WeWork founder Adam Neumann is back with a new company, and this one reportedly has a valuation of $1 billion – before it’s even opened for business. For some, it’s all feeling a bit familiar.
Neumann’s latest venture is called “Flow” and, if you go to the site set aside for it, you won’t get any information on what Flow actually is. But it’s a project aimed at “connecting people through transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes,” according to one of its investors.
That investor is Andreessen Horowitz, a massive venture capital firm that was an early investor in companies like Facebook and Airbnb. The company has invested $350 million, marking the largest individual check Andreessen Horowitz has ever written, and it values Flow at more than $1 billion.
In all, the project sounds pretty similar to WeWork – something Andreessen Horowitz noted in a statement explaining its investment – and while the firm considers it an exciting and “natural” return for Neumann, Twitter lit up on Monday with mockery of the idea and many guessing that Neumann’s business tactics haven’t exactly changed since WeWork.
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, here’s $350M from Andreessen Horowitz,” one person joked.
“I wonder what about Adam Neumann’s history and CEO experience caused A16Z to believe he was worth trusting with $350 million,” another said.
Of course, Neumann’s history as a business founder has been well documented, most recently in the AppleTV+ series “WeCrashed,” starring Jared Leto as Neumann and Anne Hathaway as his wife, Rebekah. The series told the story of how WeWork came to be, ballooned to huge valuation numbers, and eventually went public far below those projections thanks to Neumann’s financial decisions.
Accuracy was something the “WeCrashed” crew paid great attention to. Leto himself met with the Neumanns, while showrunners Lee Eisenberg and Drew Crevello did exhaustive research. And, in explaining its investment, Andreessen Horowitz acknowledged that too, but defended Neumann’s accomplishments.
“Adam, and the story of WeWork, have been exhaustively chronicled, analyzed, and fictionalized – sometimes accurately,” the statement said. “For all the energy put into covering the story, it’s often under appreciated that only one person has fundamentally redesigned the office experience and led a paradigm-changing global company in the process: Adam Neumann.”
Still, the general public remains skeptical, particularly as the New York Times reported that “exact details of the business plan could not be learned.”
“But it’s good enough for a $1Bn valuation,” one person marveled. “We should be proud of our national tendency to give billions to infamously harebrained swindlers,” another wrote.
You can check out more reactions to the news below.
