For Adam Neumann, Flow is the New We

to be answered or not. That We Work co founder and former CEO who stepped down in two thousand and nineteen in a cloud of accusations about eccentric behavior, skyhigh expenses and general extravagance, or the Adam Newman immortalized in an Apple TV miniseries starring Jared Leto about the rise and fall of That We Work empire. Well, that Adam Newman is back with Bonus Crypto and an exceptionally large three hundred and fifty million dollar check from the venture

capitalists over at Andresen Harrowitz. I think because I'm very comfortable talking about the lessons, I'm very comfortable sharing what it is that worked and didn't work, entrepreneurs are coming faster than ever before here to discuss what he's up to and why the word flow is the new wee is Bloomberg reporta Hannah Miller. He did take this startup, raise a bunch of money, get it to be worth over a billion dollars, you know, and they want to see what he can do in the crypto space, if

he can maybe do something similar. Hall, welcome back on the show. Thank you for having me. You are normally in our SF office, but here you are in New York today and I like that for lots of reason and it's good to see you. But also there's something about the geographic I don't know, miss of us about to talk about a dude who got a lot of credit for marketing coworking spaces and you know, community in

the sense of being together. It's all but we because yes, we're gonna talk about Adam Newman today where you are, who is somehow back. But before we get to how he's back, would you remind our listeners of where he was, what he was doing, and why he disappeared for a while. Yeah. So he had a meteoric rise with we Work. It was insane how big they got and how quickly they were able to raise funds. We Work was focused on

building communal workspaces all over the world. Adam Newman was the founder the CEO, and he really really sold it and they had you know, different locations throughout the US, and they're planning to do this big, big I p O. And that's when things started to get really crazy. There s one am out lots of pictures and one so filing that a company has to give to provide information about what they're doing, who they are prior to going public.

And in this S one, you know, he really laid out this vision for we Work, you know, filled with photos and images. Was not your typical S one And really people were struck by the amount of power he had within the company. You know, he had super voting rights that could give him the ability to clear the entire board. He had immense control over the company, as did his wife, Rebecca Newman, who was also quite the force,

and people grew concerned. Not helping things was the fact that there was questions of whether this was a workable business model, if they could be as profitable as they claimed to be. They were similar companies with very similar business models, worth not nearly as much as We Work and Avenge. Really he was ousted as CEO. So the big news, of course is not a huge surprise, but Adam Newman, the colorful founder of the company, is stepping down.

He's going to be decreasing his voting control of the company. These are all things that some of the investors and we Work, like soft Bank, had been pushing for. And the company did go public. It is now worth significantly less than what it claimed to be. Was valued at forty seven billion dollars at one time. It now trades at about three billion dollars. Just to emphasize everything that

you're saying about this s one filing. Here are some of the headlines that I pulled from that momentous August two thousand nineteen CNBC. The strangest and most alarming things and we Works I p O filing the verge. We Work isn't a tech company. It's a soap opera business insider. The energy of we people are roasting we Work for its cultish I p O filing fortune. Reading we Works

as one is like staring into Adam Newman's soul. These are not the kinds of things that financial media organizations generally right when a company is declaring its intent to go public, it's things like, here are the risk factors, you know, here's the expected blah, blah blah. Instead, this was just a kind of a collective WTF around the world.

And so, as you said, you know, the meteoric rise of Adam Newman was followed by a pretty precipitous decline in his personal fortunes, although he seemed to have meet out pretty well into you know, we work as an entity itself. But now it's basically two years later and he's back. What's he up to? He's send a crypto.

So we've seen two startups that he's helped found. One is called Flow Carbon, which uses blockchain to track carbon credits, and he and his wife, Rebecca Newman, they helped found it, but they don't have operational rules. The other company is more I would say, his baby. It's called Flow. As you might have noticed, Flow is Adam Newman's new favorite work. It is the new we Okay, so you know, I got to keep that in mind. So Flow is a real estate startup, and we don't know too much about it.

