WeWork founder bounces back with $1bn property project Flow

theguardian.com:

Adam Neumann, the ousted founder of WeWork, is back with a $1bn (£830m) property venture after saying he learned “plenty” of lessons from the spectacular implosion of the shared office space rental company.

Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that was an early backer of Airbnb, Facebook and Skype, announced in a blogpost that it had invested $350m in Flow, a “community-driven” rental startup founded by Neumann.

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, said the fund had decided to invest in the venture, which is targeting millennial renters, because Neumann was “a visionary leader who revolutionised the second-largest asset class in the world – commercial real estate”.

Neumann, 43, was poised to become one of the world’s richest people in 2019, crystallising a personal fortune of as much as $14bn from the planned flotation of WeWork. But in a bruising fortnight he was forced to pull the float and quit as chief executive after a series of increasingly damaging allegations about his personal conduct, including the revelation that he smoked marijuana on a private jet, came to light.

Andreessen said the story of Neumann and WeWork had been “exhaustively chronicled, analysed, and fictionalised – 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,” he said.

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