Gobs of people clamoring for hot desks at the new WeWork location our company was basically forced to move to. Just gobs, I tell ya. The We Company raised the rent on our previous location by 25%. They even started charging $500/hr to hold events there, despite promising 1 free event per month during our lease.

So much for "community," I guess.

Keep in mind that this is a company that literally made up its own financial metric - "community-based EBITDA" - to try and justify its sky-high valuation to potential next-round investors. Eventually, those investors balked. What was supposed to be an IPO of $60 to $90 billion has now been delayed. If WeWork ever does go public, they will be lucky to get $10 billion valuation.

For you blockchain folks that are pissed about your ICOs going down 99%, well, observe the granddaddy Ponzi of them all - the IPO. This is where crypto funds learned their strategy. The Greater Fool Strategy always ends when the insiders sell off to the dumb money. Blockchain did not invent that game. That's a game that has been played for centuries.

IPO stands for Initial Peon Offering.

Or maybe it's Incredible Ponzi Offering.

(I forget.)

What's that? You thought it stood for Initial Public Offering. Naw, that's just what they want you to believe. In reality, most of the retail public should have nothing to do with an IPO. The best advice is just to leave it alone for 6 months. Then see where it is trading pricewise. Most of the time, you'll be able to purchase the stub significantly cheaper than you would have been able to on Day One.

Look, I just got a 25% discount by moving to this empty new office.

This boring old co-working real estate play can maybe turn things around. But, at the moment, it feels like everyone is standing around waiting for the other shoe to drop. Rumors are that 1/3 of the workforce will soon be put on the block. Less community managers. Less maids. Less free beer and coffee in the lobby. Less workers to do all the myriad tiny things that have to be done in an office building.

That’s a tough position to put your employees in.

When I go to work these days, it feels like I’m going on a Death Watch.

For now, it’s gonna be an interesting next few months at work. Wondering which amenities are gonna go away. Wondering if anybody is gonna come fill these 100s of empty seats. Wondering if we need to break our lease and go find someplace else.

I’m all for a company trying to fix its business model in an attempt to get to profitability. But, honestly, this is a reckoning that seems long overdue.

WeWork as-is depends on fundraising. Round after round of capital infusions at ever-increasing valuations from the gobs and gobs of funds out in VC/PE Land made possible by the easy-money monetary policy of the top five central banks all over the world. The more money they put into circulation, the larger the global money supply gets. We are at something like $70 trillion-plus right now. All that money has to go somewhere. And for the past decade or so, that capital has been building up in the venture capital and private equity industry. It's pretty clear now that the excess money has severely distorted valuations. In this case, by as much as an 80% discrepancy!

If that’s true, and it's actually overaccommodating global monetary policy that's primarily driving the value of stocks and inflating the value of private companies a whole lot, then WeWork is the least of our worries.