Monday Morning.
A new day, a new week, a new opportunity to master your destiny, to bite the ass off a bear, to be a coffee achiever, to hustle harder, to get shit done.
Brendan Alper’s out the door by 8:41 a.m. He swipes his office key card just before 9:00 and steps onto the poured-concrete floor of the lobby, where the tableau that greets him is composed of beadboard paneling, hanging globe-shaped light fixtures, exposed pipes, a midcentury patchwork sectional sofa, banquettes for laptop rovers, a granite coffee bar (with La Colombe brew in the urns, Ronnybrook dairy products arranged neatly in a refrigerator, and bottles of sriracha sauce), a second bar with taps (Sierra Nevada, Angry Orchard), a large glass watercooler lined with grapefruit slices, an accent wall with a mural of a starry sky and mysterious hands plying a cat’s cradle, and another wall festooned with a neon word sculpture. hello brooklyn, it reads. You might recognize in these touches the zippered-hoodie aesthetics of WeWork, the company that operates the building. You might even be a WeWork tenant yourself. Perhaps you’ve taken a meeting or two in a WeWork building, or else you will soon enough, as twenty-first-century America continues its headlong shift toward the gig economy.
Finally, Brendan gets to his pod-enclosed desk on the fifth floor, ready for some TCB: Taking Care of Business. Brendan is thirty and the founder of a tech company. He is bright, cheerfully handsome, well-related, well-connected, an alumnus of Brown University and Goldman Sachs, where he did operational risk management, which he concedes was “not exactly a crushing-it kind of job.” One day a couple years ago, Brendan looked at his bosses and saw his future self: “charting numbers under fluorescent light, two kids at home, counting vacation days, and at what cost?” He quit and tried writing comedy sketches but found it too solitary, plus he didn’t want to move to L.A.
Last year, Brendan scraped together his life savings and started a dating app called Hater. It adds value, as the Shark Tankers say, by matching people according to their shared dislikes. He finished the beta and timed Hater’s February 2017 launch in the App Store to coincide with some canny PR stunts—coverage on The View, Good Morning America, CBS’s Sunday Morning, and Fox & Friends; features on seven blogs embargoed for the same day; a viral public- art installation depicting Trump and Putin nude and locked in an embrace. Within three weeks, he had three hundred thousand registered users worldwide. Then, per an agreement he reached with potential investors, Hater received a market valuation of $4 million, even though the company had yet to bring in a cent.
Which pretty much brings us to this fine June morning. Brendan’s wearing a striped T-shirt, jeans cuffed well above the ankle, and flip-flops—an ideal uniform if you’re hanging out at your condo swimming pool all day. That’s part of the fun of being your own CEO, he says. “But there’s that existential problem I wasn’t really prepared for: Nobody’s telling me what to do. Should I be putting together a budget? Working on the design of a new app? Raising money? Trying to retain users? Trying to attract new users? Trying to build out our analytics? Should I be dressing up like a chicken and handing out business cards in Grand Army Plaza?”
There are a lot of Brendans in the Republic of WeWork, and many are right here in this corridor. Some of the outfits in the South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, location trade in worldly goods, like Conscious Step, a sock company that donates a share of its proceeds to charity; Carvana, an online used-car dealership; Motorino, a pizza micro-chain; and Visual Magnetics, which sells idea boards. Others are entirely ether-based, such as One Door, a company that offers cloud-centric “merchandising execution”; Mish Guru, a Snapchat-focused “management & analytics platform”; and DevTribe, a social-media consultancy seeking “influencers looking to increase revenue through personal branding.” There’s at least one self-employed “vlogger and design consultant,” as well as Turnkey & Bespoke, which manages retail construction projects, be they pop-up shops, promotional booths, or, yes, offices inside WeWork buildings. There’s also a company called NSFW, whose function might be described as “facilitating curated gratification.” (It puts on swingers’ parties.) (...)
WeWork employees are quick to tell you that the company, and others like it, came about to serve the new leaders of the tech revolution. You can also see them as the by-product of an economy that suddenly ceased to guarantee young people steady employment. The economic collapse of 2008 and the flood of millennials who’ve since entered the workforce have together given us the age of “coworking,” a term WeWork popularized. The U. S. Census Bureau’s 2015 tally of unincorporated “nonemployer businesses”—an often-used classification for a lot of gig-economy work—reported that the figure had grown by nearly 20 percent, over the previous decade, to twenty- four million. Ours has long been a culture of garage tinkerers and traveling salesmen, but the coworking model presents a new, amenity- enriched option for young men and women setting out as entrepreneurial armies of one, in that it leaves them to rent the sort of infrastructure that the modern world has snatched from them.
Fees range from $220 a month for a “hot desk,” or space at a power outlet, to upwards of $650 for a private office. You also get unlimited coffee and craft beer, printer credits, evening yoga classes, themed happy hours, and lunch ’n’ learn seminars. Brendan’s four-desk office lists for $2,100 a month, but WeWork gave him the space gratis for the first six months, and now at a discount. “They like all the press Hater gets,” he says. “It’s kind of like Nike giving free shoes to athletes. Anyway, it’s better than working out of a Starbucks, and the membership ends up providing an extensive ‘collaboration network,’ ” he says. “They can find you an accountant or someone to make stickers.”
