The Cult of We

 

Journalist and author Maureen Farrell on the story-behind-the-story of the ascent and decline of WeWork, why she chose it as the topic for her first book, anecdotes and advice from her writing journey, and more.

 

Episode Notes

Maureen Farrell’s The Cult of We chronicles the rise and fall of WeWork—the once-transcendent real estate company founded by now-maligned magnate Adam Neumann. But whereas other works have focused almost entirely on Adam’s tragic character, her book takes a broader lens: exploring not just the man but the conditions and constructs that enabled him.

In her talk with Jesse, Maureen expounds on the story she wrote while also reflecting on her own journey as an author—why she chose to devote her first book to this subject, how she managed to complete it during the pandemic with co-author Eliot Brown, and the important role that persistence played in uncovering the riveting stories that make The Cult of We such a compelling and essential study of entrepreneurial audacity and institutional delusion.

(7:31) Establishing the scope of the story

(10:28) Key takeaways for readers

(13:04) Advice for aspiring authors

(15:17) Maureen reads a favorite excerpt from the book

(22:13) Lightning Round: Maureen’s recommended reads & more

Guest Bio

Maureen Farrell reports on business for the New York Times, covering big money and private capital. Prior to the Times she worked at the Wall Street Journal, where she was a recipient of the Newswomen's Club of New York's Nellie Bly Award. Farrell previously worked at Forbes, Debtwire, and Mergermarket, where she covered deals, bankruptcy, and startups. She is a graduate of Duke University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is based in New York.

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+ Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Maureen Farrell: With someone who can tell a good story, who's so charismatic, all sorts of people can suspend disbelief in the face of this. You think some crazy businessman isn't going to convince them to throw money at something that doesn't make any sense. Yet, it seems pretty much what happens. You just always have to question things, these institutions that you might hold in really high regard and think they're going to make rational decisions. It doesn't really work that way.

[00:00:33] Jesse Purewal: From Qualtrics Studios. This is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts, and ideas fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands, and experiences. I'm Jesse Purewal, Head of Brand at Qualtrics and your host. Remember WeWork, the company co-founded by Adam Neumann that was not just going to create the next experience of the workplace, but be the all encompassing movement that would help unify humanity and make the world a better place? Remember how astonishingly it rose and how spectacularly it fell. Even a simple casual scanning of the headlines on WeWork from 2013 to 2019 was enough to create jaw dropping disbelief. But what was reported then was just the tip of the iceberg of the hedonism, largess, cluelessness, and sadness that surrounded the epic that was WeWork's ascent and decline.

There's a small number of people who had almost unfettered access to Adam Neumann, his associates, investors, family, and others that were part of the ecosystem that empowered and ultimately imperiled WeWork. One of those people is the business journalist, Maureen Farrell, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and now of the New York Times. Maureen decided along with her journal colleague, Eliot Brown, that given everything they'd learned over the course of over five years reporting on WeWork, the story was simply too important and too instructive not to be told in the form of a book. That book, Maureen's first, was published in 2021. It is The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion.

It's a gripping, fascinating tale with geopolitical, economic, corporate, and human factors at play that seems almost too audacious to be true. But it is as true as it is tragic, and it has far reaching lessons and implications for builders of all kinds. I wanted to talk to Maureen about how she approached writing the book, what it was like to work with a co-author, her frame of reference for WeWork, how she regards Adam Neumann, what she believes are the key lessons from the company's rise and fall, and the advice she has for first time writers. I now give you Maureen Farrell. So, Maureen, what was the moment that you felt or that you knew that the saga of WeWork was a tale that you really wanted to tell, not just as a reporter, but as a book author?

[00:03:08] Maureen Farrell: I would say basically, as it became clear that the company wasn't going public, as we were starting to see the board come after Adam Neumann for the first time, in a sense that he was going to actually leave the company, which was completely unthinkable, it was a span of a week or two where I was barely sleeping. I was talking to my co-author and my coworker, Eliot Brown, in San Francisco, about 15 times a day. We kept on hearing more and more of the craziest things and I felt like we thought we knew some of the story, and it became clear there was so much more to tell and understand about it. I think it was over the course of those few weeks, which was September 2019, when theoretically WeWork was going to go public, but never did.

[00:03:59] Jesse Purewal: It's like that string you keep pulling and it never gets you back to the start of the sweater. It's clearly alluring the more you go. You mentioned Eliot. Talk about what it's like to have a co-author on a book of this length. I assume co-authors have to have a certain type of energy and flow with one another. But give me a sense of what co-authorship is like from your perspective.

