Tech and finance experts are shocked by SoftBank’s 'stone-cold crazy' $1.7 billion golden parachute for ousted WeWork CEO Adam Neumann.
I know I blogged about this already today. But it just gets more hilarious with each passing hour. This Softbank guy has to be the worst businessman evar!
First he says - we didn't have any competition - so we paid up. Who does that?!? Then he gives that CEO a giant golden parachute for no effing reason.
All I know is- no one knows which Silicon Valley companies are at risk right now. If people are not throwing up in the bathroom - they need to be.
This spring (April 2019)I said "All I know if that if something happens to Softbank the Valley is going to be a little screwed. They own a little of everything around here."
Masayoshi Son’s unyielding optimism — and lack of challengers — led SoftBank to overvalue WeWork, sources say.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
日本語での答え: 顔をセーブする.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you can't "save face", then you try to save your ass by making it look like you're some sort of Secret King of Investment instead of the complete fool that you are.
I have to hand it to the person at Softbank who came up with a certain slide that's been circulated to Zero Hedge: Japanese management probably does not understand the cultural implications of unicorns, but their Western investors do and their Arab investors can have this explained to them.
And yes, this is an actual slide from a Softbank investor presentation.
WeWork has already left some nasty holes to fill in commercial RE.
In several US cities, I've now walked past about a dozen empty buildings that have the WeWork logo on them, all of which have "please rent me" commercial RE signs stuck to every window that's visible at ground level.
I've never trusted these "co-working arrangement" places ever since I tried to tour a location of a well-known "global employee workplace" company in Seattle on my own and found that nobody was on-site to help me in any way whatsoever.
What I did amounted to breaking and entering with the unwitting help of some employees of another company at that site. Once I was in, I had a chat with a couple employee types and found out that their company was parking people in this building because they'd run out of space at HQ.
They were amused but didn't seem to mind that I'd social engineered my way to the top floor of their building, and since I told them I wasn't interested in their company's secrets, or even who they worked for, but instead about why this "global employee workplace" company couldn't be bothered to keep any staff on-site, I figured the least I could do was to invite them down for a coffee break while I made my own way back out of the building.
So with the building at "full occupancy", they apparently didn't bother with keeping any staff on site to deal with anyone who might drop by that's interested in the company, let alone the location ...
After that, I refused to allow anyone working for us to use one of these.
Instead, I was totally OK with paying for a better hotel with better Internet and everything else, because that way our stuff would stay private easier. I also established a policy of not questioning room service charges because if you're working on a project, having stuff brought to you saves time and bother.
An interesting thing happened: when it was clear that there wasn't anything to be gained by trying to game my room service compensation laxity, our people just ordered what they needed, sometimes just coffee.
The cost of the hotel room was usually at least an order of magnitude more, but it's safer for the people who need it and we could usually get a meeting room in the same hotel.
That's how Chicago became "neutral turf" for me, that and running away from hurricanes nearly every year I've been in Florida.
So it's not that I don't get what WeWork was trying to do.
It's just that I've come to see it as a form of corporate cheapness: these companies are too cheap to park their people at HQ or to give them the freedom to work from wherever they want, so they do this instead.
"What I did amounted to breaking and entering with the unwitting help of some employees of another company at that site. Once I was in, I had a chat with a couple employee types and found out that their company was parking people in this building because they'd run out of space at HQ."
ReplyDeleteOh. Huh. That's an interesting comment. They are essentially offloading overhead. Eeeps. Wouldn't want to be them in a downdraft. Oh wait.
At least you can mark Light off that company list. I think I single handedly caused them too fail. And I'm not even joking. I probably gave that camera more exposure than anyone they sold one to. I took it to CES twice and all the conferences and car shows and other stuff. And it's still my main camera but wow that thing pisses me off. I never met anyone else in real life with one, and everyone I ran into had never seen on other than mine. The orphaned it a while back.
It's not me! Companies just do stupid stuff. Like the camera stops working when you reach 10% battery life. Why even give you the ten percent is you can't even use it?!
ReplyDeleteI just couldn't tell people to buy a camera that spendy with some of the stupid stuff they did. And instead of fixing things they put all their effort into these douchy emails about changing the world in a social way. Just effing concentrate on the product. Mind ya own business.
I want to change the planet ...
ReplyDelete... 's diapers.
SERIOUSLY.
BECAUSE EVERY ONE OF THESE CRY BABIES IS SO FULL OF SHIT. :-)