Long considered a kind of “Wall Street genius”, Adam Neumann, the co-founder of WeWork, fell from his pedestal in 2019 when the chaotic management of the coworking giant was revealed. But the entrepreneur is now back with new start-ups…
The spectacular collapse of WeWork in the fall of 2019 will not have overcome its entrepreneurial appetite. After making headlines with WeWork, the coworking giant whose catastrophic management and the escapades of its emblematic boss almost caused the loss, the American entrepreneur of Israeli origin is returning to the forefront with two companies, the one in real estate and the other in cryptocurrencies. And the latter are already very copiously sprinkled with capital…
Indeed, the famous American fund Andreessen Horowitz, alias a16z, has agreed to invest 350 million dollars in Flow, a start-up by Adam Neumann which aims to solve problems in the housing market, according to a source close to the case cited by wall street journal. This operation, which brings the valuation of the company to more than a billion dollars according to the American economic daily, constitutes one of the largest investments in history for a barely created start-up.
To see a fund as prestigious as Andreessen Horowitz place so much trust in an entrepreneur who has symbolized the excesses of American tech in recent years is somewhat surprising. And for good reason, Adam Neumann distinguished himself during his adventure at WeWork by completely delirious ambitions – he dreamed of becoming the first trillionaire in history and being immortal -, an excessive lifestyle, a chaotic management (with crazy parties based on alcohol, drugs and sex) and staggering investments, such as the one concerning a company specializing in wave pools (Adam Neumann is a passionate surfer).
After WeWork, towards a crypto version of scam kings ?
The behind the scenes of WeWork, which wanted to change the world like other unicorns, was revealed in September 2019. And the New York coworking company, valued at $47 billion at its peak, s collapsed abruptly, with investors hallucinating upon discovering the accounts. Logically, the IPO on Wall Street, which was to consecrate the success of the WeWork model, had been aborted, SoftBank had come to the rescue, and Adam Neumann had been pushed out.
However, the entrepreneur managed the feat of leaving the company with a golden parachute of 1.7 billion dollars. WeWork has since gone public in New York in October 2021 at a valuation of $9 billion. Today, the shared office specialist is worth only $3.9 billion on Wall Street.
Despite the chaos he caused, Adam Neumann was quick to regain the confidence of prestigious investors, such as Andreessen Horowitz. The US fund also backed another WeWork co-founder’s company, Flowcarbon, which is tackling the carbon credit market through the lens of cryptocurrency earlier this year, in a $70 fundraising round. millions of dollars. Given the pedigree of the entrepreneur, and even if he is not the boss of this start-up, it would not be surprising to have in a few years a worthy successor on Netflix to the documentary The Kings of the Scam…