[00:04:21] Maureen Farrell: Sure. It was just a ton of fun. Some colleagues of mine who had written books before warned me that it could be a very lonely experience. You get very used to being in a newsroom and collaborating with people, and I had the total opposite experience. We got along so well. It felt like we really complimented each other. So, we were constantly talking. We just kept on learning more and more crazy things about the company about Adam Neumann, SoftBank, that it was nice to have someone all day to just say, "Oh, my God, you're never going to believe what I just heard."

We had a pretty straightforward split between what we had both historically covered related to the story. For example, Eliot knew the company and the real estate world. He had met Adam Neumann back in 2013. He had covered it for a long time. He really knew commercial real estate. That had been a big piece of his beat. I knew the banking world. I had covered SoftBank. So, as we were sketching out the story, it was very clear who would talk to who, whose chapters were who. But it was great. The collaborating part of it was fun. I would write a chapter, he would, and then you'd just have another set of eyes. Did this work? Did it not? I think we just, we really trusted each other. It was a great experience.

[00:05:34] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. In some ways, the book reads closer to a feature film script than to a typical company biography or a biography just because of the sheer number of characters and subplots and twists and turns. It really has this cinematographic kind of lean to it. How did you organize your thinking and develop an approach to all these threads, yet keep your eye on the long arc of the story?

[00:06:01] Maureen Farrell: Well, first of all, I'm so happy to hear that. I guess the one piece about i almost feeling more like a movie, there were so many aspects of Adam Neumann's life and WeWork that it was like we could never have made up anything as crazy as what really happened. So, that definitely helped. But it was definitely a challenge and we were lucky to have a great editor and a great agent who really jumped in and worked with us a lot. But on the one hand, the narrative arc was there from the beginning. This could be tricky in other biographies of companies or situations. We had a very clear endpoint and we knew the endpoint was going to be when Adam Neumann was pushed out of WeWork and what happened in the immediate aftermath.

[00:06:42] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. Last summer, Maureen, Alison Stewart at the Washington Post wrote that your story of WeWork was actually told with great understatement, which I think means that you're trying to not indulge the cringeworthiness of some of the stories or actively lambast too many people. But that said, I think you and Eliot do this great job of portraying this odd and ultimately lethal combination of hubris and cluelessness and largess and sadness that typifies the company's rise and fall. How did you do that. How did you write for this kind of effect where you can portray audacity and crazy, but still showcase empathy for people who are caught up in all the madness?

[00:07:31] Maureen Farrell: It was just an interesting balance the whole way through and we did wrestle with that a lot. How do you say it? Because when we would hear the facts of stories, like Adam having 10 houses and hiring his surf instructor and putting his whole family, bringing them with him everywhere he went, there's just so much craziness. But what I guess we wanted to do was look at him through a certain lens and look at the whole story and just be like an objective guide to the story.

One of the things we wanted to do along those lines was not be too judgmental. We wanted to show how he came to be. He was such an extreme force of nature and he did a lot of crazy things, but there were these, this whole world of people who enabled him and let him do that. So, it's like you really wanted to be able to showcase all the different characters and how they made this whole ecosystem and created this world and this company. It was not just him. Without all these people around him, he could not have probably hit the heights or had as sharp of a fall as he did.

[00:08:37] Jesse Purewal: The book explores what I would characterize as a disconnect between what seems to be WeWork's actual business model, which is as a real estate operator, and the framing that Adam and others close to him chose to use, which, depending on the moment, was either a tech company or a community or maybe even something the world has no name for yet. If you personally reflect on all that you've learned about WeWork and your writing career, how would you characterize what the company was and how would you characterize what it is now?

[00:09:13] Maureen Farrell: The myth making was probably the craziest part about it and it was the key to his brilliance and his ability to fundraise. It was just an interesting coworking real estate space that he used as his vehicle to pour whatever anyone wanted to see into it. So, another way of thinking of the question is one of the ways we would talk about Adam as a shorthand for writing about him is we really saw him as like a magician. Like, don't look here, look here. He knew how to do all these magic tricks and the ultimate one was to convince people that this straightforward, very cool real estate company where you could go and do co-working and that had spaces was something so much more than that.