There are still a lot of details that we have no idea what they are. And one thing though that we did learn about Flow is that it's coming out with a digital financial services wallet that will allow people to interact with cryptocurrencies, so there is a clear crypto element as of right now to Flow, though things are subject to change. Who is writing the check? Surprise surprise at s Andrews and Horowitz. It's a three million dollar checks, very large, extremely large, shows a lot of faith, a

lot of confidence. Mark and Reason like wrote a whole blog post Singing Adams praises, singing Flows praises talking about why they invested in this new startup, and in the Adam Newman one point oh story, the equivalent would have been soft Bank that had provided these large checks. Three million dollars, even by the standards of crypto, is a

dramatic amount of money. There are hedge funds in crypto that launched with initial funds of like one and a half to two billion, of which three million is a very large chunk. Is this the largest check that's a sixty and z has ever written to a single founder? I think it's definitely. It definitely ranks up there. It is a big check. So far, Atom has really been

the main person connected with Flow. You know, we don't know about any co founders, and it is a huge vote of confidence, a major stamp of approval because A sixteen Z is a formidable force within the crypto industry. Their crypto investing team is massive. They are constantly writing check They are really gung ho about the space. So is this ASICs das bet on Newman? Is this a bet on crypto? Is it sort of some combination of the two. How should folks understand where this conviction is

coming from. Yeah, I think it's a combo of the two. And it's kind of interesting because I think from a normal person's perspective, it's like, why would you ever back this guy again? You know, after what happened with we work. He's great in marketing. Yeah, And I think after speaking with venture capitalists in the crypto space, you know, there is this idea that you can't back somebody normal. You have to back an extraordinary person with this incredible vision

who can sell what they're building. And Adam really fits that profile. You know, say what you want about him, but he is not normal. He is not normal, and he knows how to get attention to his projects. What worries me is the fact that the thing that he is primarily known for is a as a marketing founder, kind of a salesperson. I'm not sure that crypto necessarily needs more hype. It has a sort of built in

mechanism for providing that on its own. Do we have any evidence that human has crypto experience of any kind? You know, you mentioned that there are no other known kind of who the operations will be if not him, Where do we think some of that talent might potentially come from to make this successful as a business. Yeah, I think he's definitely going to have to bring people on who really know the space. You know, this is a shift for him in comparison to where he was

at with we Work. He's clearly intrigued by it though and looking at for the carbon, looking at Flow. It'll be interesting to see with Flow if they kind of bring on more crypto operational people to help run this. He's going to have to get a lot of talent, right so sort of to build out this team, people who are actually familiar with crypto. Where do we think

that might come from the talent pool? And crypto is growing as we see more companies do layoffs, there are people still transitioning over from traditional tech companies who are excited by the space. I think he is going to have to to build out a team to do this, and it's pretty interesting to see what other applications they could use crypto for. These plans could change, but right now, there is no plan to tokenize real estate rentals or ownership with crypto. Right so this is not a we

put your apartment on the blockchain startup as of right now. No, not at all, and it's going to be exciting to see what happens. And we also we have to keep in mind this is an all encompassing financial services while it's not just crypto. You can have your bank account in it, you know, you can you do other stuff, so he might have to also pull in people and from traditional finance. We'll be right back with Bloomberg reports that Hannah Mila on how entrepreneur Adam Newman is stepping

into the world of crypto. There is a very crypto specific part of one of the startups that's flu Carbon, and that is the the g NT Yes, the Goddess Nature Token. Yes, the Goddess Nature Token. Basically, they're using these token bundles to represent carbon credits on the blockchain. And both Adam and Rebecca Newman are super into nature.

We know Adam is a huge surfer and you know, they also made the environment a big part of their focus when they were at we work, like banning meat in the communal kitchens, you know, things along those lines. So it's very interesting that they've chosen to sort of take this track with crypto, which is often criticized to be not environmentally friendly, and it's kind of an exciting use case, and that they're you know, doing carbon credit tracking.

We've seen other projects kind of do this. Chia is one I'm thinking of, and it hasn't really taken off yet, I would say, so it'll be interesting to see if low Carbon can shift that up. Is the Goddess Nature token trading anywhere? Does it currently have a price or is it still sort of up in the air as it relates to flu carbon itself. So they actually delayed the token launch because of Crypto winter, so we have

to see more details. I mean, reports have circulated that you know, flull Carbon shutting down things like that, but I think it they're just kind of been a holding pattern right now, waiting to see what happens, waiting for the right time to release this token. You have in the past reports it on pretty extensively. One of the bigger criticisms of you know, like VC concentration in terms

