Billion Dollar Loser follows Adam Neumann’s journey building and crashing WeWork. The book is a fascinating look into the hubris required to build a new company, but WeWork really never built anything significant like the aura Neumann sold to investors around the company’s secretive technology and culture processes.

“WeWork’s core business was simple. It leased space, cut it up, and rented out each slice with an upcharge for hip design, flexibility, and regular happy hours.”

Wiedeman catalogs Neumann subscribing to modern business theory that growth at the expense of profitability is the best strategy to acquire customers despite being in a relatively normal business category of commercial real estate leasing.

The book documents the wild speculative evaluations given to companies without the financial foundations to back them, and I especially appreciated the way Wiedeman interviewed competitors who saw Neumann and WeWork as the company it was, not like the portrayal of a unicorn company.

I enjoyed the book, and it felt remarkably similar to the journey of the company Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes.