Marc Andreessen’s company invests $350 million in WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s new project

WeWork’s famous demise seems like a PR nightmare from which one executive could not recover, spawning both TV series and documentaries chronicling the office rental company’s failure.

On Monday, that assumption was proven wrong when billionaire Marc Andreessen announced plans to make a major investment in Flow, a new real estate company. We work founder Adam Neumann.

That investment is said to be worth $350 million, as reported by New York Times, and represents the largest single investment that Andreessen’s venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has ever made. The billionaire’s investment history includes early investments in tech giants like Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Twitterand Skype — meaning his support for Flow carries a lot of weight.

The latest investment puts Flow’s valuation at over $1 billion.

WeWork collapsed in 2019, dropping its value from more than $40 billion to just $4 billion today after a year. complicated initial public offering. With that said, the company, which aims to revolutionize workplace culture through co-working spaces, has removed Neumann from the position of CEO.

Andreessen announces investment in Neumann’s latest company in a blog post on his company’s website on Monday, citing the need to invest in innovation in the US real estate sector. “The demographic trends driving the US housing market cannot be ignored: our country is creating households faster than we are building homes,” the post began.

While very little is known about the exact details of Flow’s business and mission, Andreessen implies that it aims to disrupt perceived harmful developments in the way Americans currently work and live. . The company is slated for release next year.

Neither home ownership nor current tenancy can meet most people’s needs, Andreessen wrote in her post. “The result is, [people] experience less, if any, of the social ties at the office and the camaraderie enjoyed by local workers,” he writes of the rise of work-from-home. Presumably, Flow aims to overcome those dynamics.

In his post, Andreessen also addressed Neumann’s past failure with WeWork. “We understand how difficult it is to build something like this, and we love to see iterative founders build on past successes by growing from the lessons learned. experience,” he wrote. “For Adam, successes and lessons abound and we are thrilled to be on this journey with him and his colleagues building the future of life.”

By focusing on structural issues in the US housing market, Monday’s investment announcement repeat a post Andreessen wrote in 2020 called “It’s Time to Build,” in which he advocated the proliferation of housing projects in the United States

“We can’t build nearly enough housing in cities with outstanding economic potential – which has resulted in skyrocketing housing prices in places like San Francisco, leaving the average person barely able to afford it. could move in and take the job in the future,” he pointed out. The solution, he writes, is to build more housing: a mindset often referred to as YIMBY, or “yes in my backyard.”

In the first day of this month, Atlantic revealed that Andreessen doesn’t really follow that philosophy after disclosing public documents showing he and his wife opposed the creation of multifamily units near where they live in Atherton, California. The town named as the richest zip code in the US for five consecutive years.