprise was always the goal,” Neumann says. “I just didn’t think it would be this soon.” Initially, he says, these companies came to WeWork for the short-term leases, but now they are starting to come for the culture.

Adam Neumann, CEO of WeWork: “When the best investors all agree on the same company, trust me: they’ve done their maths”
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Neumann sees no real difference between WeWork members who run their own businesses and those who work at corporations. “I don’t look at enterprise as a company with 100,000 employees. I look at them as 100,000 individuals that chose to come together,” he says. He imagines a future where workers aren’t tied to one location. They could spend a couple of months each in Tel Aviv, London, New York and Shanghai, and always have a desk waiting for them. They might be working for one company today, another company tomorrow – “but they’ll always have a We membership.”

This membership could give them access to more than just office space, as WeWork experiments with leveraging the “We Generation” in other ways: it has launched WeLive, a “co-living” venture that leases shared apartments; opened its first wellness offering, a gym and spa complex called RISE by We; and even announced a for-profit school, WeGrow, led by Rebekah Paltrow Neumann and promising “a conscious entrepreneurial approach to education”.

McKelvey says that they envisaged WeWork as a “holistic support system” from the start, and not just flexible office space. He recalls a pitch they put together for a building that included everything from a hotel and gym to a barbershop. “We were like, ‘WeWork, WeSleep, WeGive, WeCare, WeLive’ – there was everything you can think of,” he says.

Currently, however, there are only two WeLive locations in operation, both of them in the US. Reinventing the way people live is tougher than changing the way they work, Neumann says, but he is bullish on the project’s future. “WeLive is going to be a bigger business than WeWork,” he says. “You can write that.”

WeWork has also been acquiring other companies at a rapid pace, including other co-working firms such as Singapore’s Spacemob and China’s Naked Hub. Its acquisitions in the past year also include coding academy Flatiron School and online community Meetup. Neumann says that all WeWork’s products share one thing in common: “They're all community driven, and they’re all attached to the physical world.”

One particularly unusual WeWork venture is in the leisure sector. In 2017, WeWork bought a stake in Wavegarden, a Spanish company that makes artificial wave pools for surfing. The pools are man-made lagoons, capable of pushing out 1,000 waves and accommodating for 100 surfers every hour. For Neumann, getting into the wave-pool business fits perfectly with WeWork’s mission of transforming the workplace and building community. He imagines a Wavegarden in the context of a huge tech company campus, with 10,000 employees or more – HP, he suggests, or Google, or Microsoft. “We are now being asked to build the biggest campuses in the world,” he says. “They need solutions that bring people together.”

What could be better than a surfing social in the company wave pool?

WeWork chief creative officer Adam Kimmel
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One morning last August, Neumann waited anxiously for the visit of Masayoshi Son, the CEO of Japanese multinational SoftBank. The corporation recently announced a $100 billion tech investment fund and has investments in some of the world’s most highly valued tech startups, including Flipkart, Slack and Uber.

When Softbank first expressed interest in discussing business, Neumann insisted that Son should visit WeWork's headquarters in person. “It wasn’t because we were trying to be cheeky,” he says. “It was because part of what we do is energy – and I can’t put energy on a piece of paper.” Initially they had planned for a two-hour visit and Neumann had prepared a presentation. That day, Son’s team first told him that Son was running late and that he would only have 90 minutes. They later corrected that to half an hour. “He comes in and he says, ‘I only have 12 minutes – go,’” says Neumann.

Unable to make it even as far as his office, Neumann whisked Son around the small R&D area and walked him around one floor of office space. Son then invited him to join him in his car so they could chat longer. During the trip, the two started sketching out a deal on an iPad.

Neumann says he would normally have waited a few days and tried to wrangle a better offer. But that morning he had attended a spiritual class, and his teacher had said that it is sometimes necessary in life to “do the opposite of our nature”. Neumann took the advice to heart. “I took the pen, I said, ‘Today I’m not a negotiator,’” he recalls. “I signed my name, his name, and that piece of paper ended up being the deal to a T.”

The agreement with SoftBank Group and SoftBank Vision Fund, consisted of a $3 billion investment into WeWork and $1.4 billion into three new companies, WeWork China, WeWork Japan and WeWork Pacific. The deal cemented WeWork’s valuation of up to $20 billion.

Not everyone is convinced, however. Some of its critics say that WeWork should be treated like a traditional property company, not a Silicon Valley unicorn. WeWork doesn’t actually own most of it spaces, but takes out long leases on buildings, which it then offers out in smaller chunks and on shorter terms. This can be a risky model: serviced office provider Regus (now IWG) thrived in the dotcom boom only to suffer when the bubble burst, filing for bankruptcy protection for its US business in 2003.

