WeWork founder Adam Neumann's score of a gargantuan new venture-capital investment shows that Silicon Valley's love affair with free-wheeling, big-spending startup founders remains hot — even in a down market.
Driving the news: Andreessen Horowitz announced Monday it would fund Neumann's Flow —a real-estate venture aimed at "disrupting" the residential real-estate rental market the way WeWork set out to reinvent commercial office space — to the tune of $350M.
Neumann fell from grace in 2019 and took WeWork's IPO down with him after press reports of a pot party on a private jet, accusations of a culture of sexual harassment and concerns about potential self-dealing alienated investors and the company's board.
In a matter of weeks, the firm's valuation fell from a high of $48B to roughly $8B. Within a couple of years, you could watch the whole emblematic saga — in lightly fictionalized, binge-worthy form on Apple TV+, or in a Hulu documentary.
Yes, but: Whatever it was that made Neumann unfit to lead the trendy coworking-space giant didn't cause anyone to flinch at Andreessen Horowitz, which described its investment in Flow as the largest single check it has ever paid into an investment round, per the New York Times.
Why it matters: Neumann's comeback shows that the people who direct tech capital still believe the industry's most precious resources are entrepreneurial experience and epic-scale chutzpah.
"We are thrilled by the scope and aspiration of this project...only...
Read Full Story: https://www.axios.com/2022/08/16/founder-cult-adam-neumann-startups
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