Each month, “Ammirati on Innovation” episodes will look at ways that the disruptive-startup mentality is spreading beyond young entrepreneurs to big established corporations. Serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist and Carnegie Mellon B-school professor Sean Ammirati, who sits at the intersection of these high-change dynamics, provides insight.

Episode 6

In this episode, Sean and I discuss the pain and suffering at WeWork, which had roughly a $50 billion market cap, and is now struggling to do one-third that much. Their CEO, Adam Neumann voted to oust himself amid various scandals, and their “community adjusted EBITDA” he calls a made-up metric.

SoftBank, their largest investor, was poised to push for an IPO, but Sean says WeWork was a $10 billion great idea – not a $50 billion great idea. He says this was always, at the end of the day, a real estate business, and he compares it to CB Richard Ellis – although with a 5x valuation. And Sean says it turns out that beer and kombucha on tap is expensive – and there’s a lot of that in WeWork spaces.

I tell him about my experience eating seal meat with SoftBank. Sean says I should have moved it around on the plate and hope something else comes along.

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