The staffers at WeWork call themselves “community managers” and wear T-shirts bearing the company’s slogans: “Do What You Love,” “Creator,” “Better Together.” The conversations in the elevator tend to be about Slack channel pickup, or chasing virality, or how much coffee a person has to consume before it functions as a diuretic. The lavatories at the WeWork at 524 Broadway in Manhattan, incidentally, are terrific—enclosed stalls with clever toile wallpaper featuring a repeating print of surveillance cameras partially obscured by roses and leaves. WeWork employs a design team of twenty-five, and each space is full of artwork carefully curated by Jeremiah Britton, the company’s creative director of art and graphics, to exemplify certain “core values”: “relevant, clever, honest and authentic, inspiring, and shareworthy.”
When this forty-eight-year-old reporter, embedded for several weeks at 524 Broadway, had a problem using the printer on his floor, he sought help from a community manager eating her lunch from a mason jar (“something healthy people call quinoa”), who politely advised him to file a request online. They try to respond within fifteen minutes, she said, adding, “Fun fact: In this building, the average wait is four minutes.” When the reporter did eventually get the printer to work, she offered an exuberant high-five. “I knew you could do it!” Asked how she liked WeWork, another community manager, who’d recently been at a corporate retreat in L. A. (with entertainment by the Chainsmokers), replied, “Culty, but in an awesome way!” in a tone that you could swear was outfitted with a suite of emojis. (...)
Would Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt have transcended his feelings of malaise if he’d spent his evenings taking meditation classes in his office building? What might Willy Loman, who ventured door-to-door with nothing but a smile and a shoeshine, have made of WeWork’s buy-in incubator program, with its build-your-own-hash-browns bar on Thank God It’s Mondays? What would the rank and file of Dunder Mifflin think of the legions of young hustlers who hope to make a killing by coming up with the next Shine?
Shine, by the way, is a “daily messaging experience” that sends its subscribers succinct pep talks like this one: “We all want to be chill when faced w/ a frustration (‘no sweat!’). But adulting is hard, Eric. Today, learn to respond > react.” The company has thus far raised more than $3 million from investors.
Not so long ago, bright young men like Brendan and Sam would’ve kept on paying their dues, patiently working their way up middle-management rungs, devoting decades to a single institution, and eventually retiring on a tidy pension. That life went the way of the American buffalo. And the risk-tolerant dudes of Hater consider themselves happy to have the independence gained in the exchange.
A new day, a new week, a new opportunity to master your destiny, to bite the ass off a bear, to be a coffee achiever, to hustle harder, to get shit done.
Brendan Alper’s out the door by 8:41 a.m. He swipes his office key card just before 9:00 and steps onto the poured-concrete floor of the lobby, where the tableau that greets him is composed of beadboard paneling, hanging globe-shaped light fixtures, exposed pipes, a midcentury patchwork sectional sofa, banquettes for laptop rovers, a granite coffee bar (with La Colombe brew in the urns, Ronnybrook dairy products arranged neatly in a refrigerator, and bottles of sriracha sauce), a second bar with taps (Sierra Nevada, Angry Orchard), a large glass watercooler lined with grapefruit slices, an accent wall with a mural of a starry sky and mysterious hands plying a cat’s cradle, and another wall festooned with a neon word sculpture. hello brooklyn, it reads. You might recognize in these touches the zippered-hoodie aesthetics of WeWork, the company that operates the building. You might even be a WeWork tenant yourself. Perhaps you’ve taken a meeting or two in a WeWork building, or else you will soon enough, as twenty-first-century America continues its headlong shift toward the gig economy.
Finally, Brendan gets to his pod-enclosed desk on the fifth floor, ready for some TCB: Taking Care of Business. Brendan is thirty and the founder of a tech company. He is bright, cheerfully handsome, well-related, well-connected, an alumnus of Brown University and Goldman Sachs, where he did operational risk management, which he concedes was “not exactly a crushing-it kind of job.” One day a couple years ago, Brendan looked at his bosses and saw his future self: “charting numbers under fluorescent light, two kids at home, counting vacation days, and at what cost?” He quit and tried writing comedy sketches but found it too solitary, plus he didn’t want to move to L.A.
Last year, Brendan scraped together his life savings and started a dating app called Hater. It adds value, as the Shark Tankers say, by matching people according to their shared dislikes. He finished the beta and timed Hater’s February 2017 launch in the App Store to coincide with some canny PR stunts—coverage on The View, Good Morning America, CBS’s Sunday Morning, and Fox & Friends; features on seven blogs embargoed for the same day; a viral public- art installation depicting Trump and Putin nude and locked in an embrace. Within three weeks, he had three hundred thousand registered users worldwide. Then, per an agreement he reached with potential investors, Hater received a market valuation of $4 million, even though the company had yet to bring in a cent.Which pretty much brings us to this fine June morning. Brendan’s wearing a striped T-shirt, jeans cuffed well above the ankle, and flip-flops—an ideal uniform if you’re hanging out at your condo swimming pool all day. That’s part of the fun of being your own CEO, he says. “But there’s that existential problem I wasn’t really prepared for: Nobody’s telling me what to do. Should I be putting together a budget? Working on the design of a new app? Raising money? Trying to retain users? Trying to attract new users? Trying to build out our analytics? Should I be dressing up like a chicken and handing out business cards in Grand Army Plaza?”