of initial access to crypto projects. The idea, for example, that if folks are delivering tokens two insiders as a way to encourage participation in the project, a lot of those insiders are going to be the venture capitalists who are also backing the project. So we've got that, We've got that kind of inherent underlying tension about something that's

supposed to be democratizing finance. We also have the fact that A. Sixty and Z is emerging as they're functionally not just the biggest fish in crypto, but sometimes they feel like the only in the entire ocean, particularly as it relates to what they like to call web three. How are in your observations are reporting other people in crypto kind of reacting to this dominance where you have this one founder who he is very good at being

in the limelight. You have this one very large, very powerful VC entity, you know, when their powers combined tbd. But in the meantime, is it taking the oxygen out of the room for anybody else who might be thinking about flu carbon trading or just carbon trading in general, or anybody else who might be looking for different kinds of funding. Yeah. No, I think it's a mixed response

among crypto vcs. There are crypto specialized venture capital firms that are just as big on the space as a sixteen Z and I know there are some crypto native vcs vcs that you know all about crypto focus on it, this is their bread and butter, who have some resentment towards a st You know, they see them as maybe not fully committed into the space because they have so many other areas that they invest in. You know, there's this definitely a divide between quote the Sandhill set and

crypto native vcs. However, I think during crypto winter, people are just warming up to anything that comes into the industry. I had one VC tell me, well, the fact that a SIXT was able to write such a big check shows that there's capital still flowing into this industry. Well, I just want to pose their SIXT has like billion dollars worth of ability to write checks. You know, three fifty is a large check, but by their standards, it's

a tiny fraction of risk to to their overalls. So is that really do you think it's possible to extrapolate from this like unique situation across the entire industry. Yeah, I think people want to do that, right, Is that really the case that's still up for debate. It is a small fraction of what of a sixtise these war chest, but the fact that people see this big money coming in and this big name with Adam, Yeah, I mean, he definitely has a mixed reputation, but he's still a

name that you know, mainstream people recognize that. People in the exactly like he you know, he has notoriety, and I think people also see that he does have somewhat of a track record of success with we Work. I mean, he did take this startup, raise a bunch of money, get it to be worth over a billion dollars, you know, and they want to see what he can do in the crypto space, if he can maybe do something similar.

It's interesting that you analogize, you know, to very a certain flavor of tech metrics of success, which is he was an incredible fundraiser and he was a financial engineering wizard, which for a lot of stars ups in crypto are two of the things that they also really care about. Right. The idea is you want to your token to be

worth as much money as possible. You want to have the ability to have access to liquid is he especially in a crypto winter like this, So if you you know, if you assess him by that standard, and I'm sure there are many folks in crypto who are like, yeah, that that is a bar that we would like to reach.

The challenge is going to be building out an actual company around this, because, as you've mentioned, many folks have been trying to make you know, carbon credits on the blockchain happen in one capacity or another and have struggled to reach beyond interesting pilot projects or you know, relatively small things. So for good or for ill, that that industry is getting an injection of a huge amount of money and the huge amount of attention very short amount

of time. Yeah, the big question is is Kenny back it up? You know? And that's a question that's p posed to a lot of founders, But I think with Adam Newman the stakes are higher because he already has this past with we work, so it's gonna be interesting to see how he does it. I mean, they're focusing on a problem that a lot of people have, which is a painful relationship with their landlord. Rental company whatever.

I think that that with flow, they're trying to find some way to make that easier, more seamless, you know, on the blockchain, with the crypto wallet maybe yeah, yeah, I mean they're they're talking about maybe doing like a reward system based on blockchain. Again, stuff could change. There's no real clear path yet, I think, but it'll be

interesting to see what happens. I do think to your point that seeing who that team turns out to be is going to be very interesting, and we'll probably have you back on to talk more about it when they start making those announcements. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you so much for having me. You can find more of Hannah Miller's reporting on the Bloomberg Terminal on Bloomberg dot com or follow her on Twitter. She's at h G Miller nine. That's h G m

I L L E Er nine. On the next episode of Bloomberg Crypto, is it really possible to make a good blockchain based video game? What would that even look like? And is there anyone trying to do it? Right now, we're going to talk about Anamoca Brands, a video game studio turned crypto venture capital fund run by Yatsu. They're betting big on making blockchain games happen, alongside a slew of other investments in the crypto arena. This is Bloomberg Crypto,

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