Name: Insights: WeWork Founders: Community is Our Business
Uploaded: 2020-04-24
Duration: 3 min 37 s
Description: Cofounders Rebekah Neumann and Adam Neumann stress the uniqueness of their community's culture.

[MUSIC PLAYING] ANDREW NUSCA: You've got a lot of customers, a lot of different kinds of customers. Could you talk about that a little bit? And try, again, let's try to ground this a little bit. Why do people come to you? ADAM NEUMANN: So we like to call them members, not customers. So if you're to-- you can be any one of the above. If you're starting a business, you're one person. You're by yourself. ANDREW NUSCA: Sure. ADAM NEUMANN: It's a hard thing to do. Anybody here who's started a business knows it's very difficult. First thing you need to-- what is my business? Who is funding me? Where am I getting my sales? Who is going to work with me? There are 1,000 questions you need to ask. You come into WeWork. You take a space for $600 a month, and you're already part of a community. You have at least 1,000 other people around you that are ready to help. And because you're all part of the same thing, they're actually excited to do-- to be that. And that's on the smallest level. On the largest level, you might be Salesforce. You might be Facebook. You might be Dell. And you have HQs, headquarters all over the world. You have satellite offices all over the world. And you need these-- you need a solution that's better than just the old way that people used to do it when they build a global business. They might need us also. ANDREW NUSCA: They're coming to you for culture, do you think? Facebook, for example, very kind of well-known culture. We talked about-- I talked with Diane Greene earlier about Google's culture. They come to you because they want different culture, better culture? ADAM NEUMANN: Corporate America in general has a cultural challenge today. And you know it if you just need a churn of employees that are younger than 30. If you just saw all the different things that are happening in the different organizations, you would know that culture America-- culture today in corporate America is a very big deal. Do we give you the culture? We can't, because if you don't have a mission-driven business, we can create a mission for you. But if you have a mission-driven business, then we can help talk about it. We can help make sure that it's communicated, not just through your words and not just to your investors, but also, how does your space feel? What is it all about? Are you part of something greater than yourself? And that, we can help large or small companies with. ANDREW NUSCA: And I felt that. So I visited you folks in one of your New York offices. The culture of WeWork is pretty-- the kind of culture that WeWork has on display is pretty well known. You've got beer taps. You've got fancy offices. You've got small, individual desks. You've got walled-off glass desks. There's a lot of diversity in what you're offering these companies. Why wouldn't they just copy all of the aesthetics? Why wouldn't they install a beer tap in their hallway and put all-glass offices-- it's so in vogue, right? Yeah, let's open office the heck out of our company. REBEKAH NEUMANN: So I think the one thing is you're focusing a little bit on the physical, which is also very important. And a lot of time has been put into that. Our co-founder, Miguel McKelvey, who's a brilliant designer and architect, has helped really kind of mastermind what our spaces look like. But I think you have to take it back a few steps. Adam grew up on a kibbutz, Miguel in a commune with only moms. All the dads took off. And I grew up in New York-- it's not as exciting-- but kind of studying spirituality, Buddhism, yoga, what have you, my entire life. And it's the cross-section of our backgrounds and our interests that I think have kind of led to the ethos and mission of this company. And I think when members come in, they might be looking for free beer or coffee or an office or someone to collaborate with. But once they spend some time, they actually see that there's another energy that's happening there, which is leading to another level of fulfillment and success. And being able to lean on other people who will support you, and who are rooting for you, and who are working all hours of the night, and who understand what it is to wear multiple hats and do multiple things and have many trades, I think that's creating something really meaningful for them. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Insights: WeWork Founders: Community is Our Business

WeWork Founders: Community is Our Business

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Cofounders stress the uniqueness of the culture. 

Cofounders Rebekah Neumann and Adam Neumann stress the uniqueness of their community's culture. 