WeWork founder bounces again with $1bn property mission Stream

Adam Neumann, the ousted founding father of WeWork, is again with a $1bn (£830m) property enterprise after saying he discovered “loads” of classes from the spectacular implosion of the shared workplace house rental firm.

Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley enterprise capital agency that was an early backer of Airbnb, Fb and Skype, introduced in a blogpost that it had invested $350m in Stream, a “community-driven” rental startup based by Neumann.

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, mentioned the fund had determined to spend money on the enterprise, which is concentrating on millennial renters, as a result of Neumann was “a visionary chief who revolutionised the second-largest asset class on the earth – business actual property”.

Neumann, 43, was poised to change into one of many world’s richest folks in 2019, crystallising a private fortune of as a lot as $14bn from the deliberate flotation of WeWork. However in a bruising fortnight he was pressured to tug the float and give up as chief government after a collection of more and more damaging allegations about his private conduct, together with the revelation that he smoked marijuana on a non-public jet, got here to mild.

Andreessen mentioned the story of Neumann and WeWork had been “exhaustively chronicled, analysed, and fictionalised – typically precisely”.

“For all of the power put into protecting the story, it’s usually under-appreciated that just one individual has essentially redesigned the workplace expertise and led a paradigm-changing international firm within the course of: Adam Neumann,” he mentioned.

“We perceive how tough it’s to construct one thing like this and we love seeing repeat-founders construct on previous successes by rising from classes discovered. For Adam, the successes and classes are loads and we’re excited to go on this journey with him and his colleagues constructing the way forward for dwelling.”

The funding in Stream is known to be the biggest Andreessen Horowitz has made this early in an organization’s improvement.

It’s unclear from Stream’s web site what the corporate intends to do. The location consists solely of a touchdown web page with the phrases “Dwell Life in Stream” and “coming 2023”.

Andreessen indicated that Stream would search to reprise Neumann’s imaginative and prescient to create “dorms for adults”. He mentioned that as results of the pandemic “many individuals will stay in locations far-off from the place they work and lots of extra will shift to a hybrid setting”.

“Consequently, they are going to expertise a lot much less, if any, of the in-office social bonding and friendships that native employees get pleasure from,” he mentioned.

“For a lot of of those folks, elevated display screen time and decreased in-person interplay will trigger challenges that aren’t simply restricted to work, equivalent to alienation and loneliness. This isn’t path for anybody and it must be addressed immediately, proper now.”