WeWork Archives - Crunchbase News /tag/wework/ Data-driven reporting on private markets, startups, founders, and investors Wed, 24 Jun 2020 18:42:34 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.5 /wp-content/uploads/cb_news_favicon-150x150.png WeWork Archives - Crunchbase News /tag/wework/ 32 32 Immigrants Launched Lots Of New US Unicorns, But Numbers May Be Headed Lower /venture/immigrants-launched-lots-of-new-us-unicorns-but-numbers-may-be-headed-lower/ Fri, 06 Mar 2020 15:27:10 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=26161 A majority of the have an immigrant as founder or chief executive. But does that still hold true for the current generation of high-valuation startups?

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To answer that question, Crunchbase took a look at founders and CEOs across several groupings of startup unicorns. The research included the most heavily funded private companies, newly minted unicorns and companies that recently crossed the $5 billion valuation mark.

The short answer? Yes, immigrants are still heavily represented in the ranks of U.S. unicorn founders and CEOs. They hail from multiple continents, and are leading companies in sectors from e-commerce to crypto to pharmaceuticals.

The long answer? Yes, but maybe less so. Early data indicates the proportion of high-valuation U.S. startups founded or led by immigrants may be trending down some. One factor is the growth of startup hubs outside the U.S., making it easier for founders to launch companies in their home country. The other, most notorious factor: the hurdles of securing a visa as a would-be startup founder.

“There is no visa specifically for someone who wants to start a company,” according to , founding partner at , a Silicon Valley-based firm that invests in U.S. startups with immigrant founders.

While U.S. student enrollment of foreign nationals roughly doubled from 2007 to 2018, there hasn’t been a corresponding strategy to speed or simplify graduates’ pursuit of a green card, Mehta said. And although that issue predates Trump’s election, the current administration hasn’t helped, deciding not to implement an Obama-era .

Still, a striking percentage of funded private companies that crossed the $1 billion valuation threshold this past year are immigrant founded. Below, we take a look at 19 such companies, along with a look founders’ countries of origin.

We also look at the most heavily funded, highest-valuation private companies overall with immigrant founders and CEOs.

The big picture

If investors are backing fewer immigrant-led U.S. startups, it may be because there are fewer available to back. For the 2018-19 period, U.S. immigration declined to 595,000 people—the lowest level since the 1980s, according to one oft-cited . It’s a level that leaves even some members of the Trump administration’s inner circle concerned that immigration levels are to support economic growth.

Of course, one needn’t be a new immigrant to launch a high-flying startup. Many of the successful founders on our lists above immigrated years or decades before their companies took flight. The lists, overall, include immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children as well as those who came later, commonly to attend universities.

Lastly, we should keep in mind that immigration, like unicorns, venture funding and startup valuations, has historically been rather cyclical. The issues confronting immigrant founders today may very well fade away or morph into something completely different in coming years.

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Austin’s Swivel Raises $8M For More Flexible Office Leases /venture/austins-swivel-raises-8m-for-more-flexible-office-leases/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 13:00:07 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=25502 A little while back, I wrote about how an emerging new category of workplace alternatives are attracting attention from both the venture community and some of commercial real estate’s biggest players.

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One such company is Austin-based , which has developed an agile leasing platform and network. The startup just raised $8 million in Series A funding led by of (who’s also backed the likes of and ). Breyer is contributing $5 million of the capital. , the venture arm of commercial real estate brokerage giant , put up the remaining $3 million. The financing brings Swivel’s to $14.6 million, according to its Crunchbase profile.

Swivel raised an $850,000 seed round in 2016 and then another $1 million in June 2017. In 2018, the company in what Swivel founder and president described as a Seed 2 round.

The startup has been testing its model across Texas, mostly in Austin and some in Dallas and Houston.

“Everything seems to be proven right and working,” Harmon told Crunchbase News. “So we raised this round to scale up nationwide.”

How it works

founded Swivel in late 2016 with some initial incubation capital from . He and Floodgate Co-Founder had started and sold a software company together in the late 1990s called , and decided they wanted to work together again.

They both ,” Harmon said, and felt like the commercial real estate office market needed to be disrupted.