“The problem was catastrophically falling rents,” IWG CEO Mark Dixon, who founded the company in 1989, tells me later. There was no real fall in demand, he says, but a disjoint in cost base. “If you sign leases that are too long and you’re fixed at double the market on your liability side on leases, you basically lose all your margin.” Today, IWG remains one of WeWork’s main competitors, and, with over 3,000 locations to WeWork’s 200, it is much bigger. IWG has been publicly traded since 2000; at the time of writing, it has a market cap of £2.2 billion. Dixon insists that he is not worried about WeWork. “There’s no magic ingredient that they have that everyone else doesn’t have,” he says. IWG launched its first space under co-working brand Spaces, which is closer in style to WeWork than its more formal Regus offices, in 2015. I ask what he makes of WeWork’s $20 billion valuation. “Well, it’s a great story,” he says.

Neumann is uncharacteristically reticent when I bring up WeWork’s worth. “Don’t you think there are bigger world problems to debate about?” he says.

He responds by listing some of the company’s investors: Benchmark Capital, Fidelity Investments, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Harvard Management Company, Wellington Management, T Rowe Price, Hony Capital and, most recently, SoftBank. “When the best investors all agree on the same company, trust me that they’ve done their math, they know our returns, they know exactly what Wall Street pays when a company goes public, and they are sure that they are going to get a return,” he says.

In April 2018, WeWork sought more funding, making its first foray into the bond market. This kind of debt financing is a way to raise money without giving away more equity. The company sold $702 million of seven-year, high-yield bonds – an increase on the $500 million it initially intended to sell. Markus Rimner, a managing director in asset management at consulting firm Accenture, says that this likely reflects both an interest in the company and the current appetite for high-yield or “junk” bonds, which offer a potential greater return for a higher level of risk.

The bond prospectus revealed some more details on WeWork’s financials, including its revenue and expenses. Documents published by the Financial Times (which WeWork confirmed as accurate) show that, in 2017, WeWork reported total revenues of $886 million, with a net loss of $883 million. Rimner says such a loss should not be unexpected, given the company’s rapid expansion. “I don’t think anyone who’s been following WeWork is surprised by that,” he says.

WeWork has also started buying property. In 2017, it acquired New York’s iconic Lord & Taylor building (with partners), which it plans to turn into its future headquarters. And in April this year, it teamed up with investors to purchase a £580 million site in London’s Devonshire Square.

Members in a communal area at WeWork Brickell City Center, Miami
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In Brooklyn’s old Navy Yard, a 17-storey building stands unfinished. Giant trusses support the concrete exoskeleton's lower floors so that it can withstand extreme weather, like 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. Take the service lift up and you can see right across Manhattan’s financial district from one of the soon-to-be terraces.

The development is called Dock 72, and WeWork has already leased a significant proportion of the space inside. It’s unusual for WeWork to get involved in a building at such an early stage, but it already has the floor plan mapped out. There will be offices and co-working areas as well as restaurants, bars and wellness classes.

Federico Negro, who leads WeWork's design team, says that it operates more like a product company than the traditional construction industry. Creative and delivery teams work hand-in-hand, and as much work as possible is kept in-house rather than outsourced. “We also try to own as much of our supply chain as we possibly can,” he says.

One example is the glass-and-aluminium partition system that WeWork uses to divide offices. Rather than buying off-the-shelf, the company has designed its own dies and goes directly to the aluminium extruders, so it can order in bulk and without delay. “We don’t have to go through all these middle people to get it, so we can get a much better product for a better price and we know we can get it on time, because we’re essentially prefabricating the whole thing,” says Negro. He compares it to Apple buying a glass manufacturer.

Once a new building has been selected, the first thing Negro’s team will do is start programming the space. The exact layout will depend on the kind of members they expect in that location – whether there will be lots of smaller startups, for example, or a few larger companies.

Some elements, such as the design of the IT room, are “one hundred per cent standardised”. This includes the size of the room, and also the electrical, heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) loads and the equipment that goes into it – “exactly down to how many racks, the type of rack, the spec of the rack, what goes in that rack,” he says. “Everything is documented and formulated down to that level.”

When it comes to designing the space, there are “a tonne of ratios that drive everything”, such as how many seats should be available in the lounge area for a given number of offices. This standardisation means the team can start designing and ordering materials as soon as they have an agreement on a new building. Their construction time-frame, from signing the lease to opening the doors, is three months.

The interior design allows for slightly more flexibility. “We’ll take cues from residential design,” says Justin Capuco, then WeWork’s creative director (he has since left the company).

