WeWork - What Investors Can Take Away from the Recent Meltdown
What transpired at WeWork over the last few months is among the most dramatic meltdowns in private investing history. From a sky-high valuation in January to a scrapped IPO in September culminating in an emergency rescue and takeover by investor Soft Bank, there are plenty of missteps worth studying. Given the magnitude and publicity of this debacle, we thought it would be prudent to highlight what investors can take away from the fallout.
There are numerous tenants of investing that can be learned or reinforced by studying WeWork, but we’ll focus on two:
- Beware of “Growth at Any Cost”
o Profitability has to matter at some point, and investors finally drew a line in 2019 with WeWork.
- Invest in assets that can be reasonably valued
o There was no way for investors to accurately value the business because it had a record of increasingly large losses and little prospect of future profits
o In our opinion, because the company was not logically valued, WeWork cannot be thought of in the context of an investment, but rather a speculation.
Before discussing each of these takeaways further, it’s helpful to review the company’s background, rapid rise, and quicker fall in a bit more detail.
Background
Adam Neumann founded WeWork in 2010 in New York City. WeWork is a commercial real estate company that secures office space through purchases or long-term leases. The company renovates the spaces, usually into trendy open format co-working spaces (often outfitted with beer fountains and fruit infused water stations) and subsequently leases the properties on a short-term basis to tenants.
It’s worth noting that WeWork was not the first real estate company to enter into long-term leases and turn around to lease them to short term tenants. IWG, better known for their brand Regus, is a similar real estate company that follows the same model. Regus underwent a chapter 11 bankruptcy restructuring after the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s and many short-term tenants vacated their offices while Regus was left holding the proverbial bag in the form of long-term leases they could not service. More on Regus later.
As WeWork grew, Neumann spoke ambitiously about his desire to “elevate the consciousness of the world” and become the world’s first trillionaire.
From 2010 to 2019, funding rounds by the likes of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Hony Capital and SoftBank’s Vision Fund allowed the company to aggressively expand by buying and renovating new properties. Valuations for the company during these subsequent rounds rose dramatically, reaching $10B in 2016, $20B in 2017, and a staggering $47B by early 2019. Meanwhile, revenue consistently grew by 100%+ annually, with growing losses following suit. From 2017 to 2018 annual revenues grew from $886M to $1.8B, and annual losses ballooned from $883M to $1.6B.
With WeWork burning through cash at an alarming rate, the business needed to go public to raise $9B ($3B in an equity offering with $6B of debt financing tied to the IPO) in the second half of 2019. After disclosing details in IPO filings regarding the company’s governance (which revealed apparent self-dealing and conflicts of interest) and ugly financials, investors had no appetite for the deal, especially at sky-high valuations (WeWork’s valuation at $47B represented 26x the previous year’s revenue!). IPO valuations sought by the company’s investment banks were slashed, from upwards of $80B at the start of 2019 to below $20B by the end of the summer. In October, amidst the plummeting valuations and mounting pressure from investors, WeWork’s board called off the IPO, ousted CEO Adam Neumann who ceded majority control through a rescue investment from SoftBank which valued the company at less than $8B (recall the company was valued at $47B in January).
SoftBank is now leading a major restructuring of the company, terminating between 2,000 – 3,000 employees, selling off noncore assets, and halting international growth initiatives in an effort to save the company and their $10B+ investment. Quite a dramatic downfall for a Silicon Valley darling – roughly $40B of equity erased in a few months – especially considering nothing materially changed about WeWork’s business model during that time period.
The chart below summarize the valuations over the last decade at WeWork.
So, what investors can learn from this rapid unraveling?
Beware of “Growth at Any Cost” Investments
“Growth before profits” has seemingly long been a mantra of Silicon Valley investors. This motto has never been more true leading into 2019. Many will point to the dominant tech firms of today and the fact that Google, Amazon, Facebook, and others focused on growth rather than profitability in the years after their founding. While this is true to an extent, the size of the losses and length of time before profitability should be reviewed before making comparisons to today’s “Unicorns” (privately held start-ups valued in excess of $1B).
As seen in the chart to the right, Apple, Facebook, and Google were all profitable within 5 years of their founding, and well before going public. Amazon took 9 years before turning a profit, but reported significantly narrower losses while painting a realistic path to profitability along the way.
After nearly 10 years of rapid growth and mounting losses, investors finally woke up and questioned whether WeWork’s business model was sustainable.
WeWork demonstrated many signs of “empire building”, when companies put an emphasis on growing larger with little attention paid to profits. It’s tough to find an example of this strategy working out in the long-run. The business quickly expanded into non-core areas of business such as Rise by We (a luxury gym), WeGrow (a private school), WeLive (a co-living concept) and made a slew of investments in other startups. With no real rhyme or reason to the growth, the only constant at WeWork was the desire for “more”.
