Welcome to WeWork India’s future
From the promise of a billion-dollar-plus exit to now having to run WeWork India for longer than it planned, Embassy’s fortunes have changed rapidly thanks to We Co.’s predicament
Do you remember your first office?
It was a long time back, but I still have vivid memories of mine. It was a small hole-in-the-wall office with rickety plastic chairs and creaky tables. To get my daily fix of “cutting” chai, I had to walk down to the corner tapri.
I have come a long way since then. I now have a comfortable air-conditioned office with tea served to my seat twice a day.
But I realised just how much further I need to go in terms of office spaces when I visited a friend at his co-working facility provided by WeWork.
The seats at this co-working space would put Herman Miller’s Aeron chair to shame. The conference facilities were only one degree removed from the mega-villain’s lair that you get to see in a James Bond flick. And forget tea, you have not just beer on tap but several other fancy hipster beverages on demand, 24 by 7.
All for just $150 a month.
At that time, I had only one question — how in the world can WeWork afford to provide all this for such a low price?
It is a question that several others have also asked in the last month or so.
The answers that they got were not quite satisfactory — so much so, that the planned WeWork IPO was called off, and its messianic founder, Adam Neumann was replaced by…wait for it…a new man.
But cringey puns notwithstanding, WeWork’s fate and future hold enormous import for multiple reasons. While a lot of newsprint has been expended on WeWork’s IPO, not enough has been written about the company’s efforts in India — an intriguing tale that involves a business model that is unlike what it follows in the rest of the world. It also features India’s 28th richest man in the centre of it all.
Read Arundhati’s tale on WeWork’s travails in India and how it affects the broader co-working ecosystem here: https://the-ken.com/story/embassy-picking-up-pieces-for-wework-india/
This excerpt was first sent as a part of The Ken’s daily morning emailers on 30th September 2019, written by Sumanth Raghavendra.
The Ken is a subscription-based digital publication headquartered out of Bengaluru, India. It publishes one in-depth analytical story everyday about start-ups, technology, healthcare and science with an India-specific lens.
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