Swivel Founder Scott Harmon

So how does it work? Pre-qualified member companies can contract with Swivel’s landlord partners for turnkey office space on flexible terms with little or no upfront capital expenditure and no lease lock-in.

Landlords use the company’s agile leasing platform to backstop their leases for member companies. (I wrote about a similar startup, Landing, recently that is focused on flexible apartment leases). Using Swivel, leases are typically a 12-month commitment with a maximum of four years.

Clients are able to use Swivel’s software to configure and design the space however they want; most offices are between 3,000 and 10,000 square feet. Companies need only to give 60 to 90 days notice before moving out and then are not charged any penalties or move-out fees, and don’t have to deal with subleasing.

Since its network launch in 2019, Swivel has signed up over 30 landlords representing more than 150 properties across Austin, Dallas and Houston.

What it is and what it’s not

Harmon is quick to point out that unlike other flexible workspace operators such as or , Swivel is not a landlord. It does not lease space.

“We’re more like a VRBO for office space,” he told me. “People who own properties use our technology and platform to lease to new tenants on more flexible terms. Landlords make the money and share their profits with us.”

For example, a landlord can open up two floors in a building specifically to be listed via Swivel. They can charge a (10 to 20 percent higher) price per square foot because of the flexible terms, but it will still come out to about half the cost of a co-working space, Harmon said. Swivel will completely furnish the space, and “the building becomes more valuable,” according to Harmon.

“We work with hundreds of landlords,” Harmon said, “and we allow them to make more money by bringing a different kind of client into their building and providing a new class of service.”

Swivel is also not out to replace commercial real estate brokers, opting instead to partner with them so it saves money on marketing as well. It works out well for all involved, Harmon said.

Looking ahead

Swivel’s target market is tech-enabled companies in their growth phase, which make up about half of the tenants leasing through its platform. (It works with tenants such as Dremio, Graylog, Guideline 401k, hOp, Plivo, Samcart, TalentRobot, and Vertify.)

The process is a more appealing one to tech upstarts that simply prefer a more digital process in general.

“They’re just used to flexibility and that sort of convenience in other parts of their lives,” Harmon said.

But Swivel has also helped a number of multinational companies that require flexibility for their satellite offices.

The company plans to use its new capital primarily to expand across the U.S. in 2020. It is in talks with landlords in Boston, New York, Northern Virginia, Charlotte, N.C., Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Utah, Denver and San Francisco.

“Expansion cities are a finite list and expand based on how our landlord partnerships unfold,” Harmon said. “Landlord partners will determine the order and timing of opening up each market.”

For his part, Breyer believes Swivel’s business model is an ideal approach to help landlords be able to meet the evolving needs of tenants.

“As a VC, one of my mantras [to portfolio companies] is ‘don’t sign anything longer than two years,’ ” Breyer told me. “Real estate hasn’t kept up with that, as the leasing business hasn’t yet been tech-enabled, particularly in very important markets, like Silicon Valley and Austin.”

In general, he also believes flexible leases will become more and more important in general given workforce needs.

“The next generation thinks about flexibility first and foremost,” Breyer told me. “Swivel gives landlords the opportunity to attract the tenants of the future.”

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WeWork Aims To Be Free Cash Flow Positive By 2022 /startups/wework-aims-to-be-free-cash-flow-positive-by-2022/ Tue, 11 Feb 2020 20:27:12 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=25314 laid out a 5-year plan on Tuesday, including goals to be free cash flow positive by 2022 and have $1 billion of free cash flow by 2024.

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The comes as the company closes a $1.75 billion credit line from and soon after WeWork appointed a new CEO, real estate executive Sandeep Mathrani.

As part of the 5-year plan, the company said it expects to post its first-ever quarter with $1 billion in revenue this year. In 2021, it’s aiming to be adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) positive, and in 2022 WeWork’s goal is to be free cash flow positive.

Put simply, free cash flow means a company is “generating more cash than is used to run the business and reinvest to grow the business,” according to .

When WeWork filed its S-1 document with the , it was clear the company was burning cash. You can read more about the state of WeWork’s finances when it filed to go public here. But the summary of its cash situation is that its operations were consuming a lot of cash ($198.7 million in H1 2019), and the company’s investing cash was even more negative ($2.36 billion in H1 2019).

