Eliot Brown, The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion (Book Review)
Well this was quite the trainwreck. What I most liked about this book was everything around WeWork and Adam Neumann: The solid narrative of raising money for a startup, the leadup to IPO (and getting the S1 right [or wrong, in this case]), and so forth.
The story is really quite repetitive: Each chapter is either devoted to raising more money in order to increase revenue; or a story about Neumann's excesses; or the discovery that despite the last round of money, they don't have enough money to proceed. It's that simple. However, the horribleness of the sequence is a narcotic. Can it really be this bad? Can it get worse? Oh yes it can.
A possibly toxic drinking game would be to down a shot every time the authors say that Neumann propagates some new thing that doesn't show a "good look."
I also read Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup and I have to say that Neumann is worse that Elizabeth Holmes, because there was simply nothing there with Neumann except for his charisma. Because of his dyslexia, he never seemed to know the numbers or the putative tech of the company.
On the one hand you think "how could these investors be this stupid?" And then you realize: Oh, because they're dumb. And really, really greedy. You also wonder why so many people stuck with Neumann (particularly Jen Berrent). Could people not have been telling these insiders "get out while you still can?"
I found this whole story so nutty I may need to read the other book on WeWork, Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork.
Originally reviewed on Goodreads on 19 August 2021.
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