For those paying attention to Neumann’s behavior, they noticed he did little to quell fears that the company was focused on being bigger rather than better. While his business was bleeding money Neumann spent an estimated $90M amassing six personal properties around the country, and splurged on a company-owned $60M Gulfstream G650 private jet. Compare this approach to Warren Buffet, one of the world’s wealthiest people with a net worth orders of magnitudes greater than Neumann’s. Buffett has lived in the same modest home in Omaha Nebraska since 1958, estimated to be worth around $650K. Who would you rather have looking after your capital?
WeWork was crafted in Neumann’s image, and whether reviewing his business or personal decisions, it was clear getting bigger, faster, was important while making sound financial decisions was not.
Invest in assets that can be reasonably valued
Investing entails laying out cash now with the expectation of receiving more cash in the future, discounting the future cash into today’s dollars, and weighing it against other options. As discussed in a previous post, it is critical to be able to reasonably estimate what a company will earn in the future in order to come up with a realistic valuation. Reviewing WeWork’s results, one can only wonder what assumptions investors were operating under to assign a $47B valuation to the company. Results from 2016 to 2018 were as follows:
- 2016: net loss of $429M on $436M in revenue
- 2017: net loss of $890M on $886M in revenue
- 2018: net loss of $1.6B on $1.8B in revenue
Even taking a look at losses after noncash expenses point to no signs of operating leverage or future profitability.
No matter how it’s viewed, it’s very hard to envision WeWork turning a profit anytime soon and therefore nearly impossible to value. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the public markets found little chance of future profitability, and as such could not assign a valuation to the business other than “a lot lower than $47B”.
As mentioned earlier, Regus operates a very comparable business model with nearly identical revenues. IWG (Regus’ parent company) netted roughly a $200M operating profit in 2018 and sports a market cap of roughly $4.5B – ten times smaller than where WeWork was valued in January. Some have argued that WeWork should command a premium valuation given the rapid growth compared to Regus. The problem is that revenue growth is value-destructive when margins are negative! No logical investor should be willing to pay a premium for revenue growth when it comes at a negative (seemingly perpetual) margin.
The markets struggling to come up with a valuation for WeWork resulted in an 80% reduction in equity value in a matter of months leading to billions of dollars in losses for investors and thousands of employees being laid off.
WeWork’s valuation history seems to be a prime example of the “Greater Fool Theory”. Under this theory – “investments” are made on the premise that someone else will pay more for an asset than you did. Who cares if you overpay when someone else will surely overpay by more later? These situations can work out well until the last investor buys in at a valuation so high there are no fools left. SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son has made brilliant investments in his past, but appeared to be the greater fool with WeWork.
Turning back to Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, it is inconceivable that Berkshire’s stock could lose 80% of its market value in the blink of an eye because the valuation is backstopped by billions of dollars of earnings from a group of top-of-the-line businesses. If Berkshire were somehow hypothetically to lose 80% of its market value and trade at something like 3x earnings, it would last mere moments as investors race to scoop up the bargain.
If someone were to ask us what we think WeWork is worth, we would respond by saying “I don’t know”, and move on to the next idea. We find it much easier to sleep at night owning businesses whose valuations are based on cold hard cash, not the hope of someone paying more for our asset in the future.
Summary
We are intrigued by WeWork because in many ways it is the antithesis of what we look for in an investment. To refresh, we seek investments that:
1) We understand
2) Have a demonstrated and enduring competitive advantage
3) Have a resilient balance sheet
4) Have honest and able management who run the company for the benefit of the shareholders
5) Can be purchased for a reasonable price that affords a margin of safety
While WeWork’s business was easy enough to understand, it’s evident that to us the company is the exact opposite of criteria 2-5. Some of the most valuable lessons can be learned from others’ mistakes, which is why we think it wise to study what happens when investments go south. All of these mistakes will surely be repeated in the future by some, but can be avoided by those that remember the underlying causes of shareholder pain that investments like WeWork have created.
November 12, 2019
Sources:
https://www.wsj.com/search/term.html?KEYWORDS=unicorns&page=3
https://www.wsj.com/video/weworks-risky-business-model-explained/E80A0AE7-C9EF-4C4A-B609-00698829FEE0.html?mod=searchresults&page=11&pos=3
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wework-is-valued-10-times-greater-than-this-profitable-public-rival-11566298801?mod=searchresults&page=11&pos=8
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-tech-unicorns-are-raking-in-cash-but-losing-big-money-11553857200
https://www.businessinsider.com/can-wework-be-profitable-ipo-financials-2019-8