Looking ahead, WeWork is also aiming for 1 million memberships in 2023, and having $1 billion of free cash flow in 2024. The company had more than 662,000 total memberships by the end of last year.

WeWork attempted to go public last fall but had to scrap its IPO after concerns came up about the company’s finances and corporate governance. Since then, its valuation plummeted, former CEO Adam Neumann stepped down (and was reportedly being paid well to do so, though the company’s chairman told Monday that the billion-dollar figure wasn’t true), and took control of the company.

It laid out a turnaround strategy, which included divesting acquired companies that weren’t part of WeWork’s “core business.”

WeWork had 739 locations as of the end of last year, in 140 cities and 37 countries, according to the company.

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Casper Lowers Price Range Ahead Of IPO, Sinking Valuation /startups/casper-lowers-price-range-ahead-of-ipo-sinking-valuation/ Wed, 05 Feb 2020 15:46:04 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=25080 Mattress startup lowered the price range for its shares to between $12 and $13 on Wednesday, slashing the company’s valuation in half before it’s set to begin trading on the public markets Friday.

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Casper set a price range of between $17 and $19 per share last week. That range raised some eyebrows, because even if the company priced its shares at the high end, it would bring Casper’s valuation to about $786.2 million–significantly less than its last private valuation.

After Casper raised its $100 million in March 2019, it was valued at about $1.1 billion. But with the updated price on Wednesday, Casper’s market capitalization would be $514.6 million if it prices at the high end of its range.

When Casper filed its S-1 with the last month, it reported $67.4 million in losses on $312.3 million in revenue for the first nine months of 2019. Revenue grew 20.3 percent from the same period the year prior, and its losses were up about 5 percent during the same period as well. More on Casper’s financials here.

As we wrote earlier, venture-backed startups looking to go public are having something of a moment of reckoning regarding their valuations. After WeWork’s failed IPO and other lackluster public debuts of buzzy unicorns, there have been a lot of questions around valuations of unprofitable startups.

The company raised $339.7 million in funding while private, with backers including and .

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Goldman Sachs To Extend $1.75B Credit Line To WeWork /venture/goldman-sachs-to-extend-1-75b-credit-line-to-wework/ Wed, 18 Dec 2019 21:15:43 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=23538 , the beleaguered co-working and commercial real estate subleasing company, has reportedly secured $1.75 billion in additional debt financing as it plots a path forward following its failed attempt at going public, the departure of its eccentric and controversial co-founder Adam Neumann, layoffs of thousands of employees, and an all-but-total takeover of the business by its largest financier, and its .

This is all to say that 2019 has been a tumultuous year for the company.

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Reuters that the new $1.75 billion comes in the form of a credit line extended by . A statement from WeWork said that “the facility is in the process of syndication and is expected to be available in January.”

The new debt facility replaces existing lines of credit totaling approximately $1.1 billion, . It’s also part of SoftBank Group Corp.’s $9.5 billion capital commitment to WeWork, made in October as the company failed to make its public debut following investor scrutiny of its disclosed financials as well as numerous financial conflicts of interests involving now-former CEO Neumann.

The company has raised over $8 billion in outside equity funding, plus billions more in debt over its existence. The company was once valued at $47 billion. WeWork was valued at roughly $8 billion when SoftBank Group took control of at least 70 percent of the company’s equity in October.

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WeWork’s Layoffs In Context /venture/weworks-layoffs-in-context/ Fri, 22 Nov 2019 15:02:21 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=22644 Morning Markets: WeWork’s layoffs may help the company’s operating profit, but its free cash flow is a different story.

As expected, announced . Some 2,400 positions are impacted thus far, a smaller number than many expected.

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WeWork, temporarily The We Company, is a concern in the midst of a transformation. Starting life as a coworking service, the firm morphed into a Medusa-like agglomeration of ambition, led by its erstwhile CEO . However, after the company filed an infamous S-1 with the SEC as it looked to go public, its CEO was fired and the company’s management shaken up.