Everything is designed to foster community by subtly forcing interaction. “We’ll create purposeful points of density,” he explains. The hallway, for example, might be made narrow to bring people together. “It sounds funny, but we want our members to have that sort of proximity.”

The overall aesthetic varies slightly by region. In the UK, dropped ceilings and raised floors are the norm, while in the US, the building’s guts are often left on show. In Brazil, brighter colours are acceptable; in India, plywood is avoided as it can be seen as cheap. New York WeWorks are all about natural materials and getting as much light as possible.

The biggest difference between countries, says Negro, is how people eat. In Argentina, Israel and the Netherlands, workers tend to take lunch together and prepare their own meals. These locations need larger pantry areas; a queue for the fridge would be a “bad user experience”. In New York, people tend to eat in smaller groups and often use food-delivery apps.

WeWork’s research department makes these observations by using presence sensors in buildings to track how people are using the space and asking for community feedback. Recently, the research team, led by Josh Emig, conducted a study on the friendship networks in a WeLive space in New York. It consists of around 200 apartments with one to four bedrooms, each with their own, rather basic kitchen and lounge areas. There are then larger communal spaces and amenities, including a laundry-room-cum-video-game-arcade and a terrace with hot tubs and barbecue grill.

Every three floors are grouped into a “neighbourhood” that shares common spaces. Emig’s team wanted to discover how this affected people’s community ties, so they surveyed residents and found that those living in the same three-storey grouping were more likely to be friends with each other than they were with people in other parts of the building.

It may sound obvious, but by doing this kind of research, WeWork wants to understand the social networks it creates in real life. “We talk a lot about community and being able to foster community,” says Emig. “This is one way that we can measure community and measure the effects of community, rather than talking about it as a sort of abstract, fuzzy term.”

The company's newest shared workspace opened in Tokyo in February
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From his patch of open-plan, wood-floored office space in the middle of WeWork HQ, Veresh Sita can see every WeWork in the world. On a computer screen, he brings up a Google Maps-type program that shows the company’s entire real-estate portfolio. As he zooms in on Manhattan, markers appear scattered across the borough, with letters A to D. D, he explains, shows a spot where WeWork is considering opening a site. As deals get done, the building goes through levels C, B and A; a black marker denotes a completed, functioning WeWork.

Sita zooms in further to one site. Here, he can access floor plans, budget information and notes left by colleagues. On the floor plan he brings up, an alert symbol indicates that a fire extinguisher needs checking.

This tool is available to anyone involved in the construction and design process. “You have architects, you have project managers, you have contractors, you have subcontractors, you have HVAC people – so many different people need to come together,” he says. “We need everyone to work off the same playbook.”

Sita leads WeWork’s enterprise business, which he says has been WeWork’s fastest-growing segment over the past 18 months. Often, he says, larger companies come to WeWork for temporary space when they’re entering a new market, but end up staying. “What we quickly learned is, ‘Come for a month, stay for life’ – once they come into the space, they love the space, they love the energy.”

Chief growth officer Dave Fano says that WeWork offers these larger companies a “fix” for traditional lease commitments. Rather than signing a lease for ten years and having to predict how their business will grow in that time, WeWork lets companies take a two- or three-year lease and expand when necessary.

For WeWork, enterprise clients offer a steadier commitment; they take larger spaces and tend to commit for longer than smaller companies. Some larger businesses are still reluctant to relinquish control over their office space, says Fano, especially when it comes to their headquarters. For these customers, WeWork has come up with a new option it calls “Powered by We”.

Under Powered by We (which I’m assured sounds less amusing to American ears than British ones), WeWork will help build, design and operate a company’s own office. Fano describes it as “WeWork as a service”; instead of the company decamping to WeWork, WeWork goes to the company.

“The idea is that they can leverage our infrastructure that we’ve developed to find the real estate, design it, build it and run it, and basically plug themselves into that,” he says. “But it’s still their lease, their commitment, their capital.”

In the tech demo area, Sita shows me photos of the first Powered by We space, a Chicago-based office for 800 employees of a well-known travel company whose name I’m not allowed to disclose. It’s one of two Powered by We offices currently in operation. There are the obligatory wood floors and indoor plants, with meeting rooms placed in the middle of a walkway in an effort to inspire collaboration.

Like a regular WeWork space, Powered by We spaces are run by WeWork community teams, who keep the spaces clean and the coffee hot, and host a calendar of extra-curricular activities. Employees become WeWork members, meaning they can access other WeWork spaces and events. Companies using Powered by We also get access to technology such as the guest registration system and the WeWork app, which lets people book meeting rooms or log support tickets, as well as acting as a social network.

