Adam Neumann

Adam Neumann emerged with a new residential-real-estate business called Flow that is set to be the heir to WeWork, his commercial-real-estate company.

There’s a vision of justice in which the people who fail and lose billions of people’s dollars get exiled, making room for other people who haven’t made colossal mistakes to get some of the billions of dollars in investment capital to realize their dreams. Flowcarbon is “financially separate,” according to the New York Times, but this is Adam Neumann we’re talking about — the guy who bought a wave-pool company and folded it into WeWork because he could. The first is that the “theme” of Flow is “connecting people through transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes.” In this way, it is very much like WeWork — and builds on the dorm-style vision of the fizzled-out WeLive — though what it will look like is still unclear. This wouldn’t be that much of a surprise since Silicon Valley has essentially flipped itself from an engine of American innovation to a funnel for money into scammy high-margin businesses that can be scaled through the use of an app. “For Adam, the successes and lessons are plenty and we are excited to go on this journey with him and his colleagues building the future of living.” The rollout for Flow is already quintessentially Neumannian in that there are a lot of buzzwords and very little when it comes to concrete business plans.

Nearly three years after Adam Neumann stepped down as CEO of WeWork following a failed attempt to take the company public, he is said to once again be in ...

"We think it is natural that for his first venture since WeWork, Adam returns to the theme of connecting people through transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes," Andreessen wrote. Andreessen positioned the new company as a long-awaited solution to the nation's "housing crisis." For all the energy put into covering the story, it's often under appreciated that only one person has fundamentally redesigned the office experience and led a paradigm-changing global company in the process: Adam Neumann."

The investment will be the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz's largest check written for a single round of backing in the fund's history.

“We understand how difficult it is to build something like this, and we love seeing repeat-founders build on past successes by growing from lessons learned,” Andreessen wrote in the blog post. The partnership between Andreessen Horowitz and Neumann is noteworthy for several reasons. The venture capital firm’s investment in Flow, a residential real estate company led by Neumann, is roughly $350 million, said a person familiar with the deal who asked not to be identified because the information is private.

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz announced Monday that it plans to invest in Adam Neumann's new residential real estate company called Flow.

Andreesen Horowitz suggests that Flow may enable a new way for people to purchase their living space, though it's unclear if that's through a rent-to-own model. Flow's website doesn't offer many details on the company but says it's expected to launch in 2023. The company's 2019 IPO filing showed large losses, a complicated corporate structure, and anomalies such as the company paying Neumann nearly $6 million to acquire the trademark to "We" prior to a corporate name change.

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Andreessen Horowitz invested a reported $350 million into Neumann's new company.

Not to mention it's already a unicorn. - Neumann is planning to make a significant personal investment in Flow, in the form of cash and real estate assets, the NYT reports. Adam Neumann's next act is coming a bit more into focus — or at least capital.

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is reportedly investing $350 million into Flow, a new commercial real estate company that failed WeWork co-founder ...

Ultimately, Andreessen Horowitz gets to determine in whom and in what to invest its capital. The difference, though, is that he hopefully gets to learn from past mistakes as he launches Flow. Underrepresented business leaders who failed aren’t usually afforded such opportunities to demonstrate that they’ve learned or to apply lessons from prior failures to new, well-funded startups. All this is extremely well known, as Neumann and the company have been subjects of the Apple TV+ series WeCrashed, multiple books, business school case studies, expert analyses, and perhaps way too many commentaries. In other words, getting their first businesses launched is challenging because of investment inequities. Characterizing Neumann’s prior leadership as “success” is another notable aspect of the a16z co-founder’s statement. For instance, a 2020 McKinsey report notes that white entrepreneurs start businesses with approximately three times more capital than do Black business owners: $107,000 versus $35,000, respectively.

A big bet on the WeWork founder by Andreessen Horowitz shows how powerful men can fail upwards.

Arsenal Capital Partners, a New York-based private equity firm, raised $5.4 billion across two funds. Financial terms were not disclosed. Financial terms were not disclosed. Financial terms were not disclosed. Financial terms were not disclosed. Meanwhile, Travis Kalanick, Uber’s controversial previous CEO, who was ousted in 2017, has essentially declared he won’t change. Would other tarnished founders or executives get such a well-capitalized second chance? “We understand how difficult it is to build something like this and we love seeing repeat-founders build on past successes by growing from lessons learned,” Andreessen wrote in a blog post announcing the news on Monday. Details of Flow’s plans, including what exactly it will do differently than other residential property managers, are scarce. Softbank boss Masayoshi Son, who bankrolled Neumann along with dozens of other startups, took a massive $8.9 billion loss to his Vision Fund portfolio in 2019, much of it due to WeWork. “My investment judgment was poor,” Son said at the time. In the world of venture capital, though, there’s a familiar pattern to the way history repeats itself. It’s easy enough to understand the urge to go back in time, after the past few years of pandemic trauma and turmoil.