Reposted from Greg Isenberg’s Linkedin Post. Greg runs his own product studio, Late Checkout, and is followed by 340k Twitter followers.

The news JUST broke that WeWork is filing for BANKRUPTCY next week

The same WeWork that was valued at $48 billion is now worth ~$48 million

I sold my company to them in 2019. And was briefly the head of Product Strategy of WeWork.

Here's what went wrong and what we can learn:

#1 People can turn on you on a dime

In the WeWork corporate halls, I witnessed folks singing praises of Adam Neumann, almost to the point of worship.

Adam could do no wrong, Adam knew all the answers, Adam could fix this.

But as soon as they realized their stock was tanking, they turned on him.

It happened overnight. Literally.

This taught me a lot about human nature.

Trust can be broken in seconds.

#2 Doing too much in business never works

WeWork was working on like 100 businesses at once, but never really figured out the economics of the core business.

Seems obvious, but get your house in order first, before you go and decide to venture out.

I’m a big believer in the multipreneur movement, owning a portfolio of businesses that cash-flow, not a bunch of businesses that drain cash aka WeWork.

#3 The valuation of your venture-backed business really doesn't mean a whole lot.

I met people at WeWork in summer 2019 that told me they were excited for the IPO so they could buy their house.

They were already house shopping.

"Yeah, I'll probably put $600k into renovations too. I know a good contractor if you need one."

I cringed.

Pretty delusional.

Never count on your stock options.

Consider it gravy.

(Thankfully I had very little stock.)

#4 The community piece was actually on-point.

This one is kinda a hot take.

Probably because the community-adjusted IPO was pretty made fun of.

But that's not what I'm talking about.

The idea of WeWork being a community is a valuable one.

Because when you build a community, you have trust and attention.

And when you have trust and attention, you can build products to support their rituals.

So, here's what would have made WeWork more successful:

I think if WeWork built vertical-specific co-working, that would have worked better.

WeWork for designers, WeWork for artists, etc.

With the ultimate goal of building a portfolio of vertical SaaS.

I think there is a tremendous opportunity to:

Step 1) Build community
Step 2) Build vertical SaaS on top of it

If WeWork would have had a smaller portfolio of niche co-working spaces, say in NYC, London, and LA only... and built their enterprise value via vertical software...

Now that could have been not just a $47 billion startup, but a $470 billion business.