Sita shows me some examples of other technologies that WeWork is working on. There’s a smart phone-booth that knows when it’s vacant or engaged, and a door that unlocks when he holds his phone to it. He is particularly excited about a proprietary smart sit-stand desk. At the moment, the desk has a sensor underneath that can tell when someone is using it. The next step, he says, is for it to recognise who is using it and offer them personalised features. He waves his WeWork ID over a card reader in the desk’s surface and it automatically adjusts to suit his height. A fan plugged into a socket springs into life. “You’re going to give up a degree of anonymity and things will happen for you,” he says.

Another technology WeWork is experimenting with is facial recognition and sentiment analysis. Fano says facial recognition could be used as an extra level of building security or to “turbo-charge” its community managers – for example, giving the on-duty manager a heads-up that someone new has just entered the building.

When I approach a laptop running a sentiment analysis program in the demo area, it identifies my face and notes that I am female and wearing glasses. I make an awkward smile at the camera and get a high “happy” score. “We’re trying to uncover passive ways of understanding happiness,” says Sita.

He imagines cameras in a WeWork office tracking people’s moods via their facial expressions, perhaps combined with listening devices that analyse the emotion in their voice patterns.

These technologies are not currently used in WeWork spaces. If they were to be deployed, it is not yet clear if or how data would be shared with customers. Sita says he hopes these kind of analytics could help individuals understand more about their own behaviour. “What I do not want to do is put this data in the hands of a manager and say, ‘Go manage your workforce,’” he says.
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On a Thursday evening in September 2017, Neumann is getting ready to take the stage. Dressed in black jeans and a leather jacket, he tests his microphone in the wings at Battersea Evolution, a large venue in Battersea Park, while a beatbox collective warms up the crowd. This is the London leg of the WeWork Creator Awards. Tonight, WeWork will award over $1 million to startups, individuals and nonprofits, in a Dragons’ Den-style pitching contest.

Introduced by British TV presenters Reggie Yates and Carly Wilford, Neumann bounds onstage, pumping his fist to the electronic music.

“Good evening, London!” he shouts.

Neumann makes a speech to open the ceremony. He plays to the crowd, declaring London “the official creator capital of the world”. (A creator, in WeWork parlance, is anyone – an entrepreneur, an artist, a singer, or someone who “creates” spreadsheets.)

Stuart Thomson is founder and CEO of floating-hot-tub startup HotTug UK, one of many companies on the shortlist for an award. He later tells me that HotTug has been based in WeWork Shoreditch since its founding in November 2017 and that he’s very happy there. “The spaces are fantastic, and it’s the community they provide access to,” he says. “Even though you’re a very small business, you feel like you’re part of a bigger team.”

Emma Ross, co-founder of PR agency Missive, says that she and business partner Nicola Koronka looked at many potential office spaces before moving into WeWork Moorgate in 2015. “It was by far the most expensive, but it ticked so many boxes for us,” she says. A key selling point was the flexibility; Missive originally leased a few desks in a shared WeWork space, then took a small private office, and has kept upgrading ever since. It now has an office that can accommodate 16 people. Like Thomson, Ross places a lot of value on being part of the broader WeWork network. “You can be standing by the coffee machine and someone will start up a chat and you’ll end up having a meeting,” she explains.

But WeWork isn’t for everyone. Rutger Bruining, founder and CEO of biography-writing startup Story Terrace, decided to move his company after spending less than a year at a WeWork in London’s Old Street. He felt that it was difficult for his startup to forge its own identity there. “Your company culture can become like WeWork’s company culture instead of your own,” he says.
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Cost is also a major consideration. Ross expects Missive to move out of WeWork within 18 months, once her team has grown a bit more. “I think there’s a limit to when it makes financial sense, size-wise,” she says. “The economies of scale don’t work compared to what we could get elsewhere.”

Tonight, however, the venue is packed with WeWork believers, and as the beer flows the applause gets louder. Neumann hands out three awards to WeWork members who have been put forward for a “giving” prize for helping others in the community. Introducing the award, he comes across as a hybrid of tech-bro and life-coach. “When you know that giving is receiving, you start to understand a little bit more about how the Universe works,” he says.

He is preaching to the choir. One nominee is visibly emotional as she accepts her award in front of the audience of more than 2,500 people. “I rarely have crushes on businesspeople, because I think most of them are full of shit,” she says to the audience. “But when I hear Adam speak and he talks about the We Generation, I really feel this, because everything that goes on in the world, it is just about what we can do for each other here.”
This article was first published in the July/August 2018 issue of WIRED magazine
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