Once in my life, I entered a WeWork building in San Francisco, and I remember immediately wanting to belong to this plush and creative universe that evoked both a vacation club and a start-up incubator. I was not the only one to fall in love: the series WeCrashed tells how this mythical shared office company, founded in 2010 in Manhattan by Adam Neumann, has mystified its customers, investors and employees.
Seen from France, where its establishments are mainly located in the business district of western Paris, WeWork is not the most famous of unicorns – these start-ups whose financial valuation reaches several billion dollars. WeWork rents buildings in the most prestigious business districts, transforms them into welcoming workspaces that encourage interaction and creativity, and offers its clients, freelancers and companies, a headquarters, employee services, but also and above all a sense of community. It is through this existential promise that WeWork will leave the hushed and boring world of tertiary real estate to join that of the myth. This is the not-so-distant era when the mere mention of digital technologies in a company’s pitch drives investors crazy, many of whom want to believe in easy money in the medium term.
The important thing is not to earn money, but to spend it to grow
All the dramatic tension of the series is based on the creative, then destructive madness of its founding visionary, Adam Neumann, the real Steve Jobs of coworking. Raised on a kibbutz in Israel, he experienced an intense sense of belonging there, an experience that will inspire the mindset and corporate culture of WeWork. Neumann’s genius idea is to sell a community, a “physical social network” instead of a vulgar office rental contract. Permanently barefoot, long hair and a Christian look, the character of Neumann interpreted by Jared Leto is an outstanding speaker coupled with a tenacious and unscrupulous salesman.
The spectacular development of WeWork, which will multiply office openings at a frantic pace in the 2010s to win the race for gigantism, recalls Uber’s strategy to impose itself on the taxi market in London, New York or Paris. . The important thing is not to earn money, but to spend it to grow by overtaking competitors. Spend to grow (“Spend to grow”), shouts Neumann tirelessly in the series, a bottle of tequila in hand, in an atmosphere of fair andafter work standing, while in the background its employees jiggle over a Harlem shake, one of those burlesque rituals of Silicon Valley culture that have contributed so much to its nonconformist reputation.
Driven by the megalomania of its founder, the company will chain astronomical fundraising. A strategy of headlong rush that ends up being sanctioned. The revelations of the American press on the internal culture of WeWork, the behavior of Neumann, who for example hid drugs in a packet of cereal during a trip in his private jet, and the analysis of the potential of the company end by getting the better of the legend of the unicorn: valued up to 47 billion dollars in 2019, shortly before its IPO, WeWork collapsed. When this introduction finally takes place – not without having been postponed by two years – the company is only worth 9. Neumann is forced to resign.
Economic tale of the digital age, WeCrashed is also a fusional love story, that of a couple who dreams of creating another world through and within capitalism. Actress, spiritualist and “soul” of WeWork, the character of Rebekah Neumann, played by Anne Hathaway, is the most successful of this series which has the good taste to be limited to one season. Paradoxically, WeCrashed is finally the story of a failure whose legacy in Western corporate culture is immense. Nowadays, any corporate headquarters project is modeled on the pop, industrial or design codes popularized by the unicorn of coworking – its co-founder Miguel McKelvey was a graduate in architecture. The collaborative ideal has imposed itself insofar as more solitary work can be carried out remotely for workers in the tertiary sector. There remains the question of work as a pleasure, a precept on which WeWork based its philosophy; maybe that’s what WeCrashed depicts an aspiration that, in just a decade, has gone considerably out of fashion.