As a company, WeWork lost too much money, had little business focus or discipline, all while sporting one of the worst examples of corporate governance the market has seen. Now with new leadership in place, WeWork is limiting its efforts to coworking, shedding unneeded businesses, and trying to cut its losses.

But how much can 2,400 layoffs save the firm? WeWork posted a staggering $1.37 billion operating loss in the first half of 2019. Surely the layoffs can’t make much of a dent against that sum?

However, that isn’t the figure I’d focus on. Instead, if we observe WeWork’s cash flow statement we can see that the firm’s operating activities only burned $198.7 million in H1 2019. That’s a figure that 2,400 layoffs could begin to staunch. The firm’s comical -$1.47 billion in investing cash flow over the same period can be reined in separately.

How far the company is willing to curtail investing in new properties (and thus limiting growth) isn’t clear; the company’s plans still call for extensive buildouts.

Summing, it isn’t impossible to see that the WeWork layoffs will reduce its operating cash burn. But the firm will need to dial back build outs to get its figures where Wall Street wants them it seems. But it’s not all bad news, WeWork claims that its offices make more money over time, and it has lots of space still maturing. Perhaps those locations can provide enough growth to allow the firm to ratchet back spend and get its figures closer to the realm of sanity.

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Unpacking WeWork’s Latest Financial Results /venture/unpacking-weworks-latest-financial-results/ Thu, 14 Nov 2019 15:09:53 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=22327 Morning Markets: WeWork’s financials didn’t radically change in Q3. That’s a problem.

How fast can turn its business around? Unsurprisingly given the timing of its pulled IPO (Sept. 30), the company wasn’t able to materially change the outline of its financial progress in the third quarter. That fact gives us a quarterly-window into the company’s old, high-burn growth model that brought it capital and acclaim at first and derision later.

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According to , WeWork’s revenue expanded by 94 percent on a year-over-year basis in Q3 2019 to $934 million. That’s a good result. On the other side of the coin, WeWork lost $1.25 billion on a net basis in the same quarter. The Journal also noted that the documents it reviewed detailed WeWork as reporting a “$197 million charge related to asset impairments as it wrote down the costs of businesses it acquired” and costs regarding the full saga of its IPO of $83 million.

According of the figures, the company’s run-rate was up 108 percent from the year-ago period.

The $1.25 billion net loss figure could be expanded by so-called one-time costs. CNN WeWork’s cash on hand was $2 billion “as of September 30.” (WeWork’s prior investors apart from the Vision Fund include , , , proper, , , among others.)

Even for WeWork, losing $1.25 billion in a quarter is shocking. The firm lost $1.9 billion in all of 2018, for example. To add to your understanding of the numbers, here’s what the company’s last few quarters look like regarding revenue and net losses (bear in mind that the company’s negative free cash flow is different from the shown net loss figure):

It’s now more surprising that WeWork got as far as it did on the path to going public than it is a shock that the company had to withdraw its prospectus. WeWork’s results are staggeringly negative, showing a business that is ravenous for cash and is more than willing to spend more than $2 in a quarter for every $1 in revenue that it brought in.

Perhaps at an early-stage startup just taking its product to market, similarly scaled losses could be tolerated; but for a company as large as WeWork the deficits are unsustainable and speak to operational weakness.

Let’s recall the company’s turnaround plan that it hopes will be able to shake-up its operating losses and allow it another shot at going public.

The Future

WeWork has a four-part plan to right its ship: shed acquisitions not related to its “core business,” cut employee headcount, add more desks, and work on its internal and external relationships. WeWork said in a presentation to investors last month that it would get rid of some of its 18 or so investments and acquisitions (, and were among the companies listed to be divested).

New executive chairman has told employees that layoffs would happen, though he did not specify how many people would be cut from WeWork’s workforce of about 15,000 people.

The company told investors recently that it added 115,000 desks during Q3, according to , and said in its presentation last month that it expects “record highs” for desk openings in Q4. As for relationships that WeWork needs to fix, we can only speculate which ones those will be, given the chaos of the past couple of months. We can’t imagine investors and employees, for example, are happy with the situation.

