[imagesource: Angus Mordant / Bloomberg News]

Stories about former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann’s wanton spending and erratic behaviour on his private jet have become the stuff of legend.

As a quick refresher, the company went from being the darling of the venture capital world, with a market value of around $47 billion, to unravelling and requiring a bailout in a matter of years.

Today, WeWork is worth roughly $4,3 billion and Neumann, who left the company in 2019, exited with a package reportedly worth $1,7 billion.

I wonder if Neumann has watched WeCrashed yet? Perhaps not, because it looks like he’s been hard at work growing a billion-dollar real estate start-up.

Here’s CNN:

Andreessen Horowitz, the prominent venture capital firm known for its early investments in Twitter and Airbnb, has pumped about $350 million into Neumann’s newest venture, called Flow…

The investment valued the startup at more than $1 billion, according to the report.

A unicorn is a privately held start-up company valued at over $1 billion.

The announcement of the investment was made yesterday by Marc Andreessen, cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm. That $350 million figure is the largest single investment that the firm has ever made.

Andreessen acknowledged that Neumann had suffered a very public fall from grace as WeWork bombed but backed him to come good this time:

“Adam is a visionary leader who revolutionized the second largest asset class in the world — commercial real estate — by bringing community and brand to an industry in which neither existed before,” Andreessen wrote in his post Monday.

“Adam, and the story of WeWork, have been exhaustively chronicled, analyzed, and fictionalized — sometimes accurately. For all the energy put into covering the story, it’s often under appreciated that only one person has fundamentally redesigned the office experience and led a paradigm-changing global company in the process: Adam Neumann.”

As things stand, the general public knows very little about Flow and how it’s going to change the residential housing industry.

Swing past the website and you’ll be met with a single landing page:

It’s reported that ahead of that 2023 launch, Neumann has purchased in excess of 3 000 apartment units in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta, and Nashville.

At this stage, there are more questions than answers but Andreessen’s blog post did give a few hints, says The New York Times:

He hinted that the company might try to address one of the biggest challenges renters face: “You can pay rent for decades and still own zero equity — nothing.”

He added: “In a world where limited access to homeownership continues to be a driving force behind inequality and anxiety, giving renters a sense of security, community and genuine ownership has transformative power for our society.”

Andreessen isn’t wrong.

Whether or not his firm’s massive faith in a man whose reputation lies in tatters is well-founded should be revealed in due course,

[sources:cnn&nytimes]