Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
47 published records
01 / belief
“I think at this point, you could say that the old valuation models that we for most of these companies is value this, it’s a Series A, value this.”
02 / uncertainty
“I don’t know whether they’re officially signing lease or not, but certainly had the engine running.”
03 / belief
“You mean in terms of the lead? I think two things, New York-based, but also think about that.”
04 / uncertainty
“There we have it. We don’t know who did, somebody did. The end of all of this is that the company is now running really on fumes.”
05 / uncertainty
“” When you call SoftBank, I don’t know if we haven’t determined or no comment, but for whatever reason they’re claiming they’re not controlling this.”
06 / belief
“I believe by 2014, WeWork had become the single largest lessor of new available commercial square footage in New York City.”
07 / belief
“I have been told that there were certain people who got actual stock grants, which is different than options, just were handed stock basically free in lieu of cash. I doubt that was very much.”
08 / belief
“What we do know is that by the time we get to now, he has, I believe, it’s a $500 million loan facility personally from JP Morgan backed by his WeWork shares, which is effectively a way to be selling without actually selling your shares.”
09 / belief
“I think in many ways once this came out in the IPO, filing this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
10 / commitment
“Here on this episode, we will dive into the existential question of, if WeWork, a once $47 billion company, can be saved by SoftBank's effective acquisition of the company.”
11 / commitment
“I’m sure we will, well if the cash last that long. Listeners, thank you for going on this journey with us.”
12 / belief
“One thing, I think, to really keep in mind, they have $100 billion to put to work.”
13 / commitment
“Think of DoorDash, think of Uber. It has been that no matter what the industry is, if you buy market share, you can suffer the losses, we will make money eventually.”
14 / belief
“I think that’s part of it but it’s also if you’re Masa, SoftBank looks at what they believe are transformational shift in how people either live or work.”
15 / belief
“If not 20, he has at least 10. I believe he still has 10. He still controls the votes as of two days ago.”
16 / commitment
“I will say that there is an ongoing question of why they didn’t let JPMorgan do the bailout.”
17 / belief
“We were thinking about how to frame this and talk with Dan a little bit before. I think what we decided to go with, which is true, is this is a tragedy.”
18 / uncertainty
“I don’t know exactly how much capital they’ve deployed out of Vision Fund I at this point, but they’re like, “We want to raise fund, too.”
19 / belief
“Unfortunately, the switch that flipped, I think, was more in Adam than in the business.”
20 / belief
“I think the real reason is—pure speculation—I don’t think SoftBank wants to consolidate WeWork’s financials on their balance sheet.”
21 / uncertainty
“In fact, he goes to a party at his own apartment, as per the research here. Dan, I don't know if you saw this or remember this.”
22 / commitment
“As we will learn later, he has two people on the board of directors, but they have as much control over financial decisions there as my kid does in my house.”
23 / belief
“SoftBank does end up investing corporate, I believe, not the Vision Fund, $2 billion in WeWork at this point in time.”
24 / commitment
“Search SoftBank in your Acquired feed. And listeners, we will see you next time.”
25 / commitment
“People weren't building real tech companies in New York. We will continue on that.”
26 / belief
“Is someone actually saying, “Well, if they continue growing at this rate for X years and we’re looking at our net operating margin, we think there are some chances to generate a billion-and-a-half in cash flows.”
27 / commitment
“Not about antitrust. They got through antitrust, but about a dozen state attorney generals are suing the block, so we will see.”
28 / uncertainty
“Again, we don’t know for sure. Anyway, the two of them decided right around the same time, going back to the Greendesk environmental roots of the company, they really should ban meat.”
29 / belief
“I think you could argue then that the valuations for the tech venture capital community look a lot like what you said, but I can imagine Goldman, JP Morgan, they don’t do this.”
30 / prediction
“A huge upfront infrastructure spend and you will get your money, basically recurring revenue year after year. It will take a while to get that back but then eventually, it’s a lot of money down the road and it’s recurring.”
31 / belief
“I think the only guaranteed outcome here is that the SEC is going to have lots of job openings and guaranteed employment for a number of years, at least the New York office of the SEC.”
32 / observation
“” Masa says, “Yes. The problem is you’re not crazy enough.” Dan, we talked about this as a prep for this.”
33 / belief
“I’m trying to think of Brooklyn. I’m trying to identify in my mind, the first windmill I’ve seen there.”
34 / belief
“Every single company I think I ever talked to tells me that even though they’re losing a lot of money, their unit economics are fantastic.”
35 / belief
“I remember covering cable companies and the history of cable companies, as we’ve discussed a little bit on Acquired, was like nobody believed in them during the 80s and 90s when they were incurring huge losses doing all this build out of laying the cable, laying the pipes into consumer’s homes, but then the switch flipped, exactly like you said, Dan, and then they became cash flow monsters and people love them. So, I think a lot of this bad here was the same thing that’s going to happen in WeWork.”
36 / belief
“The Craigslist postings that they’re making are just getting all this demand and I believe within a month, they have the space pretty much booked up.”
37 / evaluation
“An app company can disappear just like that. There is a scandal or it doesn’t work, there is no product market fit.”
38 / evaluation
“WeWork was the same way and WeWork should have been able to because WeWork have been saying things over the years, again like Uber in mature markets where they have been X number of years or had X number of buildings, we were building profitable.”
39 / evaluation
“” I don’t think that was the breaking point of that deal, but that was something I always heard from Adam’s people internally at WeWork was, that he always felt the reporting on that was wrong because “he was never, ever going to give up control in the SoftBank deal.”
40 / evaluation
“Adam, of course, had Miguel as his co-founder. It’s now obfuscated because they have their shares in an LLC, but I believe Adam always had a greater economic percentage of the company than Miguel.”
41 / evaluation
“People showed up because what they were really doing was they were selling a culture, they were selling a workspace feel, design, and culture.”
42 / prediction
“For example, Travis Kalanick, I think, owned like 6% of Uber when he got booted, around 6%.”
43 / evaluation
“There’s a Forbes article a couple of years later in the early days of WeWork and they say, “Sort of like Airbnb but maybe a better analogy is like an airline operator,” because really, what they’re trying to do is take a physical asset and squeeze as many people into it.”
44 / evaluation
“The landlord says, “Man, this is becoming a big part of my business.” It’s unclear to me if he offered to buy or they offered to sell them, but the landlord buys Greendesk from Adam and Miguel for $3 million, which is pretty great.”
45 / evaluation
“And then he decided to I go over the top. That’s why he’s so unusual and I would say with this, he might look out and say, “Things are really bad right now, but there is a business.”
46 / evaluation
“If the first one doesn’t work, they will come up with another way to make the calculation. But there is some reasonableness to it because you think about if you think about WeWork, the issue was always they had to spend a lot of money upfront.”
47 / evaluation
“Adam, at this point, is very wealthy on paper, but as they keep raising money, it’s unclear exactly the method by which he did this.”