And if WeWork didn’t have enough trouble winning back investor, employee, and public confidence, its bonds’ value . Sometimes things really do have to get worse before they can get better.

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Public Investors Signal It’s A Buyer’s Market For Money-Losing Startups /startups/public-investors-signal-its-a-buyers-market-for-money-losing-startups/ Fri, 08 Nov 2019 13:29:52 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=22081 There is an old joke about a new bar in Silicon Valley. On opening day, six thousand people come. No one buys a drink. The business is declared a roaring success.

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The joke is an homage to the oft-mocked truth that in the world of high-valuation startups, investors have historically favored growth above profits. Particularly in nascent sectors where early mover advantage matters, VCs have been all-too-willing to bankroll persistent losses in the pursuit of market dominance.

The expectation is that a least one of two things will happen. Ideally, the startup will get profitable as it grows up. If not that, then it will keep growing and public investors will eventually bankroll it at an even higher valuation.

In recent months, the WeWork fiasco, post-IPO performance, and a host of indicators of slowing growth in the unicorn set have upended these expectations. Public investors, it turns out, are not always willing to pay astronomical multiples for money-losing companies just because founders, VCs and investment bankers spin a great narrative about their world-changing potential.

That brings us to where we are now: VCs are talking about things like revenue quality, gross margins, and unit economics. Even SoftBank is a more cautious investment strategy should it manage to go forward with a second Vision Fund. The firm, the largest backer of Uber and , now wants to concentrate on companies with clearer pathways to profitability and public offerings.

It’s easy to see how we got here. Too many startups raised too much money to scale businesses with too many losses. While it’s easy to poke fun at imploded unicorns and their masterpieces of financial obfuscation, this is not a clearly helpful exercise.

Instead, we thought it might be useful to look for some signal amid the noise. That is: What level and type of losses are acceptable to public market investors these days? And how might those translate into good or at least non-catastrophic exits for the current pipeline of high valuation venture-backed startups?

Here are a few of the points public investors are making with wallets:

We Make The Valuations, Not You: At some points in the business cycle, startup IPOs are essentially a seller’s market. Public investors are eager for new offerings, and it’s relatively easy for IPO underwriters to sell shares their at desired price. First-day pops can be pretty common.

In a buyer’s market, investors are pickier about offers. There’s diminished urgency about getting in early, and a sense that wait-and-see could be the better strategy. It’s logical to feel this way when by simply waiting a few weeks, even an enthusiastic buyer of Uber, , and others could snap up shares at a steep discount to opening day prices.

Clean Up Your Numbers Before You Come Knocking: Continuing with the buyer’s market theme, let’s make an analogy to real estate. In a hot seller’s market, one can list a home with ugly pink bathroom tiles and still get multiple good offers in a few days. In a buyer’s market, it might sit for a while, and even interested buyers might demand a discount or some upgrades.

In recent months, public market investors have seen a lot of IPO filings with the financial equivalents of ugly pink bathroom tile. This includes things like meager growth coupled with massive losses, obfuscatory financial statements, a shrinking market, and even the ability to post negative gross margins while charging several dollars for a cup of coffee.

Now, we’re not in a full-on buyer’s market at the moment. U.S. indexes are still trading near multi-year highs, the IPO window is open, and public investors are looking for new growth stories. But while some balance sheet ugliness remains tolerable, do expect public investors to demand a discount.

Software Multiples Require Software Margins: This last point has been echoed by several in the venture business, and it makes sense. The unicorn boom has been replete with companies that pursued some of hybrid software-meets-real-world business model. There’s Uber – offering an app for the labor-intensive tasks of driving people and delivering their food. There’s – boosting returns on exercise equipment by adding connectivity and subscription classes. And so on.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with hybrid models. Their revenue multiples, however, can’t be expected to compare to say, a SaaS company that incurs little-to-no cost for each additional customer. Markets are in the process of sorting out just what kinds of multiples these hybrid models should command. Early indications are they’re reasonable compared to non-software sectors, but not the lofty multiples venture investors originally targeted.

Losing Control Of The Narrative

Looking at the emerging standards of public market investors, a casual observer might say they seem pretty sensible.

