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Today is WeWork’s (WE) IPO, and it’s time for a first-hand account of life under WeWork.

Having been hired by WeWork as Meetup’s CEO exactly three years ago, I gained a keen insider perspective of WeWork under Adam Neumann. The saga was covered for many months ad nauseam, and after a two-year delay, a canceled IPO, then a delayed IPO again, it’s time to get some perspective on life at WeWork from someone who lived it.

• WeWork and Adam Neumann were sincerely focused on making the world a better place. The company and its leader were not the sinister people portrayed by the media.
• WeWork genuinely cared about human connections and community more deeply than many companies and leaders. 
• Great people, with an inspiring mission, were undone by incredibly poor decisions, grounded in impossible goals.
• WeWork is a story of how decision-making and the goals that anchored those decisions nearly destroyed a company and its people.
• However, WeWork’s culture was more insane and the stories far crazier than the documentary, books, and endless press had conveyed.

When Meetup was sold out of WeWork at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020 I was no longer spending 2.5 hours commuting and I decided to reconstruct the story of Meetup’s survival under WeWork (and later during the pandemic) and share a framework for smart decision making. I started writing an article about the experience and it quickly turned into Decide & Conquer, a 256-page book that is being published by HarperCollins Leadership. It’s a story of Meetup’s survival in the face of some pretty stark challenges and the decisions that made that happen. Because, unlike WeWork, while there were exceptional people at both Meetup and WeWork and a deeply impactful mission, Meetup anchored its decisions in the right goals: mission first, expansion later. 

In light of WeWork’s IPO announcement, I thought I would share an excerpt from my forthcoming book:

In January 2019 I was summoned from New York to San Francisco to have a one-on-one with Adam at WeWork’s West Coast headquarters in Salesforce Tower. He began the meeting by telling me what Meetup’s expansion strategy should be. There was then a short break where Adam decided to shut the lights off and play The Greatest Showman in surround sound while he, myself, and the general manager from Latin America (I had no idea why he was there) sang along. The meeting was then interrupted by a critical call that Adam needed to make to confirm that the Samurai sword sent by Masayoshi Son (the largest investor in WeWork) had been delivered to Adam’s home. Then his wife, Rebekah, entered the room, promptly took off her shoes, and asked me who I was. Rebekah recently had been promoted to WeWork’s chief brand officer. From my notes, our conversation went something like this: 

Rebekah: Who are you? 

David: The new CEO of Meetup. 

Rebekah: What’s Meetup? 

Adam: We acquired Meetup a year ago. 

Rebekah: We own Meetup? What do they do?

David (thinking): The chief brand officer of WeWork doesn’t even know they own us. Boy, I feel pretty damn unimportant. 

Rebekah: You should change the name of the company. It is terrible. 

Adam: Well, they have built a brand for the last eighteen years, but we should definitely talk about changing the name. 

David (thinking because he’s speechless): What the hell did I get myself into?! 

Success boils down to one thing: making good decisions. That’s easy to say, but what do we do when we are faced with terrible options, deep anxiety, and fear of failure? Learning the right framework now can make all the difference later. 

As outlined in my book, leaders need to navigate the big decisions that will impact their future and make their organizations a success. 

Apply principles like open communication, transparency, and kindness to inform great decision-making.

Set yourself up to succeed, even before you start, by removing potential roadblocks before they become a problem.

Be a bold and decisive leader and do not succumb to fear.