Adam Neumann came up at the right time: on the tail of the great recession when everybody wanted to be an entrepreneur and office space was available

The shocking and rude ways WeWork’s ex-CEO Adam Neumann treated staff

submited by

Style Pass

2021-07-18 05:00:05

Adam Neumann came up at the right time: on the tail of the great recession when everybody wanted to be an entrepreneur and office space was available on the cheap.

After immigrating from Israel to New York City in 2001, he tried his hand at Krawlers — a line of baby clothing with padded knees — which flopped. When he co-founded the shared-workspace company WeWork three years later, it was with some of a $1 million wedding present he and wife, Rebekah, had received from her Long Island parents.

But Adam, now 42, was never exactly a nose-to the grindstone guy. As co-authors Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell reveal in the book “The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion” (Crown), out Tuesday, expensive shortcuts appealed to Adam.

For example, he became obsessed with surfing, but found it a hassle to get to the big waves. “The way I surf, I don’t have time for paddling,” he told a colleague. Instead, he would hop on a chauffeured Jet Ski. As the book puts it, “Most surfers consider [this] cheating—like a mountain climber hopping a ride on a helicopter most of the way up.”