[00:10:07] Jesse Purewal: What do you think is the key lesson that a reader should take away from reading this book, particularly for somebody who doesn't sit in Silicon Valley or doesn't sit New York or maybe is less familiar with interchanges between real estate and tech and finance? Sort of a casual reader who wants to go, "Oh, yeah, I've heard of that." What's the takeaway that a general reader should have here?

[00:10:28] Maureen Farrell: The psychology vs. rationality. With someone who could tell a good story, who's so charismatic, all sorts of people can suspend disbelief in the face of this. You think in the world, there are these gatekeepers that make rational decisions. Throughout the book, you see people like a Fidelity, the very sober mutual fund managers. You think they're not going to be some crazy business and some businessman isn't going to convince them to throw money at something that doesn't make any sense. Yet, it seems pretty much what happened. I think it's like you just always have to question things. I think it's made me a much more skeptical journalist. There's a lot of interpersonal relationships that go into things. These institutions that you might hold in really high regard and think that they're going to make rational decisions, it doesn't really work that way, which I think throughout the story, you see that.

[00:11:28] Jesse Purewal: You've been writing obviously your entire career. The Cult of We is your first book. What are the top few things that you say you learned about yourself as you went along the author's journey?

[00:11:41] Maureen Farrell: I loved having the time and the space to really dig into advisor.eas as a journalist, you're always pushing stuff out and there's a certain adrenaline to that. I really like it. But it was just so much fun to go down these rabbit holes and there's so much on the cutting room floor and do the research and talk to a million different people. It was sort of journalism on steroids. So, I think the whole process was so much more fun than I thought. I think as a journalist, I can tend to have maybe a bit of ADD, like jump from one thing to another, and I was pretty happy that I was able to focus in a certain way on this.

We wrote this during the pandemic. So, you're sort of locked away from the world. I think I learned that I have more focus that I think I have, which made me really happy. One trick I'll just tell you, all the struggles for focus, this is such an obvious one. I think I probably read about this somewhere. At night, I was like, "I need to write something." So, I would say, "Okay, put on the 35 minute timer, and no matter what, I cannot do anything else except focus for this period of time." I felt like I got in such a nice zone while writing the book. I try to get back to that more and more now and remember that I could do it.

[00:12:55] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. What else falls on that list of tactical advice that you'd give to people who like to write, who might say it's a goal of mine to write and publish a book?

[00:13:04] Maureen Farrell: I think it's important to find your timing, when you really work well, and carve out your own space and time in your life where you can focus on things. For me, I was forced into this. But during the pandemic, my kids were home from school and I was homeschooling them. My husband was in his real job. I was on book leave. So, he had a lot of day to day deadlines. It was just so hard to find the time during the day. I had a whole situation where I would just at 8:00 at night until 2:00 in the morning and there was some sort of adrenaline there. But it was always just nice to have that window.

I was like, "I might not sleep in much the next day," but just to know a block of time where you really have it and then to know you really need to get things done during it. The other thing about a book is it is such a long process. There are other ideas I had toyed with in the past. I think a lot of journalists do. But I'm really happy that this was my first one. Now, if I think back, you just want something that you can dig into in such a way that will keep you very excited for a year plus, two years. In retrospect, there's so many things I didn't do that I'm very happy I didn't.

[00:14:20] Jesse Purewal: Hey, it's Jesse. If you like hearing and learning from authors who told a great story and experienced some success with their first book, check out one of our past episodes, my conversation with Brad Balukjian. Brad's the author of an incredible book that hit number seven on the LA Times bestseller list Called The Wax Pack. It's the story of a wildly absurd and fun as hell premise. Brad took a pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards, opened it, and then embarked on a cross country quest to personally meet every one of the players who were on the cards he got in the pack to try to discover what life was like after major league baseball and to try to find himself in the process. That show with Brad is episode 31 of Breakthrough Builders. Now, back to the rest of my conversation with Maureen Farrell. Maureen, do you have a favorite passage or moment from the book that you wouldn't mind talking to us about and maybe reading directly to our listeners?

[00:15:17] Maureen Farrell: Sure. So, there were so many things that jumped out at us. But one that I'm just thinking about right now is we wound up hearing in the lead up to the IPO, all the bankers vying so much, trying to elbow each other out of the way to get Adam Neumann's business. There are many ridiculous stories about it, but one someone told me was that there's this debt deal that Goldman Sachs wanted to do with WeWork and Adam Neumann thought maybe they didn't stand by him and the way he wanted to and they pulled back to him of what they promised. So, he told Goldman, "Oh, you're out. We want J.P. Morgan. I'm going to work with them. They're going to be my lead banker."

