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.
“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. 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 investment in Flow is understood to be the largest Andreessen Horowitz has made this early in a company’s development.
It is unclear from Flow’s website what the company intends to do. The site consists only of a landing page with the words “Live Life in Flow” and “coming 2023”.
Andreessen indicated that Flow would seek to reprise Neumann’s vision to create “dorms for adults”. He said that as result of the pandemic “many people will live in places far away from where they work and many more will shift to a hybrid environment”.
“As a result, they will experience much less, if any, of the in-office social bonding and friendships that local workers enjoy,” he said.
“For many of these people, increased screen time and reduced in-person interaction will cause challenges that are not just limited to work, such as alienation and loneliness. This is not a good path for anyone and it needs to be addressed directly, right now.”
