Adam Neumann, the expelled founder of WeWork, has returned with a $1bn (£830m) real estate business after claiming to have learned “plenty” of lessons from the stunning collapse of the shared office space leasing company.
Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that was an early investor in Airbnb, Facebook, and Skype, revealed in a blog post that it has invested $350 million in Neumann’s “community-driven” rental startup, Flow.
Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, stated that the fund decided to invest in the millennial renter-focused startup because Neumann was “a visionary leader who revolutionized the second-largest asset class – commercial real estate.”
Neumann, 43, was expected to become one of the world’s richest individuals in 2019, amassing a personal fortune of up to $14 billion from WeWork’s planned IPO. After a series of progressively devastating revelations about his conduct, including the disclosure that he smoked marijuana on a private jet, he was compelled to pull the float and resign as CEO within two weeks.
The narrative of Neumann and WeWork, according to Andreessen, has been “extensively recounted, analyzed, and fictionalized — sometimes accurately.”
Adam Neumann is the only individual to have radically reinvented the workplace experience and led a paradigm-shifting global firm as a result, despite all the effort put into reporting the narrative, he claimed.
“We realize how difficult it is to develop something like this, and we enjoy seeing repeat-founders build on previous accomplishments by evolving from their past mistakes. Adam has amassed a wealth of accomplishments and lessons, and we are thrilled to embark on this journey with him and his colleagues as they create the future of life.”
It is believed that Andreessen Horowitz’s investment in Flow is the largest it has made in such an early stage of a company’s development.
Flow’s website does not reveal the company’s intentions. The single page on the website reads “Live Life in Flow” and “coming in 2023.”
Andreessen said that Flow would attempt to realize Neumann’s notion of “adult dorms.” As a result of the epidemic, he stated, “many individuals will live distant from where they work, and many more will move to a hybrid environment.”
“As a result, they will experience far less social connection and friendships in the workplace, if any at all,” he said.
“For many of these individuals, more screen time and decreased in-person engagement will result in difficulties that are not restricted to the workplace, such as alienation and loneliness. This is not a good route for anyone, and it must be dealt with immediately.”
