Name: The We Company Wants Your Life
Uploaded: 2020-03-23T23:33:25.000Z
Duration: 6 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

If you’re doing something that has intention

The feeling you have right now of being together,

the feeling of being happy - that’s what WeWork is!

It is an idea that's shared by a lot of startups,

that your work should be more than just something

that you do 9 to 5, Monday through Friday

or something that you feel truly compelled to do.

WeWork believes that they’re not just selling a workplace,

They really think of this idea of the community

as something not measurable but very effective

in giving the workplace a sort of spark of energy.

And Neumann has a term for this intangible energy.

I'm pretty sure he would call it "the power of 'We'".

This is the story of how WeWork turned work into  a lifestyle

but 2019 hasn’t started as the company may have been hoping.

The Japanese conglomerate announced Monday it’s investing an additional $2 billion

It's a step back from the $16 billion investment that would have given

The significantly smaller investment from Japan’s SoftBank leaves WeWork more vulnerable

and announced in January it’s rebranding itself as

the We Company with the ambitious mission “to elevate the world’s consciousness”.

That kind of sounds like a self-help cult now so what does the We Company do?

The We Company will consist of three main verticals,

WeWork, WeLive, which for now is just two buildings

and WeGrow - which is a $42,000 a year elementary school in New York.

When Miguel and I started this company, the intention was - can we change the world?

The idea for WeWork emerged from the upbringings of Neumann and his co-founder Miguel McKelvey.

They both spent part of their childhoods in  communal living.

It was really community and bringing people together that we were both attracted to.

The doors to the first WeWork location opened in 2010.

They started by renting out desks and famously small "fish-tank" offices to freelancers

But the WeWork model has always been about lively communal spaces.

Most WeWorks will have staff called titles like, Community Manager

and they have a pretty big say in the culture of a place,

they maybe organize happy hours or speaking events or lunch time meetings that people

can come to and sort of network with each other.

WeWork wants people to interact and to achieve this they monitor how people use their spaces.

Things people usually don’t talk about.

Like when they get up and how often do they go to the coffee or actually literally

WeWork has an in-house social media app used to book rooms and rate working spaces,

This app, paired with data-harvesting sensors, which are spread around selected offices,

Based on that, they can make design tweaks and roll them out in their next building.

And they have a steady stream of buildings in development to test those ideas on.

They've put a lot of energy into growing super, super fast.

In 2014 WeWork opened its first international location in London.

Fast-forward five years and they have 400 locations in 26 countries.

They’re now the largest private tenant in Central London, Manhattan and Washington D.C.

And while it continues to expand at breakneck speed,

The largest companies in the world have been approaching us, and saying hey, can you bring

More than 30% of WeWork’s members now work at companies with 1000 or more employees

And I think this is gonna be a tricky thing for WeWork, trying to balance the entrepreneurial

energy that's a big part of their brand, with the stability and revenue that comes from

But despite all the changes, the company still markets itself as

You’re a creator and you’re a creator and we’re all creators.

WeWork couldn’t be happier than to give you the $50,000.

That’s Neumann at one of WeWork’s Creator Awards events.

The company launched the elevator pitch competition in 2017,

and opened it up to people outside of WeWork’s network.

They distribute $20 million annually in prize money

And it’s just another way that WeWork is trying to build its brand.

Like they really see this, I’m sure, as a marketing expense.

as the newly renamed We Company branches  outside of office spaces.

I'm not convinced yet that they're going to have that sort of effect on the way we live.

But yeah in terms of the way that they affect our expectations about our workplace,

I do think that they've already probably made some big changes in what companies expect

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The We Company Wants Your Life

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