For the unicorn private investor crowd, however, it’s a more ominous development than it seems. That’s because the entire unicorn phenomenon – the philosophy of scale fast and break things, the , scooters everywhere, massive losses, Adam Neumann – is predicated on being the opposite of sensible. The broad goal behind all of high-valuation startup dealmaking is to hopefully back that handful of entrepreneurs just crazy enough to be brilliant.

For now, expect the startup crowd to talk about how a successful bar investment now includes selling some drinks, preferably at more than it costs to pour them. To anyone not in Silicon Valley, this would sound perfectly normal. But for the venture crowd, it’s a far cry from big crowds and empty glasses.

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What Cloudflare’s Earnings Tell Us About High-Growth, Unprofitable Unicorns /venture/what-cloudflares-earnings-tell-us-about-high-growth-unprofitable-unicorns/ Thu, 07 Nov 2019 22:14:39 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=22048 Update: After rising in after-hours trading, shares of Cloudflare are down as we prep the Daily for publication. Take the final section of this post with needed salt given the market’s seemingly changed mood.

We’ve been tracking the revenue multiples of SaaS companies broadly, and the 2019 IPO class more specifically over the past few months. We’re working to understand why some companies have solid IPO pricing runs, only to struggle as public companies. , , , and others have suffered from share-price declines from early highs, for example.

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Today , another 2019 IPO, reported its first set of earnings. Let’s quickly peek at the figures, examine the market’s reaction, and then tie the package back to our revenue multiple question and see what we can suss out for private companies.

Q3

In the , Cloudflare’s revenue grew around 48 percent to $73.9 million from a year-ago result of $50.1 million. The company’s gross margin came in at 78.3 percent, with the firm noting a “non-GAAP gross-margin of 78.9” percent in the same period. Both are improvements over year-ago results.

The company’s GAAP loss expanded ($40.9 million in Q3 2019 compared to $38.0 million in Q3 2018). Its adjusted losses worsened as well, with the firm losing $18.5 million on an adjusted basis in the quarter, up from $13.4 million in the year-ago period.

Given that the company’s revenue growth came in ahead of expectations ( tally had an average expectation of $69.7 million listed before the report) it’s doubtful that Cloudflare will be dinged too much for a small boost to its adjusted profit. If you are going to lose more money over time, coming in ahead of growth expectations is always welcome.

Cloudflare, therefore, is a company with strong, software margins that are improving as it grows more quickly than expected; those tailwinds are partially offset by rising losses. Now let’s talk reaction.

Multiples And Context

Cloudflare stock is currently up just under 6 percent to $16.83 per share. Recall that Cloudflare priced at $15 per share, above its raised range (the firm’s initial pricing estimate looks somewhat modest in contrast to recent results).

Now, to the things that we care about. First, know that Cloudflare is a richly-valued, growth stock. Going into earnings, data indicated that Cloudflare had a trailing revenue multiple of 16. The company’s new, record quarter (in revenue terms) will limit that figure some, but it remains richly-valued.

The lesson for late-stage companies eyeing Cloudflare’s recent IPO (a success in terms of pricing and initial market response) is that you can still lose increasing amounts of money in 2019 (on a GAAP and adjusted basis) provided that you have high gross margins and quicker growth than the market expects.

That’s a very risk-on note, mind. And this result, coming on the heels of the WeWork implosion, pushes back against the new idea (from private investors no less) that growth is out of favor and profits ascendant.

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The Best Slides From SoftBank’s WeWork-Focused Earnings Report /venture/the-best-slides-from-softbanks-wework-focused-earnings-report/ Thu, 07 Nov 2019 15:23:23 +0000 http://news.crunchbase.com/?p=22027 Morning Markets: SoftBank’s earnings report wasn’t great as the bill from WeWork’s implosion came due. However, SoftBank has a plan for the future and it’s here to explain it to you.

We’ll start with my (Alex’s) take and then see what Sophia has to say.

I want to be very clear upfront that I love latest slideshow. I say that with no malice, no sarcasm, nothing. I mean it.

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The deck came out as part of the Japanese conglomerate’s earnings report that we touched on yesterday, the same report that detailed the cost of stumble and quick staunching. SoftBank’s has expressed public contrition about the investment but appears optimistic about not only the broader portfolio () but also the chances of WeWork to work out.