Someone around the situation said Goldman bankers came to Adam Neumann's house and begged him to take this deal and one of them said he wouldn't leave at his ice bath until he promised to take this debt deal. When I first heard that, there's just so many elements that seem just ridiculous, like Adam Neumann encouraging frat=like behavior in people in every part of the financial system. The more we dug, we found that it was true. There's evidently pictures of this. But the bankers went to Adam Neumann's house, one of his houses in The Hamptons to try to say, "Don't walk away from us. We really want you to take our money and work with us and have us lead your IPO or whatever it is." So, they arrive and Adam Neumann and his sidekick, Michael Gross, an executive who was always involved in a lot of crazy scenes with him, came in, they talk, but then they both invite them to go to the sauna. It was a favorite venue, neumann explained, for thinking and conversation.

As the four men sat inside sweating, Neumann told the Goldman bankers why he was going with J.P. Morgan. It was a sure safe bet. Jamie Dimon had personally promised that J.P. Morgan could get them $6 billion, Neumann said. Nevertheless, Linga and Sundaram persisted. These were the two Goldman bankers. Their plan, the modified Goldman deal that Neumann had rejected and considered a betrayal, was the best way for WeWork to get money to keep growing. As Linga and Sundaram thought their message was sinking in, Neumann walked them from the sauna toward his ice bath. "No one," Neumann declared, "could possibly stay in there longer than five minutes."

Linga, who had become friendly with Neumann over several months, protested. He took very cold showers every day after meditating. He'd do it. Linga slid in while Neumann and Gross kept an eye on the clock and snapped photos. As the ice cold water enveloped his legs, he joked that he wouldn't get out until Neumann took Goldman's debt deal, not J.P. Morgan's. As the clock passed five minutes, Neumann watched in amazement. Finally, Linga emerged shaking. Neumann said he'd spend the weekend thinking through his next steps. In the end Linga's playful plea was for naught. Days later, Neumann informed the Goldman team that he was officially taking J.P. Morgan's deal. Jamie Dimon's efforts had paid off. WeWork was about to take its own plunge into the public markets.

[00:18:33] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. It's one of so many jaw dropping, like, "Wait, that really happened?" kind of stories. I think so many people are fascinated by it and it's a little like watching an accident in the other lane. You shouldn't be looking and you hope it never happens. But when it does, it becomes addictive to read. I personally loved how you framed all of the things that needed to happen either in sequence or in tandem for this mess to occur the way it did. It happens close to the end, page 390. Had a frothy venture capital sector not been so obsessed with the search for eccentric and visionary founders, WeWork might still occupy only a smattering of buildings in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. If mutual funds hadn't rushed into startups, WeWork might have never had the funds to start expanding into surf pools.

If Saudi Arabia's economy hadn't fallen under the control of a new startup loving prince desperate to diversify its oil wealth, Masayoshi Son might never have written Neumann a check. If bankers hadn't been so focused on the prestige and fees from leading a big IPO, perhaps sober advice could have prevailed before a major public embarrassment. So, when you talked at the top about just all the circumstances that had to be in play for this to occur, of course you had the principal actor in Neumann. But there's macroeconomic context. There's political context. There's ego. There's a dozen factors in play here that are literally almost unimaginable. So, it's just incredible work that you and Eliot did to bring this together into something that people can understand, maybe enjoy a little bit, and then really learn from and adapt because of.

[00:20:05] Maureen Farrell: Thank you. Another piece of that whole puzzle is every step of the way, you just think, oh, someone's going to stand up to Adam Neumann, the board. He asked for a private jet. They grumble. They give it to him. He doesn't show up for board meetings. They grumble. No one really does anything about it. It was just the lack of action of anyone taking him to task. I think it was just really sad to watch that each step of the way too.

[00:20:34] Jesse Purewal: Well, I think it had the feeling of honest sustained momentum as the economy was continuing to go. I can remember thinking at some point, probably mid to late 2018, wow. Maybe I'm the one who's thinking about this wrong. For sure in the earlier days pre-SoftBank, it was a little like, okay, this is a little bit of a lark. Then once that became a big visible part of it and you start seeing the logo on dozens of different medium rise buildings around New York and San Francisco and Chicago and other places, then you're going, "Okay. Maybe this is happening without me."

