The Cult of We

Wework and the Great Start-Up Delusion

The Cult of We
Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell
RRP:
NZ$ 58.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 47.19
Hardback
h235 x 156mm - 304pg
4 May 2021
International import eta 7-19 days
9780593237113
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
The definitive inside story of WeWork, its audacious founder, and what the company' s epic unraveling exposes about Silicon Valley' s delusions and the financial system' s desperate hunger to cash in--from the Wall Street Journal reporters whose scoops hastened the company' s downfall. In 2001, Adam Neumann arrived in New York after five years as a conscript in the Israeli navy. Just over fifteen years later, he had transformed himself into the charismatic CEO of a company worth $47 billion--at least on paper. With his long hair and feel-good mantras, the 6-foot-five Neumann, who grew up in part on a kibbutz, looked the part of a messianic Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The vision he offered was mesmerizing: a radical reimagining of work space for a new generation, with its fluid jobs and lax office culture. He called it WeWork. Though the company was merely subleasing "amenity"-filled office space to freelancers and small startups, Neumann marketed it like a revolutionary product--and investors swooned. As billions of funding dollars poured in, Neumann' s ambitions grew limitless. WeWork wasn' t just an office space provider, he boasted. It would build schools, create WeWork cities, even colonize Mars. Could he, Neumann wondered from the ice bath he' d installed in his office, become the first trillionaire or a world leader? In pursuit of its founder' s grandiose vision, the company spent money faster than it could bring it in. From his private jet, sometimes clouded with marijuana smoke, the CEO scoured the globe for more capital. In late 2019, just weeks before WeWork' s highly publicized IPO, a Hail Mary effort to raise cash, everything fell apart. Neumann was ousted from his company--but still was poised to walk away a billionaire. Calling to mind the recent demise of Theranos and the hubris of the dotcom era bust, WeWork' s extraordinary rise and staggering implosion were fueled by disparate characters in a financial system blind to its risks, from a Japanese billionaire with designs on becoming the Warren Buffet of tech, to leaders at JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs who seemed intoxicated by a Silicon Valley culture where sensible business models lost out to youthful CEOs who promised "disruption. " Why did some of the biggest names in banking and venture capital buy the hype? And what does the future hold for Silicon Valley "unicorns"? Wall Street Journal reporters Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell explore these questions in this definitive account of WeWork' s unraveling.
"The lines between vision, bullshit, and fraud are narrow, and if you tell a thirty-year-old male that he is Jesus Christ, he' s inclined to believe you. The idolatry of founders in Silicon Valley will rage until the music stops playing. The Cult of We is a cautionary tale and a crisp page-turner. "--Scott Galloway, New York Times bestselling author of The Four and professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business "Whether you know a lot or a little about the fall of WeWork, you won' t be able to put down The Cult of We by Wall Street Journal reporters Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. Their book is teeming with incredible details. While heroes are in short supply, the schadenfreude you' ll feel about the spectacular downfall of those who deserve it is delightful. "--Bethany McLean, New York Times bestselling co-author of The Smartest Guys in the Room"Only a handful of books capture the zeitgeist of a business era. Add this one, a wild saga that caps a decade when founder-worshipping investors threw billions at well-spun visions--even those of a megalomaniac whose new-age real estate enterprise' s losses piled up as fast as its valuation climbed. The duo who broke the story of WeWork' s rise and fall have now artfully fleshed it out in a book whose colorful narrative is undergirded by deep context about the times, and enablers, that made Adam Neumann possible. "--John Helyar, #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of Barbarians at the Gate "Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell owned the WeWork story as it was unfolding. And now, with The Cult of We, we finally get the chronicle we deserve of a madness that consumed venture capital, corporate America, and the world. "--Charles Duhigg, New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Habit "Adam Neumann took a simple idea for an office-rental company and turned it into a grandiose vision for a tech company that would somehow also elevate the world' s consciousness. Along the way he raised billions of dollars from investors and bought quite a lot of houses. Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell have written the riveting, definitive account of WeWork, one of the wildest business stories of our time, tracking both its baffling rise and its surprisingly satisfying fall. "--Matt Levine, Money Stuff columnist, Bloomberg Opinion"A delicious chronicle of hubris and misjudgment, this will hit the spot for fans of business tales that walk on the wild side. "--Publishers Weekly
Eliot Brown covers startups and venture capital for The Wall Street Journal. He joined the Journal in 2010, when he was hired to cover commercial real estate in the wake of the financial crisis. He previously worked at the New York Observer, where he covered economic development and local politics, and is a graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Maureen Farrell has been a reporter at The Wall Street Journal since 2013. A recipient of the Newswomen' s Club of New York' s Nellie Bly Award, Farrell previously worked at Forbes, Debtwire, and Mergermarket, where she covered deals, bankruptcy, and startups. She is a graduate of Duke University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is based in New York.
Status: No local stock, title imported to order
ISBN-13: 9780593237113
Published: 4 May 2021
Published In:
Imprint: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
Format: Hardback
Height: 235mm
Width: 156mm
Spine: 19mm
Weight: 547g
Pages: 304

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