Adam Neumann’s new real estate venture using the same buzz words, community and vibes, sounds like the same BS

There were so many dramatizations of Adam Neumann’s WeWork epic fail, from movies, tv shows and podcasts, he is a house hold name in douche bag pony tail wearing tech guy disaster.

In 2017, two years before WeWorks epic implosion after a failed attempt to go public, the Wall street journal called WeWork a “20 billion dollar start up fueled by silicon valley pixie dust”.

At its height, in 2019 before the combustion, the public valuation of WeWork was 47billion dollars...whaaaat? Why?! What is the actual thing? Is there a thing? What is it???

WeWork had no proof of concept, it had no ability to profit, it had no interesting or proprietary concepts. Its crazy to wrap our heads around how such an out of touch, billionaire blow hard used meat free, pro yoga, barefoot visionary smoke and mirrors to fool so many very wealthy investors into believing they were going to be part of a great idea. I mean, that was a LOT of money being thrown around. And in the end, a Japanese share holder SoftBank paid Neumann 480$ billion dollars to cut ties with the company so they could salvage what was left.

It takes some kind of Gaul, or maybe delusion, to take another big swing before the dust has even settled on your last foul ball.

Never the less, in comes Neumann with Flow. Again the biggest question at hand, WTF is it?? Here’s what we know; it is a real estate venture start up. He has purchased 3,000 apartments. The aim of Flow is meant to help renters gain equity. Rent to own models have been around forever, there’s got to be something more to it than that.

Another detail is that Flow plans to launch a crypto wallet component. So do we have here, a new kind of sketchy avenue for people to lose their homes to bitcoin fall out? Exciting.

It is wild that multiple investors from WeWork have hopped aboard Neumann’s super wacky non idea train yet again. One of these investors, Andreessen, is describing Flow as a “community driven, experience-centric service with the latest technology”. Okay- but what is the service though? Experience-centric...gross.

All of this heady, non specific, buzz word descriptive talk sounds eerily familiar. Like our buddy in the pony tail is pitching another puff of hot air. The difference that feels disturbing here is what's potentially at stake, peoples homes. Its hard to say how far this word mumbo jumbo will actually get. It is as possible that he learned something from his WeWork debacle, as it is possible, he learned nothing at all. Some of these folks with big new ideas in the tech world(no matter how completely and utterly un fleshed out they are) just have to possess a good heavy dose of narcissism. Who among us truly believes that our thoughts alone, should be backed by billions of dollars, because they are just that awesome? And who comes back after screwing the pooch very publicly, very recently with an equally non substantiated project and asks the same investors for more billions?

Here’s the thing though, if our boy has purchased 3,000 apartments for his next turn up to bat, and its another (dare I say it) major loss, do we have thousands of people relying on that housing when everything falls apart? Because living situations can't be just an idea, like whatever the work from your home community of physical and digital worlds mash up, WeWork was supposed to be. A home is not a hazy metaphor for some concept that never really made sense.

So what we could be looking at here might impact thousands of people with a very negative outcome. It feels like the ultra-wealthy playing chess with renters. That’s yucky.

It does seem clear, that people are really watching this, and it is not getting past anyone that there is still no actual plan here. If it remains a head in the clouds word salad of one mans overinflated bravado, most likely it will be called out as such before people are depending on any kind of reliable system behind using crypto currency to rent from Adam Neumann. The startup world, is most certainly watching, and unlike these second-round investors, they won't have the wool pulled over their eyes again.