It takes a long time for any company to die, period. WeWork (or I guess now Twitter) style rapid flameouts are very rare.

Most corporate deaths look like Sears. The writing on the wall was there for over two decades.

On the wall for two decades?!

Hell it was there for four decades, double that time. Walmart was running circles around Sears by the 70s.

I kinda wonder if there is a type of employee who likes working at dying firms. Every year their job gets easier with fewer demands. Failure becomes kinda expected.

I’m reminded of someone I met at a party who actually worked for Sears. They’d spent many years at Amazon on the retail side of the business, in the earlier days of Amazon. Sears hired several people with this background in Seattle to turn their business around.

Pretty quickly, they figured out upper management had no interest in their ideas to make Sears into a viable online retailer. Everybody left or started coasting. They all knew the company was doomed but cashed their paychecks. After all, that’s literally what they were being paid to do.

WeWork is also very much alive.

WeWork is living dead, taking down and feasting on the flesh of the living. Their financials are so bad that there is no possibility of rescue, only the matter of the timing and details of end. Meanwhile the coworking space continues to be critical for an increasing fraction of the workforce. Those companies that actually live in this space by charging members fees that pay for the property and services required have a huge challenge competing with WeWork. It is a textbook case of venture capital doing terrible damage to an entire sector without actually contributing anything. The capital will be burned through and WeWork and other companies will die and then maybe we can start again for real. It is so frustrating.

Sure, this month

So it has been for however many years since the purported "rapid flameout".

WeWork is still going strong in London. Lots of offices and all of which are full.

A full office only tells you about the revenue side of the business. Many businesses are popular with customers but go bankrupt

Yeah, but I’m sure most of those businesses would have done their due diligence on WeWorks financials before moving in.

Changing offices is an expensive exercise so they wouldn’t want to risk renting space from somewhere that is likely to go under in the next year or two.

The whole point of wework from a customer perspective is that you don’t have to commit to long 10-year leases. So wework leases long-term and the customers short-term. If the customers dry up wework still needs to pay their commitments.

Where did I say 10 year leases? I specifically said 1 to 2 years knowing exactly how WeWork operates.

Nowhere did you say.

My point is the dynamic I mention explains the problems of wework, and is not proved wrong by the argument you put forward, paraphrased, that "businesses have evaluated long-term risk of renting at wework so wework is not at risk"

Your second attempt at paraphrasing my comment is still way off the mark.

You keep discussing a long term context yet my comment was just as much about short term risk too.

You don’t have to agree with me, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t “paraphrase” my comment in a way that’s disingenuous to the original point it was making.

I paraphrased to try to reach a common ground, not as a kind of trick, but I understand you don't agree with the gist of the argument. We will have to agree to disagree, and that is ok.

Twitter? Seemed very much alive an hour ago.

ChatGPT is increasingly handling the bulk of my major queries, and that’s when its rate limited and hard to access (behind a sign up, behind captcha)

It somehow disturbs me that I need to prove I’m a human when chatting with a bot..

Sorry, puny human, you couldn't solve the squiggly license plates fast enough.