I think that was probably a sense that a lot of the investors, the board members had. It's like the FOMO if you drop out now, the FOMO if you sell out now, the FOMO if you kick him out now. It's like, what if we just wait another chapter? That's the challenge of the human condition, right? You want to give everybody a next chance, and sometimes it's really hard to cut bait in a situation like this.

[00:21:31] Maureen Farrell: I think you're exactly right and it's what people talk about almost from the very beginning with Adam. He would say the most outlandish things, like he was opening his first building, I would say. "We're going to open buildings all over the United States," and a lot of people around him just said they were skeptical. "Oh, he's so over the top." But then he executed on so much of this. He kept on defying people's expectations. Then obviously, it just took a turn where it got really megalomaniacal and there was no rationality underpinning much of anything.

[00:22:07] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. Okay. Maureen, can I move us to a quick lightning round to close?

[00:22:11] Maureen Farrell: Sure.

[00:22:13] Jesse Purewal: Maureen, what are three words or phrases your closest colleagues would use to describe you?

[00:22:18] Maureen Farrell: I would like to think energetic, I really hope fun, and maybe a little scattered, I'd say. My co-author, Eliot, he's much more focused than me, so I'd always be spitballing ideas and I'd have 25 and he'd say, "Okay, let's focus. Let's move forward on these things."

[00:22:39] Jesse Purewal: What is a book that you love to recommend to people? It cannot be entitled The Cult of We.

[00:22:46] Maureen Farrell: I'll say in terms of non-fiction, two books by the same author, Patrick Radden Keefe. I've read probably maybe a year ago while I was writing this, Say Nothing about the troubles in Northern Ireland, and it was such a compelling read. It makes you understand humanity and geopolitics. Then I actually just read his other book, The Empire of Pain about the Sacklers. It's absolutely horrifying and so depressing, but it makes you really think about the taint of all the horrible things that have been done by the Sacklers.

[00:23:19] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. Adam obviously is a cautionary tale of a person, as alluring as he was, framing the builder in a slightly different way. Who's a builder that you think is doing a wonderful job.

[00:23:31] Maureen Farrell: One person who brings to mind is Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky. I've gotten to know him over the years as I've covered a lot of different companies on their way to going public. I was tasked with writing a profile of him when I came back and after Adam Neumann, I felt like you talk to anyone around him, you're like, "Can we talk off the record?" They'll tell you all these crazy things about him, and I felt like with Brian Chesky, I would talk to all sorts of people who have known him over the years and they were like, "Oh, my mom was sick. He called and checked in on her all the time." He's been a pretty great leader. I think he tries to do the right thing in a big way. Like everything else, it's had its own problems, but it seems like he treats people very well.

[00:24:14] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. I can totally see that. Lastly, Maureen, how would you describe your secret sauce? What's the special blend of stuff that makes you do you?

[00:24:22] Maureen Farrell: Talking to a million people. I felt like with this book, one of the things that worked is making 10 more phone calls than you think you need to and then you'll find something you never quite thought that could bring everything together or make it more exciting. Just keep on [inaudible] and keep on making calls and you'll get somewhere better than you were.

[00:24:44] Jesse Purewal: I love it. Persistence, hard work, determination, staying the course, the recipe for success and certainly the recipe that has helped you put together a wonderful story. Your book is The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion. People can find it wherever they find their books. So, Maureen Farrell, thank you for your time, your energy, and your perspective today and appreciate you joining the show.

[00:25:08] Maureen Farrell: Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun.

[00:25:11] Jesse Purewal: Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and a review, and tell a friend. Breakthrough Builders is a Qualtrics Studios original, hosted and executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. An awesome team of people puts this show together, including our show writer, Todd Bagnull, and our head of social media, Chelsea Hunersen. From Studio Pod Media in San Francisco, our show coordinator is Nicole Genova. Editing and music are by producer, Sterling Shore, and executive producer, Katie Sunku Wood, with sound engineering by Ryan Crowther. At Vayner Talent in New York, Samantha Heapps, Hannah Park, and Yvonna Lynn provide publicity and promotional support. The show’s designers are Baron Santiago and Vansuka Chindavijak. Our website is by Gregory Hedon. Photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Ben Hawken, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.

Season 5Jesse Purewalwework, business journalism, wall street journal, marketing, startups, corporate greed, real estate, new york times, venture capital, adam neumann, entrepreneurship