VC Delenda Est

Flow

Kirk Van Houten shows off his new Flow apartment

First of all congratulations to Adam Newman, your intoxicating audacity is an inspiration to narcissists everywhere.

Adam Neumann Gets a New Backer

Second, please God, make it stop.

Adam is a visionary leader who revolutionized the second largest asset class in the world — commercial real estate — by bringing community and brand to an industry in which neither existed before. Adam, and the story of WeWork, have been exhaustively chronicled, analyzed, and fictionalized – sometimes accurately. 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.

Wework raised ~ $11b in venture capital and raised ~$1.3b from it’s SPAC reverse merger. The current market cap is ~$4b. HE VAPORIZED BILLIONS OF DOLLARS and Andreesen makes him sound like Prometheus bequeathing fire.

Flow is Gob Bluth’s Single City with kombucha taps in the business center. It’s a terrible idea and it will lose money. People live in apartments for a variety of reasons, they might be students, retirees, or young families that aspire to a single family home. But as different and diverse as the folks renting apartments may be, their E Pluribus Unum, is not wanting Adam Newman as their Julie McCoy.

I am especially disappointed, because I held a lazy prior that Marc Andreessen was ‘smart’ VC. He hangs out with Tyler Cohen and tweets about the current thing. He promotes Private Truths, Public Lies, a book about the dangers of a society where what people can say publicly diverges from what they believe privately. But apparently the author of It’s Time to Build, isn’t subject to ‘foolish consistency.’

Here is what he and his ‘partner’ submitted to their local planning board recently:

I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton … Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.

Building for thee, but not for me.

Great timing, I wonder how he got the idea that their was a housing shortage?

Case Shiller Home Price Index

Doing this requires combining community-driven, experience-centric service with the latest technology in a way that has never been done before to create a system where renters receive the benefits of owners. This means rethinking the entire value chain, from the way buildings are purchased and owned to the way residents interact with their buildings to the way value is distributed among stakeholders.

What do those words even mean? If renters get the benefits of ownership, why are you making this investment? He is either lying or is an idiot. The renters aren’t going to be owners, they are going to get some b$ll$hit web3 token to gamble away in the metaverse.

This is absolute and total proof that we are in a bear market rally. The underlying dysfunction that gives Tiger Global, Masayoshi, and Marc Andreesen capital to wantonly destroy on obviously bad ideas persists. From 2010 to 2020 Unicorns existed in harmony with a low inflation. That world ended in 2020. Now it is the Fed’s sacred mission to destroy VC and salt the earth. If they don’t, labor markets will remain permanently distorted and ponzi investments will destroy the nation’s productive capacity until we reach either hyperinflation or liquidation.