Evidence receipt / commitment
Published · transcript-backedPacky McCormick: commitment
3 Dec 2021 Acquired Not Boring (with Packy McCormick)
“We read a bunch of Ben Thompson and we read Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, and we're like, we're going to turn this company around using strategy. So we wrote this detailed memo full of his data science and my crazy ideas on how we can actually turn the company around by adding monthly space and competing more at the margins with companies like WeWork and Knotel.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Packy McCormick
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- commitment
- Recorded
- 3 Dec 2021
- Publisher
- Acquired
Transcript context
…The catch was there was actually demand for Uber. There was demand for Uber. Uber supply could come and go and Uber didn't have to pay them anything. We signed five-year leases and did construction, and so it's just a very different situation. So we added a space per day in 2016, 2017 for about a year there. Every day, we were launching a new space. So we were deeply oversupplied. Our gross margins were awful I think, -25%. Then me and Ben Rollert, who now runs a company called Composer which just launched—congrats, Ben—who was kind of our head of data science at the time. He decided to spend a Christmas break just figuring out how we could fix this thing. We had always had this thing where we only did short-term rentals, we only did meetings, whatever. But we just went deep into the content. We read a bunch of Ben Thompson and we read Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, and we're like, we're going to turn this company around using strategy. So we wrote this detailed memo full of his data science and my crazy ideas on how we can actually turn the company around by adding monthly space and competing more at the margins with companies like WeWork and Knotel. Then we sent it out to the company and we got back. We got the blessing of the exec team. We sent it out to the company. Did it have gifs and Taylor Swift references in it?…
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