You can see the argument in the slides, which you can read in entirety . I recommend it. For the time-strapped, I’ve included the best (from our view) in terms of their bald honesty, simple distillation of business truths, and optimism. Those are three of my favorite things, so perhaps it isn’t a huge surprise that I dig what SoftBank presented.

Without further ado, let’s PowerPoint.

WeWork

Let’s start with some WeWork-related slides. Here’s a piece of the deck detailing an issue that WeWork had heading into its IPO:

That chart is valid, honest, and correctly color-coded to represent increasingly negative EBITDA, something that WeWork has generated oceans of through time.

Why did the company generate so much negative EBITDA? Fundamentally WeWork was a low gross-margin business that had high operating costs, leading to sharply negative adjusted profit. SoftBank spells this out:

Fact-check? True.

To solve the issues SoftBank intends to boost profit while limiting operating expenses. That’s a good recipe frankly, and probably the only way that WeWork can survive. To pull that off, SoftBank details three moves, namely stopping the build-out of new coworking spaces, “cost reduction,” and the “sort[ing] out [of] unprofitable business[es].”

The result of which the company hopes will lead to this sort of result:

I don’t raise that chart merely to underline how much I enjoy it. The rising gross profit line forms the crux of SoftBank’s argument regarding turning WeWork around. Later, the company shows the impact of lowering operating expenses against rising gross profit:

What’s the result? The flip of our first chart:

Other Brilliance

This column is supposed to be short, pithy, and useful. In that spirit let’s limit ourselves to just three more slides.

The first of our final three details a business concept that I’ve actually tried to explain using words to little effect. Sometimes images are better than words, something that pains me to admit as a writer. Still, this is a slide I intend on saving and using later on (though with FCF swapped out):

For our penultimate chart, an image from the middle of an argument about the future of the value of AI-related companies, using historical Internet trends paired with market cap data to make a point about growth. The argument in the following chart is easy to grok: Internet traffic (use) and Internet company market cap (resulting value) have risen in tandem.

And, as the amount of data stored in the world goes up (magenta line, right chart) the value of AI companies will rise (green line, right chart). This probably isn’t untrue. But what makes the chart fun is that this is the sort of thing you see from companies at Y Combinator, brimming with enthusiasm for the future. You don’t usually get this sort of stoked-ness from folks who might have another $100 billion to invest in short order.

Finally, the best slide of all. Son and SoftBank and the Vision Fund aren’t going to let the WeWork fiasco slow them done. Instead, it’s Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!

Sophia’s Take

First of all, I am also a fan of the honesty in this slideshow. I don’t want to give SoftBank too much credit for doing what they’re supposed to do (i.e. not lying to their shareholders), but I do appreciate that they don’t mince words, perhaps best illustrated with this slide:

Kudos for not calling it the “WeWork opportunity.”

Anyway, I found the slides mentioned above interesting as well, but it was also useful to see what SoftBank had planned for turning WeWork around. Much of what’s in a slide that Alex summarized above, which confirms earlier reporting by various news outlets.

The first point seemingly confirms earlier reporting by the that WeWork planned on scaling back in some areas (FT reported that it would be China, India and Latin America, and the company would focus on U.S., European, and Japanese operations).

The second point we’ve known was coming, we just don’t know how big it’s coming. Layoffs, that is. WeWork’s new executive chairman Marcelo Claure said in an all-hands meeting that there would be layoffs, but he was unsure how many people would be cut. News reports indicate that it could be up to 4,000 people of WeWork’s approximately 15,000-person company. In what other way SoftBank intends on cutting costs besides slashing the headcount is unclear. Maybe they’ll cut perks as well.

The third point makes a lot of sense — WeWork needs to get rid of its unprofitable businesses if it ever wants to turn a profit. According to Crunchbase, WeWork has 18 companies to date (more here on the company’s old acquisition methods). That’s a lot for startup, especially one that’s burning cash like WeWork. It’d be more helpful to see what parts of the business SoftBank was considering reducing or cutting, but that’s for another slideshow.

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