<story><title>WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-08/wework-gets-a-visit-from-financial-reality</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scandox</author><text>In 1999 there was an email going round about how ridiculous dotcom valuations were. Taking Amazon, I think, as an example it said it would have to earn more than Kodak, Boeing, Caterpillar etc to ever be worth it&amp;#x27;s valuation.&lt;p&gt;There was a general sense of &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s just a bookstore&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Now I know everything is more mature and the situation is different, but I also remember feeling very confident that Amazon was waaay overvalued.</text></item><item><author>Traster</author><text>&amp;gt;The Gulf investors backing the Vision Fund seem to have decided that WeWork is not a tech bet but simply an aggressive punt on real estate.&lt;p&gt;This is the bogey man of a huge number of current &amp;#x27;tech startups&amp;#x27; - What if it turns out Tesla really are a car company! Or if We Work are actually an office rental company! OR &lt;i&gt;gasp&lt;/i&gt; Uber is a cab company! (1)&lt;p&gt;We now have a glut of companies operating in traditional markets that have valuations that would indicate they&amp;#x27;ll be as big or bigger than their biggest competitors. IWG is a comparable company to WeWork, has £2.35n revenue and £1.95Bn market cap. Wework has slightly lower revenue but is being lined up for a £20Bn valuation. Not only this, but WeWork are going to learn about the cyclical nature of office rental revenue.&lt;p&gt;The key for these companies is to show concrete indicators that their business is actually different from the companies they&amp;#x27;re disrupting and We Work has done an absolutely rubbish job of that so far.&lt;p&gt;(1) I want to be clear I don&amp;#x27;t think all those examples have nothing to differentiate them, but it&amp;#x27;s closer than some people might like to think.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simias</author><text>Hindsight is 20&amp;#x2F;20. Maybe people in 1999 were wrong about Amazon but they were right about Pets.com and many others, your comment is just an example of survivorship bias. I mean, I&amp;#x27;m sure you&amp;#x27;re not trying to argue that dotcom valuations weren&amp;#x27;t generally ridiculous.&lt;p&gt;Besides, Amazon, Kodak and Boeing were never exactly in the same market. The parent is comparing companies that ostensibly offer similar services.&lt;p&gt;If I can trust Wikipedia by 1999 Amazon &amp;quot;also sold video games, consumer electronics, home-improvement items, software, games and toys in addition to other items.&amp;quot; That meant that it was already an online retail store, not a mere bookstore.</text></comment>
<story><title>WeWork Gets a Visit from Financial Reality</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-08/wework-gets-a-visit-from-financial-reality</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scandox</author><text>In 1999 there was an email going round about how ridiculous dotcom valuations were. Taking Amazon, I think, as an example it said it would have to earn more than Kodak, Boeing, Caterpillar etc to ever be worth it&amp;#x27;s valuation.&lt;p&gt;There was a general sense of &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s just a bookstore&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Now I know everything is more mature and the situation is different, but I also remember feeling very confident that Amazon was waaay overvalued.</text></item><item><author>Traster</author><text>&amp;gt;The Gulf investors backing the Vision Fund seem to have decided that WeWork is not a tech bet but simply an aggressive punt on real estate.&lt;p&gt;This is the bogey man of a huge number of current &amp;#x27;tech startups&amp;#x27; - What if it turns out Tesla really are a car company! Or if We Work are actually an office rental company! OR &lt;i&gt;gasp&lt;/i&gt; Uber is a cab company! (1)&lt;p&gt;We now have a glut of companies operating in traditional markets that have valuations that would indicate they&amp;#x27;ll be as big or bigger than their biggest competitors. IWG is a comparable company to WeWork, has £2.35n revenue and £1.95Bn market cap. Wework has slightly lower revenue but is being lined up for a £20Bn valuation. Not only this, but WeWork are going to learn about the cyclical nature of office rental revenue.&lt;p&gt;The key for these companies is to show concrete indicators that their business is actually different from the companies they&amp;#x27;re disrupting and We Work has done an absolutely rubbish job of that so far.&lt;p&gt;(1) I want to be clear I don&amp;#x27;t think all those examples have nothing to differentiate them, but it&amp;#x27;s closer than some people might like to think.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fhbdukfrh</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s pretty revisionist as to the actual reality. The vast  majority where incredibly overvalued internet plays on traditional markets, exactly what the gp warns. You just picked one of the few that survived and thrived. Don&amp;#x27;t overestimate how inevitable it was that we ended up with the Amazon we see today.&lt;p&gt;The biggest difference I see this time is these unicorns have actual revenue. Heavily subsidized but revenue still. Last time we had monster companies that didn&amp;#x27;t even show that given 2 dollars they could make 1, so progress?</text></comment>