There are a lot of Brendans in the Republic of WeWork, and many are right here in this corridor. Some of the outfits in the South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, location trade in worldly goods, like Conscious Step, a sock company that donates a share of its proceeds to charity; Carvana, an online used-car dealership; Motorino, a pizza micro-chain; and Visual Magnetics, which sells idea boards. Others are entirely ether-based, such as One Door, a company that offers cloud-centric “merchandising execution”; Mish Guru, a Snapchat-focused “management & analytics platform”; and DevTribe, a social-media consultancy seeking “influencers looking to increase revenue through personal branding.” There’s at least one self-employed “vlogger and design consultant,” as well as Turnkey & Bespoke, which manages retail construction projects, be they pop-up shops, promotional booths, or, yes, offices inside WeWork buildings. There’s also a company called NSFW, whose function might be described as “facilitating curated gratification.” (It puts on swingers’ parties.) (...)
WeWork employees are quick to tell you that the company, and others like it, came about to serve the new leaders of the tech revolution. You can also see them as the by-product of an economy that suddenly ceased to guarantee young people steady employment. The economic collapse of 2008 and the flood of millennials who’ve since entered the workforce have together given us the age of “coworking,” a term WeWork popularized. The U. S. Census Bureau’s 2015 tally of unincorporated “nonemployer businesses”—an often-used classification for a lot of gig-economy work—reported that the figure had grown by nearly 20 percent, over the previous decade, to twenty- four million. Ours has long been a culture of garage tinkerers and traveling salesmen, but the coworking model presents a new, amenity- enriched option for young men and women setting out as entrepreneurial armies of one, in that it leaves them to rent the sort of infrastructure that the modern world has snatched from them.
Fees range from $220 a month for a “hot desk,” or space at a power outlet, to upwards of $650 for a private office. You also get unlimited coffee and craft beer, printer credits, evening yoga classes, themed happy hours, and lunch ’n’ learn seminars. Brendan’s four-desk office lists for $2,100 a month, but WeWork gave him the space gratis for the first six months, and now at a discount. “They like all the press Hater gets,” he says. “It’s kind of like Nike giving free shoes to athletes. Anyway, it’s better than working out of a Starbucks, and the membership ends up providing an extensive ‘collaboration network,’ ” he says. “They can find you an accountant or someone to make stickers.”
The staffers at WeWork call themselves “community managers” and wear T-shirts bearing the company’s slogans: “Do What You Love,” “Creator,” “Better Together.” The conversations in the elevator tend to be about Slack channel pickup, or chasing virality, or how much coffee a person has to consume before it functions as a diuretic. The lavatories at the WeWork at 524 Broadway in Manhattan, incidentally, are terrific—enclosed stalls with clever toile wallpaper featuring a repeating print of surveillance cameras partially obscured by roses and leaves. WeWork employs a design team of twenty-five, and each space is full of artwork carefully curated by Jeremiah Britton, the company’s creative director of art and graphics, to exemplify certain “core values”: “relevant, clever, honest and authentic, inspiring, and shareworthy.”
When this forty-eight-year-old reporter, embedded for several weeks at 524 Broadway, had a problem using the printer on his floor, he sought help from a community manager eating her lunch from a mason jar (“something healthy people call quinoa”), who politely advised him to file a request online. They try to respond within fifteen minutes, she said, adding, “Fun fact: In this building, the average wait is four minutes.” When the reporter did eventually get the printer to work, she offered an exuberant high-five. “I knew you could do it!” Asked how she liked WeWork, another community manager, who’d recently been at a corporate retreat in L. A. (with entertainment by the Chainsmokers), replied, “Culty, but in an awesome way!” in a tone that you could swear was outfitted with a suite of emojis. (...)
Would Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt have transcended his feelings of malaise if he’d spent his evenings taking meditation classes in his office building? What might Willy Loman, who ventured door-to-door with nothing but a smile and a shoeshine, have made of WeWork’s buy-in incubator program, with its build-your-own-hash-browns bar on Thank God It’s Mondays? What would the rank and file of Dunder Mifflin think of the legions of young hustlers who hope to make a killing by coming up with the next Shine?
Shine, by the way, is a “daily messaging experience” that sends its subscribers succinct pep talks like this one: “We all want to be chill when faced w/ a frustration (‘no sweat!’). But adulting is hard, Eric. Today, learn to respond > react.” The company has thus far raised more than $3 million from investors.
Not so long ago, bright young men like Brendan and Sam would’ve kept on paying their dues, patiently working their way up middle-management rungs, devoting decades to a single institution, and eventually retiring on a tidy pension. That life went the way of the American buffalo. And the risk-tolerant dudes of Hater consider themselves happy to have the independence gained in the exchange.
by Eric Konigsberg, Esquire | Read more:
