The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Adam Neumann: The Real Story Behind WeWork, A $4 Billion Cab Ride, And Surviving A $460 Million Debt

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

Are you chasing material success to fill an emotional void from your childhood? Adam Neumann speaks about the psychological lessons and spiritual frameworks that he learned after the most publicized corporate collapse in modern history.  Adam Neumann is the visionary entrepreneur who cofounded WeWork, growing it into a $47 billion global empire before stepping down amid unprecedented public scrutiny. He is now partnered with legendary venture firm a16z, and founder of Flow; an innovative residential real estate company designed to solve the modern loneliness epidemic by fostering genuine community.  In this episode, he explains: ■ The Ego Trap: How a massive $4.2 billion investment offer in the back of a taxi instantly derailed WeWork's mission, showing rapid financial success can blind founders to their core values. ■ The Foundation of Failure: Why experiencing a traumatic childhood or public business collapse is not a curse, but rather the exact mechanism required to build unbreakable psychological resilience. ■ The Technology Shabbat: Why disconnecting from all electronic devices for 24 hours every week is a necessary practice to break addiction, quiet noise, and discover yourself. ■ The True Measurement of Partners: Why you must evaluate your investors, friends, and life partners solely by how they treat you on your absolute worst day. ■ Influence vs. Control: The counterintuitive leadership principle that true power requires leading from the bottom up. Follow Adam Neumann: Flow Instagram: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/EyH0BGY Flow TikTok: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/GcyYR7H Flow Linkedin: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/DctJqQ9 Flow YouTube: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/1lIOLPI The Diary Of A CEO: ◼ Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼ Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/BWjLTZK ◼ Shop The Diary Of A CEO collection: https://thediary.com/collections/shop ◼ Get email updates - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5IB1H6E ◼ Follow Steven - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/AGU9QP4 Sponsors: Wispr - Get 14 days of Wispr Flow for free at https://wisprflow.ai/steven Pipedrive - https://pipedrive.com/CEO

I went from 13,000 employees to three employees in one week. Weworth was one of the fastest physical global growth the world's ever seen. But everything went wrong. We lost everything. At 2019, we publicly filed its S-1. Company valued at around $47 billion. The S-1 showed some losses. Three billion in the past three years.

Also, the S-1 revealed when you were CEO that you'd also trademarked the word we and sold it back to the company. That's not true. People sometimes think I was fired because the Wall Street Journal sets up. Not true. I wanted to hear directly from you. What happened? You really want to go there?

I'm happy to. The floor is yours. So in WeWork, the business grew faster than I could grow. And every step I take, suddenly the ego starts coming up. Oh, $20 billion valuation, billion valuation in Japan. On top of that, $5 billion in China. It suddenly became about the money. I forgot what we were all about.

And when I lost it, everybody lost. And the next thing is we found ourselves being forced to go public when we weren't ready. Then you resigned as CEO of WeWork after the IPO. didn't pan out. So I stepped down out of choice. In a second after I did it, we got stabbed in the back and the only lesson there, if you're going to stab the king, kill. If you're not going to kill, I'm going to come back again. Why did you make that choice to go back into business again? Because you had money from the reports almost a billion dollars. You know how hard it is. I now realize that in WeWork, I did a lot more things right than more, a lot more, not like 10% more, like 95%.

Some of what I'm saying is hard for you to fully hone in on all these founders you spoke to, all this, I I don't think they shared this label. So let's talk about it. So first, guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better.

I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now. hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much. Adam Newman, I've had the privilege of getting to know you briefly over the last couple of months and it struck me almost immediately that you are unlike almost any other founder or CEO or really person I think I've ever met. There's a depth to you and a philosophy and a perspective that is just incredibly rare. My question, to you is for you to be an anomaly, if we accept that, am I right in thinking that you had some sort of anomalous early origin story? What is that, that story that shaped this man that sat in front

of me? You know, for me first, when I get to know some at the beginning and they say, where is it coming from? Who are you? I usually start the same. First of all, I'm a husband. It's my first job, what I'm most proud of. Then I'm a father. I'm a father of six. Then I'm a friend. Friendships are very important for me. And after that, I'm an entrepreneur. I think each one of us has a phenomenal soul. I think it's perfect. And I think what really we see when we look at people is the distance between where we think they're holding to where their potential is. And I think it's that gap between those two things that actually defines a person. And for me, throughout my life, sometimes out of my control when I was young, and sometimes with my control when I got older,

I've always been striving to close that gap. So you talk about not having control. Your early context is quite unstable from what I read because your mother suffered from bipolar. Can you bring me into that world so I can understand the sort of context that Adam was raised happily? So we'll start, like every story it has two sides to it. My mom and my father are both doctors. And growing up, I always saw both of them taking care of the patients. And it would feel sometimes

like the patients came ahead of us. So, for example, my sister and I, we were never sick. No matter how sick we were, we looked at the man she was an oncologist. And she would say, my patients were sicker, go to school. And that was sort of the beginning of it.

When I was in the second grade, my parents got a divorce. It was very difficult for my mom, and she needed a change of synest. so we actually moved to the United States. You know this photo here? I do. And this one here, you've got a kid.

This is you as a child that is beaming with a smile, sort of ear to ear. Often when I see photos like that, my curiosity is what you can't see and what that young kid, that young boy there is not saying, but what he's feeling underneath all of those emotions. What I could tell you is, I think for me, I think the challenge started in that.

So we talked about my mother being bipolar. I only observed my mother's moods when we moved to the United States. There was nowhere around. It was only my mom and my sister and I. And all day she would work with the patients. And at night at 8 p.m. she would come home and all hell would break loose. And I remember, there are many stories, but I remember this. She would tell my sister and I, we had to wash the dishes.

Those are one chore. And we wouldn't, no matter what, because kids sometimes rebel by action when they can't rebel by words. And she would come home. you didn't wash the dishes, and she would take the dishes and throw them on the floor. And then she would cry

and start cleaning the dishes and mopping them. And it was, every night, ended with some version of action like that. And for two years, I remember how crazy my sister and I thought the whole experience was, and we didn't have any friends

who were sharing that experience. Until one day she bought this nice set of dishes, and she comes home again to throw the dishes, and we know this, she's only throwing the cheap dishes. She's not showing the ones that she liked. which gave us a little hint

that maybe there's a little more control over what's happening than this out-of-control situation. So if I had to guess what was happening with this kids, because now in hindsight, I know my mom and my dad very well. Probably there was a lot of arguing in the house.

Probably as a kid, because I now see my kids that are very young. I'm sure a child finds it very confusing when the parents are not aligned as a team. Because as a child, all you have to lean on are your parents. but I think the most important thing to say if my mom wasn't the way she was

and if I didn't go through all those challenges that I went through growing up and I went through a lot we're talking about bipolar, there's a lot that comes with it and we could go deeper or less but almost every single thing if you took a piece of paper

and you had to do a checkmark for every bad thing the thing can happen to a little boy you get to checkmark with me almost all of them including the really bad ones that we don't like to talk about As bad as that was, when I was 22, 23, I remember being very angry about my childhood.

Only when I met Rebecca, my then-girlfriend to then-wife, she very quickly introduced me to a spiritual practice. The way she introduced me, by the way, was after a week of dating, she came to and she goes, look, you're really nice, you have a lot of potential, but you're not a guy for me. I was very surprised at the time I was living in New York. My sister was the supermodel, we were hanging out. but I thought a lot of myself. And I said, what do you mean? I'm not the guy for you. He said, well, you don't have a spiritual bend.

You're very focused on material things. You want to be successful, but you're not actually understanding the game of life. The guy I'm interested in is going to want true happiness and true fulfillment. And true happiness and true fulfillment does not come from material things. It was so different for anything anyone has ever told me that instead of running away or doing this or doing that,

I thought for a second. I said, well, how would one come to explore, explore this spiritual life that you're talking about. And she said, well, you need a practice. And for me, that practice started being Kabbalah, but for all of us, there can be different practices. The thing I learned very quickly in the practice is the difference between meant to be and free choice.

And I think a lot of people don't understand it, but how can there be, we talk a lot about and spiritual about it's meant to be and there's free choice. How could there be free choice and things be meant to be at the same time? The way I explain it is you get to a fork in your life, and you choose left over right, and everything works out, meant to be. You get to that same fork, and you choose right, and you crash on your face horribly.

Everybody's watching. And you stop, and you actually learn lessons from it. And you take accountability, and you say, you know what? Whatever happened to me happened for a reason, and I'm going to learn from it. I'm going to be stronger, almost like a sword that's getting forged. and the more times you hit it and the more hit you put on it, the stronger it gets. And then you learn those lessons and you go back into the game of life and you apply that in again. Suddenly you take the catastrophe or the tragedy or the curse and you make it into a blessing.

You turn it into a mate-to-be. When the world did crash on me as an adult, it was nothing compared to what I had to deal with as a child. I was like, it's okay. I have a wife. I have kids. I have close friends. We'll take a deep breath and we'll start from scratching. And that kind of fortitude, I think regretfully, comes through going through very difficult things.

So if you're listening to this right now and you're going through something really difficult and it feels dark, I encourage you to remember that the darkest moment of the night is a second before dawn. I feel like there's things in your early context that you haven't shared before, because you said there's things that we don't usually share. Not publicly, but meaning I have in front of, so I used to share. everything in front of our employees that we work. So there's things I shared in front of 10,000 people. I'm not sure it ever made it to the press. What is missing?

You really want to go there? I'm happy to. If you're happy to, I'm happy to. I'll share two things that I'm not sure, but maybe could be helpful for other people that are going for similar things. So the hitting and stuff like, so when someone's bipolar, by the way,

they get very angry or very happy, very fast. When they're happy, they're the happiest. You have fun and everything's amazing. And my mom would play games with us and it was phenomenal. But also, and that I think happens a lot with bipolar. There's the suicide threats. And then there's one thing when you threaten to, so again, if you're two children

and your only parent threatens to commit suicide, who is going to take care of you? What is going to happen if suddenly that happens? And I have a lot of memories, but one that just came back to me not too long ago. We're in the kibbutz, which is where we're living after we came back from the U.S. My mom wanted us to have a special experience.

We went to this community, where we shared a lot of things together. It's also the beginning of why I love communities. And we got into this big fight, and my mom basically says she's going to kill herself, and she takes the knife. And I remember she's holding this huge knife. I'm like, no, no, don't do it.

And I remember, I just remember feeling that I have to stop it, that it is up to me. And if I don't stop it, then she's going to kill herself right there in front my sister and I. So I grabbed the knife and we're fighting left and right, and my sister-D is sitting right there, and she's crying, and she's crying. And I'm no, and she's saying yes, and the whole thing is so crazy. How old were you?

At 12, at that moment. That's one. There's more if you want to go deeper, but that was one. I invite you to go deeper. When I was in between second grade to fourth grade, and I was sexually, I think, called molested, by an older than a teenager. And so she was at least six or seven years older than me.

This one, I didn't even know that what was happening was wrong. And many years later, Rebecca and I are in the Hamptons. And somehow the story comes up, and she goes, Adam, I understand that this is not normal. for a child at that age. And I didn't even fully understand. And that taught me, that explained to me a lot about children.

And again, we go back to the responsibility of parents and the responsibility of society to take care of the children and schools to understand what's happening. And whenever we see anyone, we are so good at walking into a room, seeing someone else and judging. Oh, they're not acting the way I would act.

They're not acting right. They're not speaking right. Everybody's so busy judging everybody. I want to encourage every single person next time you're about to judge. You don't know who that person is. You do not know where they come from. You do not know what happened to them as a kid.

God forbid they were molested. God forbid they dealt with all these things. You don't know where they started. You only know where you see them now. And it could be that if you really got to know them and you would have known the distance they went from here to here, you would have been extremely impressed with them, and you would have not measured them that way.

And this is why I think it's so important for all of us when we walk into rooms to really go off to unity. You and I can say the same sentence in a way that tears people apart or brings people together. It takes more effort to speak in a way that brings us together. But if we don't start acting like this, If we keep dividing and keep splitting, I'm worried. Sounds like as an adult you've been able to understand that early experience

and sort of create a new sort of perspective or lens on what happened to you and what it means. And as you said, you know, you've orientated it around the fact that it's happened for a reason, or at least there's something to have learned from it. Was that always the case? I sometimes reflect on my own experience and think that for the first season of my life, I was dragged. And then at some point, I, like, got hold of the steering wheel, and I was able to, like, drive.

And one of them was, like, sort of unconscious, and the other one was more and sort of intentional and thoughtful. And I'm wondering through your early teens and 20s whether you had the wisdom and the perspective that you have now on your early experiences and how that's evolved over time. I probably went to sleep crying every single night for, probably until I was 14 or 15.

And I remember, and if you ask my sister, What would I say? I completely forgot. She said, I told her that one day, I'll become very successful and we'll take care of us. That was what I used to say. I literally didn't remember. This is something she told me.

I think that's how I interpreted that control and how I'm going to fix all these challenges that I had. But we launched a school, Rebecca and I. More Rebecca, I helped. It's a fifth school. In the school we teach kids how to become. connected to themselves. How do we part of something greater than themselves? If someone just taught me this as a kid, and I would have understood then that there's this bigger picture, I think

I would have been able to handle it a lot better and skip the challenging years faster. Move faster into the point where I realize that I don't control what happens, but I can control how I react to it. So back to your point of driving, are you driving? Don't know. Now you question it. I'm questioning myself. I would question it. You know, My follow-up question too would be how do you define success? My definition of success these days, it's funny, I was thinking about it this morning when I got on the lift on my way here. I thought, do you know what it was? Because my fiancé turned to me this weekend and she went, Stephen, I think you have enough now.

And then she paused and then she retracted the statement. But it got me thinking about what enough is. And actually, I thought, well, it's the motion forward in the pursuit of goals that matter to me that are challenging, surrounded by people. That is the success. and that's like a daily, a daily thing. There's no podium in this game that I'm playing. By the way, when she said she thinks you have enough, was she referring to material things?

Yes. I think society has taught us that once we gain that success, once we gain those material things, we get to this number, suddenly that hole that we all feel inside of us will be full. Now, I know it's very hard to hear,

especially for people who haven't gotten there. Like, oh, yeah, you got there already, so now you're saying it. I'm only going to share with you what I have learned. And from all the most successful people that I know, and I'm lucky to know quite a lot of them, I have not seen one that got happy or fulfilled from attaining a number or a material thing.

I don't believe that's how the game of life works. So when your fiancé said, which is not like her, because I think she's more on the spiritual side, tell her that I said, I'm surprised she said that. I think she had something deeper to say and she was holding back. When she said, I think you have enough, I would really go back to redefining success.

So back to that, I'll tell you how I define it in a second, but I think if we can agree on the definition of success, then we can start having a discussion of, A, are we there and are we headed there? And B, how do we do better to get there? And if we agree on our definition of success, then now we can start working together towards the same goal. If one of us defines success by making the most money and the other person defines success by being the most fulfilled,

the most happy, the most light that they can be, then playing two different games. What's your definition? When you're at your deathbed and you're one minute before it's all going to go and you know you're out of time, all you have left is the love that surrounds you at that moment, your children, your grandchildren, your friends, your friends' children,

all the love that surrounds you at that moment and all the love that you have cultivated for your entire life. And I think it's that love, which then moves on to whatever it is that happens after. So my definition of success is in that last moment, right before you go, how do you feel? Do you feel full and surrounded by love and like life has been this amazing journey? Or is there regret or is there this? And I'll tell you the one thing that happens right before we pass away, the ego goes away completely. No more secrets.

And again, in the spiritual study, you say, what's the definition? of hell back to how we started this. You get to see, you get to glimpse for a second, the ultimate potential that your soul had, how perfect it was and how high you could have gone, and where you really got to. And the distance between those two, that's hell. When you were 31 years old in 2010 and you sat down with your partner Miguel. Miguel McEl and you made this sketch on a whiteboard for WeWork. If I'd asked you then what your definition mission of success was, would you have turned to me and said love, or would you have said something else? I believe I would have said something else. So my big shift is when I met my wife.

So by this point of this picture that you're showing me, I was four years into Rebecca teaching me about the game of life. So I'm starting to advance. So I can tell you what I was thinking. It wouldn't have been love, but it would have been we. And the point about, because, it was called, if you look at that picture, it's going to say, we work, we live, we give, we share. I don't remember. I haven't seen it for like 10 years. It was never about. desks and chairs. It was always about creating a world where people make a life and not just a living. It was about something greater than ourselves. If we just jump sort of backwards in time from that day by about 10 years, if I'd ask you what you want to be when you're older, what would you have said?

At 21? 21. It's embarrassing. It's embarrassing, though. I'm embarrassed for my 21. Right. Tell me. I'm embarrassed for my 21 year old self. What did you want to be? A billionaire. You wanted to be a billionaire I did regretfully. Why? I thought that making the money is going to compensate. I thought I was going to fill that hole for my childhood. What about at 16 if I'd asked you? I think I said millionaire then.

I don't think I knew the word billionaires and 16. I think the numbers were because the world changed. But I thought that making money was going to fill that hole from the childhood that back then seemed very difficult and very aggressive and very with all these negative words that we can use about the difficult and abusive childhoods. And I thought of making money would solve it. But then I did three businesses afterwards who did not succeed until I met Rebecca. And Rebecca was like, you're chasing money.

You will never have it. And even if you get it, it will never make you happy. You will never have it. She said, chasing money is like chasing cool. You're cool. You're just like that. I don't think you're working too hard on doing. Thank you so much.

You don't like putting on shoes. I don't like putting on shoes. I don't like putting on shoes. It's all good. So she said, you're chasing. money, it doesn't work like that. Also like chasing a girl. You really want someone. You have to take a deep breath.

But she said to me, even if you were to get money the way you're chasing it, it not only will not fulfill you. It will be negative for you. So I said, well, what should I do? She said, well, you're a very talented individual. You should figure out what your superpower is. It's the first time I've heard anyone use the word superpower.

She goes, you need to take your superpower. You need to connect it to something that's really meaningful for the world. Something you're passionate about, but something that can make a difference, and to bring those two things together, and to only focus on making that a reality. Employees will want to work with a company that's doing that. Investors want to invest in a company that's doing that,

and consumers want to buy from a company that's doing that. The rest will for it. Then she said, success, the way you define it then, that money success you think is a, will fall on you from the sky, more than you can ever imagine. I was like, I want to marry this woman. I proposed three months after we met. And the idea of Wee was central to this drawing that I had in front of me, which is a drawing you did on a whiteboard when you were 31 years old, 2010 with your partner, Miguel, after selling your company, I think it was called Green Desk.

Green Desk. You sold it for how much? It wasn't like a... 1.5 million. Okay. There was three partners. So we each got half a million, half a million, half a million. But our partner didn't want to pay us the whole amount up front.

So we only gave us $300,000. The rest was installment over four years from Miguel and I. And I remember telling Miguel, Miguel, you keep the money, because I'll waste. it first time we ever made money. You'll keep the money because I will waste it and we'll keep it for our next business. And the way the universe works, by the way, the universe speaks to us, the signs start happening and you sort of one thing leads to another. It's almost serendipity. Our first We Work building, to get the building, the landlord wouldn't give it to us unless we gave a check of exactly $300,000. The same $300,000 that was sitting in Miguel's account.

It went from there to there, and Wework was creative. So tell me what that is. Okay, we're in Green Desk. Just to remind everybody what Green Desk is, Green Desk was created in May of 2008. The world was crashing. That was the downturn. And before it started, Miguel and I got to know each other.

He was an architect and I had a baby clothing company. And we're in the same building. My roommate introduced us. And we would just talk about doing great things. And there was a landlord there. And every day he would see me, goes, Adam, your baby clothing company sucks. And I said, Mr. Gutt,

Why do you say that? He said, well, my wife, we have eight kids. She loves buying baby clothes. She didn't once buy from you. I don't know how you pay me rent. Your baby clothes suck. And I would say, well, Mr. Gottman, you own all this real estate around here. He goes, yes, I do.

Said, your real estate sucks. He goes, why do you say that? Said it's all empty. And we would do that for four months, back and forth. One day he looks and he goes, Adam, if I gave you one of my buildings, you keep saying that it sucks, what would you do with it? So he takes me upstairs and he shows me this beautiful, floor plate. And I said to him, how much do you get in rent? He goes, $5,000 a month.

He said, well, it's empty, but let's say you would get $5,000. I said, look, I'm a small business. I don't need this much. It's divided to 15 small places, spaces. We'll charge $1,000 each. We'll put a receptionist, we'll pay the receptionist $2,500. We'll get $15,000. That will leave us with $12,500. You will get $7,500, and we'll get the difference. And he was like, let me think about it. He calls me the next day. He goes, I love it. But instead of one floor, take the whole building. It had five floors. We'll put the receptionist downstairs. So we can share the expenses. It will be even better. And we put five ads on Craigslist. We launched Green Desk. It was 92% full within a week. Started cash flowing positive, which was a new thing for me, because this was my fourth

business, never had cash flow positive. Cash flowing positive within a month and became very successful, very fast. After about six, maybe 12 months, we started thinking, Bigger, Miguel and I, said, we'll take Green Desk National. We went to our landlord. Said, I'm not interested. We asked for $20 million. We said, we'll split the business 50-50. He wasn't interested. So we started, and very soon after he said, I'll buy it from you, and we started planning this.

And you drew this on a whiteboard. Miguel drew this on the wall, not even a whiteboard. The walls were made of glass. This was drawn on the glass. So all of our walls in Green Desk were also whiteboards. And because everybody was about creating and inventing. And what you see here is that socialized. commercial friends is here.

This proves the fact, Ben Horwitz in the interview that you saw, he did with me in the podcast. He says to me, Adam, you've always had one idea. And then at the end, the apology said, Adam, I didn't mean to say you only have one idea. Of course, you have all these ideas. I said, Ben, you're right.

This is not that different from what flow is. This is all about the friends and all about the living and all about the working, life essentials. While I haven't seen this for a long time, fintech, travel, everything in between.

So for anyone that's watching, listening and can't see, it's a circle that has lots of circles in it. And it says all the little circles are like travel, health, social life, friends, co-work, co-worker supporters, life essentials, work rituals? Work rituals, again, you can read it better than me, but that makes sense. And this was the idea for we work. This is the idea for we work. So sometimes people said, oh, you grew out of desks and chairs. You shouldn't have gone to all these categories. The idea started.

This was before there was one desk. What is the essence of this? We wanted to make a world, place in our opinion, that really needed community. This was to deliver on a mission of creative world where people make a life and not just a living. This was a full life style, life circle.

And it was very aspirational. And it's how, by the way, for any one of our listeners or your listeners that is starting a business, Start with the vision. Dream as high as you can. Go all the way to the stars, because if you don't shoot for the stars,

you're never going to get to the moon. Go far. Then, take a deep breath and go back to basics. What do I need to do first? What I need to do second? What I need to do third? The secret of life and entrepreneurship is to be able to be in both places at the same time.

On the one hand, I'm going to go so far. On the other hand, I'm just starting, so I better roll up my sleeves and get the broom and start brooming. It's both of them. I need to go knock on doors. I need to go meet people. I need to do whatever work needs to be done at the beginning to get the business started.

Let's talk about both then. So you've got the trenches and then you've got, let's say, the clouds or the moon, as you refer to it. Why is it important to dream big? Why is the scale and the size of the dream important? So I believe it's the secret of manifestation. So when people ask me out of them, what is the secret manifestation? How do you make something out of nothing? I think the order is

first you have to believe if you and I have a big idea first we have to believe it then that takes time to believe true belief by the way do you know when belief is measured no when it's really tough belief is not measured on everything

so I remember this and I've shared the story before but your audience is so wide that I'm sure a lot of them haven't heard it when right after the whole explosion of WeWork occurred and it was like five days

in and the whole thing was crashing on us and there's a million articles and the whole thing is happening. My spiritual teacher, who I haven't spoken at this point almost for two years after I studied with him for eight years, calls me. He said, Adam, how are you doing? I said, I'm not doing so well right now. It's crazy. He said, oh, great, that's why I called you? I said, why did you call me? He said, Aten, why didn't you call me? He said, I called you to make sure that you remembered the two things we learned for eight years. I said, Aetan, we didn't learn two things for eight years. We study twice a week. We learned endless things. He goes, no, you missed it. We learned two things. I said, please remind me. It goes, one was love thy neighbor as yourself and the rest is commentary.

We took a second, Fred. I said, let's talk about this for a second. What does love thy neighbor as yourself mean to you? Such a famous saying. We've heard it so many times. When I think about it, the way that I understand it is to have empathy and compassion for all of the complexities, both the good, the bad, the indifferent, and that which you don't understand, which is like how I would treat myself. Like, I understand all the, that I'm a complex person and that I'm multifaceted and imperfect and that I have strengths and weaknesses. And I kind of, I'm okay with all of it.

And in others, we're less okay with all of it. Beautiful. Let's say a little bit different words, but I was right on. Love the neighbor as yourself means that you first have to love yourself. To love yourself, you have to acknowledge not only the great strength that you have, that you love, you must acknowledge your weaknesses, your failures, your mistakes. And the only way you can love yourself after all of those is if you're able to forgive yourself. So the true secret of loving oneself is to forgive yourself, to not carry guilt, to really be able to know that all of

these are lessons for you to grow and change and go to your next level from. Back to the sword analogy, that you're a sword and you're getting forged and every single time you get hit, you just get stronger. Once you feel that and you're able to love yourself, then you're able to love everybody else. That was the first thing he told me we learned. The second thing he said to me, which we said before, is I want to remind you that the darkest moment of the night is a second before dawn. Belief is not measured on everything is going up and everybody's telling you what the genius you are and everybody wants to be your friend and everybody wants to be your investor. Belief is measured when it's all crashing, when even your friends are questioning you,

When the phone is not ringing. And if a person is able to have true belief then, then he says to me, if you're going to be able to take this experience and really hold your belief, hold your positivity, hold your happiness, be the person I know you can be,

you can't imagine what the future is stored for you. What did you believe in your hardest moment? In God and in myself, in my wife, in my kids, and in the fact that even though I don't know at this moment why this thing happened, I am going to be stronger for it. And I remember that morning, this phone call was late at night.

The next morning at 6 a.m., I walked down to my three, I went from 13,000 employees to three employees in one week. I walked down to the three employees who were my partners in the family office, not even employees' partners. I walked down to them, and I'm smiling. And they're stressed out.

We would meet every day at 6 a.m. We're done. We're bankrupt. It's finished. They only joined me three months before. they came to manage what they thought was a $5 to $10 billion family office, and they're dealing with negative $400 million compounding interest, full bankruptcy situation. And I thought about them, all my, not all.

A lot of friends that I had that were really there with me and enjoyed with me and grew with me and made money with me, when I really needed that one small moment, a lot of them weren't there. And these three almost strangers, who I didn't really know, were standing right there by my side. And they see me smiling, say, Adam, why are you smiling? They thought I really lost my mind. It was done.

And I said, I'm smiling because I remember that the darkest moment of the night is a second before it done. And I remember that belief is actually measured when things are difficult, not when everything is working. And I believe, and I know it's going to work out, and I don't know how, and I don't know why,

but this is all going to work out for the best. And we're going to learn a lot from this, and it will actually prepare us when a real difficulty happens, so we're ready to go and deal with it. And about 10 days later, we started to do that. coming out of it in a very positive way.

I want to go to the top of the story, because I really want to walk through some of the key moments, but I noticed your energy shift a little bit when you started describing those three people. Here's another thing that I've learned. If you now haven't, you're facing this as we speak right now. I bet you have lots of friends. That's how you define friends.

Exactly. Well, I'll tell you a secret about them, and I'm sorry to say that. We're only going to know which one of them are your friend and which ones are not. If, God forbid, you crash and you actually need them. And then I can also tell you if you're gonna crash or not.

If you go big enough, really, really big, you crash. Whenever sound tells you, oh Adam, it's never gonna happen to me. My ego is never gonna get the best of me. I'm never, I'm always gonna stay in control. I have young, successful people like to say that to me. I say, oh, you haven't gone big enough. Because if you're really, really, really, that's part of the definition of going really, really big.

Life is not about if we fall down. We're supposed to fall down. Life is about how we get up. And the more times we fall down, the more times we get to get up. And if you practice getting up enough times, then you might not fall. Then you get very good at it.

And then you can go and really go for the stars. So with the friends, the reason I, my energy changed about those three, I didn't know them that well, and they stuck by me. I have a weakness with loyalty. I'm very loyal. So if you were there for me,

when things were tough, I'm a sucker for that. I'll be there for you, even if you mess up, to a fault almost. A lot of founders who start businesses have this thing that pop culture is called imposter syndrome, where they kind of do doubt themselves. And this sort of sits in contrast to this idea of having belief, because sometimes they don't believe. And they are plagued with insecurities and doubts, and they kind of go back and forward,

and they think, really, am I the person to do this? I've never done it before, which is, that comes with pursuing something. Great. You had never done it before. So what do you say to those people who are struggling with doubt? Because they're hearing, listen, you have to believe. Did you have doubt when you drew this? A fascinating question.

My level of certainty was so high when I was doing waywork. I was sure it was going to work. A lot of times I think people confused my certainty as a different word. I was just, I was that sure that the product is needed for the world. When I started flow, which was different and came after everything, thing. And after also we had a family. When I started, we had no kids. It was just Rebecca and I was very easy to throw myself into something and work 18 to 20 hour a day, seven days a week, and love every second. There was nothing else. We work grew astronomically quickly, really

atypically quickly, especially for that type of company. And I wanted to hear directly from you, like, why? What happened? What were the factors that contributed to this meteoric rise? I think a couple years after you founded the company, I became a customer of it, both in New York but also in London. What didn't I see? What was what was it? So we worked started in February of 2010. And it's, for anybody listening, I think this is the way that it should and could work. I think from the first day, we were so clear, as you pointed out with the circle, on the fact that this mission is bigger than us. And when you're part of a mission that's greater than yourself, urgency doesn't just become something like, oh, we have to do it now because I said so or because we said so.

When you feel that your mission really needs to come out to the world, then you have to do it now because there's no time to waste because it's really important. And we just started with our first, and part of my energy is I bring people together. I really like creating community, but I also, I love to move fast when we're clear on the direction that we're moving, and I don't believe anything is impossible. So when you connect that mission of something being greater than yourself, speed, and not accepting a no, you put those things together, then real magic happens. I think that's one, two. I want an example of that.

I'll give you one. Many examples, but let's start early we work, because I think this all started weird. But before the example, one more thing I was going to say that made we work to answer a question. It's the team. The team was so dedicated. The team believed so much. it was their essence. It was their experience of being part of something

greater than themselves. And when you can bring a group of people together to all run in the same direction, you almost can't stop anything. Give you an example. It's our second we work building. We need to do the floor. We only had $90,000.

We didn't have any more money. And all the quotes were $200,000 a floor, whatever the number was. And I said to Miguel and to the few people there, we have to do it for this price. And said, you can't. We got five quotes. It's not the price.

I said, well, how much is the floor and everybody's like the floors between 30 to 45,000 where these wood floors was an important part of the design. I said, why? I said, what do you mean? Why?

These are the quotes. I said, well, can you break down the quote for me? I said, what do you mean? I said, well, how many pieces of floor? How many nails? How much glue? How much rubber?

How many hours of work per person? How much does each person cost? No one could answer. I said, okay, I have an idea of how we can negotiate this differently. I called the top three, guys and said, guy, I would like you to earn 15% above the cost. I think that's a fair margin, 15%. Do you agree? So, of course I agree. It's like, great. And all three of them, by the way,

said yes. I said, great. Well, I'm going to need to see the cost of each piece. I'm going to go quote it myself. And we're going to get to 15%. Very quickly, the cost went down to that first floor instead of 30 to 45,000 was 12,000. The guy tells to me, Adam, no one's ever worked with me that way. Before you know it, they joined us and we had our own internal construction company, and we realize that only by controlling it, could we get the right price and we're fast enough? So it's not taking no for an answer, but also using logic to really look into it.

Now, it could be that if I looked into it, I wouldn't have been able to get a better price. But what I'm describing is the challenge in construction in general and globally, and it's part of the things that Flow is solving today. Elon would call that like reasoning from fast principles. I had a similar story. He would.

He would call it like that. And from what I know, in Flow, we look up to Elon as an entrepreneur. We think he's unbelievable. And whenever someone gives Elon is an example, say no one is Eland. That's not an example we use. We look at him for inspiration.

I happen to know that he can put an engineer because I have a friend who's daughter works for him in SpaceX. He can put an engineer to work on one problem for six months, one screw, one connection, but the result ends up being not twice as simple as anything NASA has done, but like 500 times as simple, and cheaper and faster and lighter. So yes, it's going back.

You can call it first principles. You can call it asking every question, but if you're the entrepreneur and you're going to run, or if you're an employee or a partner, ask why. People don't because they don't want to be rude or inconvenience others or they're too concerned with being like. So pushing back on a supplier or conventional status quo in any way is seen to be inconvenient.

I'm going to try to say a different reason why they're not, because they don't ask themselves why. It's going to go back. This discussion can keep going back to the same basics. A person who's comfortable asking himself, why is he doing something, questioning himself or herself, seeing negative things,

seeing problems, and then enjoying the process of growing out of them, will have no problem asking someone else why. Whenever you ask someone why and they don't want to answer you, what are you hiding? This is a discussion.

I usually, when I go into topics like they start by telling the vendor, wherever it is, I want you to make money. No one's trying to make you lose money. But we're on a mission. And if I'm going to pay even 20% more than I should, then that's 20% less of another building, another community, another neighborhood, that flow is not going to take part in.

This really does make a lot of sense to me. We have this Slack channel in our company called Paperwalls, and the whole idea is that we're trying to encourage our team to push on paper walls. A paper wall is something that looks solid, but reveals itself to be completely made of paper the minute you try it, you ask why, you push on it. And there's a story of a kid that worked for me in one of my companies for four years, and he animates video.

I said to him, how long is it going to take you to animate a video for us? That's 30 minutes. he said it takes nine days, right? He worked for me for four years. It took him nine days time I ate the video. We decided we want to launch a weekly channel. I need him to do it three or four days max so that the rest of the team can do it.

I say to him, how long is it going to take you? He says nine days. And then, because we had established this culture in our company of pushing on paper walls, I said to him, why? Do you know what he said to me? I think I said something like, what would it take to do it in two?

And he went, Stephen, you just need to buy me a new laptop. I have an old laptop. I thought, fucking hell. I've been paying him for four years. And he's been, think about how much time I've lost in those four years, just simply because I didn't ask that question, but also to your point, he never mentioned it. He never knew he was in a paper wall himself.

First year of WeWork, we opened one building. Year 9 of Wework, we opened two buildings a day. In 130 cities, 50 countries, 70 languages, 100,000 square foot per building. So that's 200,000 square foot a day, 20,000 square media for your European listeners. A day. A lot of the same people who are only capable doing the one and two participants, were leaders by that time of being able to do one of the fastest physical global growth

the world's ever seen. Same people. As you learn to, in your words, go through paper worlds, as you learn that anything is possible, suddenly this is the secret of high growth and momentum. Whatever you can do today, if your company starts growing fast, you'll be shocked what you'll be able to do in three months. nine months, nine months, and in two years you're going to look back and not believe that

that was your capacity. And I keep telling people, and they tell them, oh, I can't do this and this takes three months. I say, guys, I've seen this done before. Forget I know we can do it. It's easier now. I've already been there. Now you just need to believe.

And goes back to the belief. Then we're going to need to put the systems and the processes. And today with technology, and this is where I think AI is very exciting, you could shortcut a lot of these things and do a much better work. But back to what you said about your company, I bet, when's the last time, you set with them in a circle. How many employees? About 200 in total.

So 200 is a big number. But if you took 30 of them, sat in a room, and I actually asked them, what are you working on personally? What is your internal paperwork? What is your internal challenge? What's stopping you?

And they got comfortable talking about it. And then as a group, first of all their peers would hear. And before you know, their peers would help them. Hey, I remember that you said that this is a child for you're insecure, you don't talk in public,

you're a little judgmental, you're too hard on yourself. Every person has another story. Before you know, at the moment you get them used to grow internally, it will affect your business to grow externally. In WeWork, the business grew faster than I could grow. That's where everything went wrong. I actually think whenever a company grows faster than its founder,

one of two things would occur. Either it will crash because that's what happens. Or if somehow miraculously that founder is able to keep it all together, in my experience, they're not fulfilled and happy. And if they're not fulfilled and happy, why do it? How important for the founders listening and for the people that want to build or become is hard work?

Because there's a real debate around hard work. You know, some people say, you know, work-life balance is the ultimate. Some people say if you're a founder, you've got to give 100-hour weeks. By the way, new answer to that question. It is the most important thing, but we have to define hard work.

Hard work as a founder is not just limited to how many hours you put in the office. Hardware as a founder is how much time do you put on the business? How much time are you putting on yourself? As you grow, you will be a better leader. You will be a better money raiser. You will be a better express your business better. So hard work is the only way to do it

and you can't be 50%. And here's something else that your founders know. When I had to decide if I'm doing flow again or not, The reason it was so hard is because I knew that there's no such thing as being 80% in or 90% in. Either you're 100% in and you're all in or it's not going to work.

So how important is hard work? Most important thing. What is hard work? Some of it is on the business. Some of it is on you. If you're married, it's also on your relationship. If you have kids, it's also with your kids. By the way, for those listeners who have kids,

if you ever are wondering what you need to work on, just listen to your kids. They know. There you were alluding to this like sort of magical thing that happens when one focuses on something. You were saying if you're like 90% in it, like doesn't work. But if you're 100% in, it works. What is the magic that is unobvious with that? When you're 100% in, there's no time for doubt.

There's no time for questions. There's no time for fear because you're so in it. When you're, oh, I can find this work-life balance while doing it, you're not going to do something great. And if you are, if you were to achieve something, it's now close to your potential. But again, I'm redefining what 100% in meant. We talked about Warren Buffett. Was he not 100%?

And of course he is. Does he have a full schedule? No way. He keeps it open so he can have the important meetings, so he can read, so he can connect. There are different ways to be 100% in. But you must, in life, in my opinion, be 100% in. That's why I love surfing.

In surfing, when you're on the board on a way, If you're not present and you're not in flow, you're knocked off that board. What about founders that are doing two different businesses, pursuing two different missions? Remember what I told you, we say in flow? You're not Elon. I would tell them you're not Elon. Elon can do two different, very few people. I know he's one of the only examples I have, Jack Dorsey.

Some of the best on the planet can do. But it's very hard to do to businesses at the same time. It's hard enough to do one. And I guess even in those cases, they built up tremendous resources by doing one really, really well. Again, my question about I don't know which founder you're thinking, but you've met people like that. Really, when I've met people doing two that are somewhat succeeding, they're spending no time on their own personal growth. So the extra time they have, because they did their first business so well, they're using it to do another business, which usually in my experience is an excuse not to actually experience life for what it is. If you're already doing one and it's meaningful and it's fulfilling, why do you need another?

What are you hiding from? What is it that you're not actually doing? Would be my question. Now, if they, maybe there's a, maybe they're a miracle. Hello, I wasn't able to make that finance meeting. Can you tell me what I missed? What I have in front of me is Whisper Flo's new note taker. And for me, it's been an absolute game changer.

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if you're in sales and you run a sales team. I don't think you'll regret it. We often say, you know, in one end you're saying, go fast. And I hear that from great founders like yourself and Elon and those guys, they say, go fast, push on paper walls, go as fast as you can. But then also, there's other areas where you go, you have to go slow to go fast. But also know your weaknesses.

I obviously did not succeed in building great technology in WeWork. That is a known fact. So if I'm going to partner again and I'm going to build a business larger than WeWork, put the right partners. Know what you don't know. No, what you don't know. And let them lead. When we hired our CTO, we had four different CTOs. I let Ben do the final interview.

Okay. This is what I was going to ask, because one of the things I hear from, founders a lot is they know they don't know X. Let's say it's finance. And then they do an interview with someone and the person says, I'm the best at finance. They have no idea if they're the best at finance, because they don't know finance, the founder. So what did you do to mitigate the trap of accidentally hiring someone that you weren't able to assess their competence? I chose partners that say the truth. When Mark and Ben and I do a board meeting, Mark is our board member and Ben joins us. For context, I should say, Mark and Bennett, two of the world's most famous investors,

and they have backed you with your new venture flow. Yeah, just for context. Mark and Ben have invested $470 million into flow at a series A and series B. And I, Adam, and my family personally invested $350 million. Because part of when we created the business together, we wanted to be aligned. We buy together, we sell together, we do everything together. We have our board meetings. They usually start at 8 a.m. They ended 5. Very long board meetings. We talk about everything. We love it as a team. We really respect them.

We truly prepare for these meetings. We don't spend too much time because, again, when you're really busy, don't have time. So it's not like we spend a month. We go a week before, look, take stock of everything we did that quarter. It's always shocking to see how much you did. Because when you're not really measuring,

you're just doing, when you stop for a second and look what you did like, wow, we did quite a lot in three months. So very useful. We put together our board decks. We send them to them a few days before. They actually read them. And then they come for the meeting. So it's like 8.30 to 5.

And then when it's done, I go to dinner with the two of them. And the dinner starts by me saying we sit down, usually wherever it is, please tell me what I can do better. And the first time I asked them, they were a little bit uncomfortable. The second time, I literally remember Mark going like this, Mark on truth, like this, like he was ready, Ben taking out his notes. That's a true partnership. And we do it every single time.

And when you have the previous, you said some of the biggest investors, In my opinion, A16Z number one investor in the planet. And if you're an entrepreneur today and you can, that's what you want your money from. If you're an entrepreneur today and you take it from Benchmark, the company that took me out, that took Travis, superstar out, Jack Dorsey out. Travis from Uber, Jack, Travis from Uber, Jack. Drosie from Square, Twitter, Block, and many more, and many more. So when you choose your investors, look at their history.

Are they the kind that support entrepreneurs like you? Are they going to take you to the next level? Or do they have a history that actually clashes with the entrepreneur? If they have a history that clashes with the entrepreneur, partner. So there was two key things I pulled out from there. The first was around this idea of knowing when to go fast and slow and you use technology as an example. The second thing, which opened up the story about A16Z, is the right people and partners. So important. More. If I had to choose one, right investors, right employees, right partners,

most important thing. What did you learn about employees? Like, what is a great team member? If I have a problem with an employee, there's only one person to blame. And that's me. And what are the mistakes that you made in choosing employees? I think it's how I was leading that I've been learning more about. Where I used to lead from top to bottom, I know I'm learning how to lead bottom to a lot. up. What's the difference? Top to bottom means you think because someone reports into you, they have to do what you say. But it's not true. This is not a dictatorship. They have free will. They can go work.

If you hired someone, they're really talented, they'll go work elsewhere. Especially great leader. The more talented they are, the more that top to bottom does not work. They won't be willing to do it. They shouldn't. Great talent is not willing to be managed like this. Great talent wants to be inspired. Wanted me to see the full version of themselves even more than they see. see it and they want the room to make mistakes, but also to grow, but they also need feedback. If you have someone amazing and they're fucking up, sorry, they're miss. You can swear. I can swear.

And my kids are going to listen. It's all good. They're fucking up. Are you going to tell them? Or because you're not comfortable with conflict, you're going to wait for 90 days and every time they're going to make that mistake, you're going to get so upset that by the time you communicate to them, it's too late. The moment they made a mistake, if you respect them, give them the feedback because that's

the best thing for them. By the way, when you give them the feedback, give them room to give you feedback. If you're going to manage these employees and you want to attract the best talent in the world, remember that power comes from influence, not control. If you think they need to do what you said because you're their boss, you've already lost. And it's a matter of time until it doesn't work out. If they're okay with it, just because you're the boss, you have to tell them what they do and they accept that power. they're not the right employee for you

and you're not the right boss for them there's no chance you're getting the best out of them one of the parts in your journey that I have reflected on a lot because it's a fascinating story is the day that you meet Massa at SoftBank and I'm keen to understand the context of where

the business was before you met Massa at SoftBank that particular story has always inspired me for a multitude of different reasons but where was the business at was it what 2017 I want to tell you about the day I met Masa and I'm going to connect it to, I think,

the biggest mistake ever made in WeWork. I'll bring it together. Massa is one of the best investors in the world, is also one of the biggest investors in the world. In my story, Massa is the hero, even though a lot of people who didn't know the story correctly might have misunderstood. So in my story, Massa took a bet on me

and he did amazing and he deserved to have become very successful from it. And he leads soft bank. Massa is the leader of soft banks. If you want a little history of Massa, Massey is the leader of SoftBank. He becomes very well known to the world where he buys a tech conference,

actually, in Vegas. And he buys this tech conference for I think about $880 million. And at the same time, he has his own tech businesses, and he owns a phone company, and he starts growing and growing. He's famous to have gone to Steve Jobs

and said, I'm going to take the iPhone. When the iPhone just came out, he knew it was going to be a hit, and I'm going to give it to every subscriber in Japan. He invents the leasing model for it and gives an iPhone And then everybody signs to his service because everybody wanted the iPhone.

So a lot of things. And then he gives Jack Ma $20 million that over time, I think, becomes $200. For Alibaba? For Alibaba. For Alibaba, which at its peak is worth about $80 billion. Wow. So at the time, when I meet Masa, this is 2016.

Let's start with the night before. The night before I meet Masse in New York City, I have a board meeting the day before. This is the old board. And we're all sitting together. I just raised that 16, I raised maybe six months before at 16 billion. valuation. How big we work? It's about to do that year about 950 million in revenue. And the reason

I know is because we were doubled in revenue every single year. So we work, the business model was working very well and the four walls were working very well. What's the distinction, sorry, between the four walls and everything else? You have a retail business. You could have your stores could be doing really well. Yeah. Your state, not making money. And your what's not made to state? So let's say you're in New York City. So let's talk high growth for a second. When you're growing as fast as we're growing, you're always putting new buildings on the map. A new building has a ramp up. Usually ramp up of a retail store or a food or a restaurant could take two years, three years. And we like to talk about ROI, return on investment, and how long

does it take? A great time to return your investment would be 24 months, 36 month, and then can grow. We work at its peak was returning its money somewhere between six months to nine months. And then afterwards, it's going up to 12 months and 18 months. So if you're going to to grow, we grew in New York City to 130 buildings. So you can have 30 buildings. If the following year you're adding 30 more buildings, those new 30 have to per definition lose money for at least the first six months, for not nine months. So you could be very profitable in these buildings, but not profitable in these because they need time, which means this New York City, the city doesn't look as a city profitable. Or the country, if you're looking at your P&L, doesn't look as a country

profitable. Which is why in a high growth business, you've got to get very specific and in the details. And you got to really understand what's working, what's not. Even in a building, you can have one floor that's profitable because you opened it first. And the new floor that you opened after, not profitable yet. WeWork's technology was never able to count this way. Flows technology, if I threw it on WeWork today, I could tell you which square foot is, I forget which building is profitable, which floor is profitable. I can tell you which corner. It knows everything because it's a connected system.

It's not disconnected. back to what we're saying. I'm sitting with the board and we decide that we want to turn the business, we're going to go out and raise money, turn the business profitable, and take it public. How are you going to turn it profitable?

All you have to do in a high growth business that's working to turn it profitable is stop growing. You just stop adding new buildings and you give time to all the buildings to catch up. Remember I explained that in WeWork, your problem was not demand. It was supply.

So the moment you don't add, more supply. The demand is greater than the supply, everything fills up. The moment everything fills up and you didn't add anything new, you go cash flow positive. As simple as that.

So we sit in that board and we decide that I'm going to go and raise, and the number was three to four hundred million, stop the growth, meaning stop signing leases, maybe even move to management deals, something we'll talk about

in floor in a second. And then take it public. This is 2016. That was the day before. The same time, at some point, Massa's right-hand guy, his name is Ron Fisher, sends an email a text to one of our guys, and says, hey, Masa wants to come see Adam.

This is at the same time that Massa is raising the Vision Fund. For those who don't know, the Vision Fund was his $100 billion venture fund, largest venture fund ever raised. Masa wants to see Adam. Say, great, and we schedule 90 minutes in the morning for the next morning. And we do the, we get ready in the morning,

Massa is coming, everyone's excited. And I like, this is amazing. Maybe that investment we just talked about yesterday will come today. His team says, just to let you know, there will be no discussions of investing. So, okay, no problem. As it gets closer to the morning, we keep getting text messages. He's not going to have 90 minutes.

He's going to have 75 minutes. He's going to have 60 minutes. He's going to have half an hour. And I'm like, okay, whatever does, sounds great. The same time, President Trump wins for the first time. the end of December, and Masa had a meeting with them. They wanted to talk about the future of America. He said, I'm so sorry, I have a meeting with Trump, President Trump,

and I only have 12 minutes. Again, we all find ourselves in situations like this when, oh, my God, I had all this plan and I was going to do this tour and I was going to show these numbers. I'm going to do all these things, and suddenly it all changes. I take a deep breath. Let's make it the best 12 minutes we can. But I can't help myself. I go, tell me something, Masa.

If you're meeting president, a future president Trump, do you have Jared Kushner introducing you to him first? He goes, Adam, it's so funny. You're saying that. Everybody told me that it's better if Jared introduces me. I don't know him. We've been trying to get in touch. No.

I said, give me a second. I'm very lucky to count Jared as one of my close friends. Jared's married to Ivanka Trump. Jared's married to Ivanka Trump, and he's the advisor, I think, to the president. But right now he's helping to peace, both in the Middle East and in Europe. So I text Jared and I was like,

Masa is here, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta. We spent five minutes on that. Jared says, no problem. Send him. I will introduce him to the future president. Now we have seven minutes left. I say, Masa, we only have seven minutes. We're only going to stay downstairs,

but this is we work. And he looks at me. It goes like this. Smells there. He goes, you know what this smells like? And I'm like, oh, no, what is he going to say? They were serving waffles that is he going to say? It smells like waffles.

Like, what is he going to say? He goes, smells like dreams. This is a factory. We work is not an office space. It's a factory of dreams. And I'm like, he's speaking your language. Oh, no, not my language. One step above my language.

He took the dreamer and went one step above the dreamer. He out did the, he adamed Adam. He killed it. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I have this smell of dreams. There's no one's ever defined the business better than that. And he goes, look, Adam, we don't have time. I'm driving up there to 50th Street, wherever it was. Do you want to come with me to the car?

We'll talk in the car. Did he not go around the building and check? Couldn't have time, seven minutes. We were only downstairs in the lobby. The entrance was. But if you had the opportunity in 2017, 2016 to walk into our HQ, the energy was electric. You could not walk in there and not feel, I never felt a factory of dreams.

But I felt community and people coming together. It felt like people are doing their life's work. It didn't feel like a work environment. It felt like people are really connected. And when you make a connected environment, then it really takes things to the next level and everybody wants to be there. So that's what it was.

It's not what it is today, but that's what it was. So it says, come with me to the car. I said, no problem. I get into the car. And I remember the back of my hand, they said, no investing. His team said, don't talk about raising money. He goes, so I start talking about we work.

He was like, Adam, what's the number? So what do you mean? Because what's your valuation? and how much money you're raising? Goes, I'm here to do business. Said your team, said, like, ah, I am the boss. I've done this many times myself. I'm the boss.

Let's talk about it. I said, well, listen, we have, our last valuation was $16 billion. We have, we just launched China. That's a $2 billion in our company. We have Latin America and we're in Europe. We have a global company and then we have a China entity. Goes great. How much are you raising?

I said, $3, $400 million. three to 400 million. That's not going to work. Don't you want to build a global business? I was like, of course. I would love to build a global business. Because don't you have a business in China. I said, of course.

I said, what about Japan? I said, I don't have a business in Japan yet. He said, I think it's going to work very well in Japan. I said, I'm sure it's going to work well in Japan. It's working everywhere. But I don't have the team. He goes, what about Southeast Asia? I said, sounds amazing, but I've never been there.

He goes, well, I think it's going to work there. I said, again, I'm sure it's going to work there. And before you know, this is. I think we should do about $3 billion. And I was a big number. Remember three, we were, I was the night before the board, $300 to $400 million. Stake lesson number one.

And again, I don't blame Master for any of this. Every decision I made was my decision. He's an investor. He saw a great business and he wanted to go big. I respect that. I've done it myself, not that those numbers, but I've done it myself. If you decide you have a mission or a vision

and you're going to go raise out $300 million. And the next day, someone offers you $3 billion. Before you say yes, take a deep breath and ask yourself, again, that question of why, and what is my intention, and what is they're going to do to the business, and am I ready to take that much? So it says $3 billion, we then keep talking about all the different needs and the different stuff. It ends up after, this is, now we met for 12 minutes, and the ride is 16 minutes. So, yeah, total 28 to 36, man, that's the whole thing.

And we agree on the, he says 4 billion, 4.2 to be exact. $4.2 billion. Dollars? That he wants to invest. And we work Topko, we work China, we work Japan, and we work Southeast Asia. Remember, we were a cash machine. You put cash into us. And we, that just to, I'll go back to the second, but we were doing 980 million that year.

We hit our numbers. We forecast it. We're going to do $1.8 billion next year. We did our $1.8 billion. It was working so well the model. All you needed was cash to build it. You needed to build these spaces and you needed to do if you're going to grow that big,

he had big aspirations and I'd big aspirations. Did you tell him that? Did you tell him that it was a cash machine? No, you didn't need to. Did you tell him that if you put cash and you get cash out? I didn't need to. Must understand business better than most people in the world. But again, it was obvious.

Because if you looked at the history of Wework, every single time you put money into it, It grew. The mistake was we were signing leases. We were taking long-term commitments against short-term commitments. We should have done something else, and we'll talk about it in a second, what we should have done, and it's what we're doing in flow. But this question was, there's people that a lot of people didn't understand the money raised.

The money raised was to build tremendous businesses all over the planet, and those businesses, the moment you stopped growing them, turned profitable. Today, we works profitable. Those businesses, all you had to do was stop growing. We were at a high-growth stage. That's what high growth entrepreneurs do. That's what the market wanted at the time, and that's what everybody knew we were doing.

It was not a secret to what we were doing, and it was growing exponentially. So we ended up agreeing on $4.2 billion. He takes an iPad, he writes it all down. This is all in that same car right. He writes it all down. He signs his name, and he hands me the pen to sign my. I look at it.

I sign. He walks out of the car, says, thank you very much, and goes to his meeting. This is now on about 454 street. Our HQ is on 18th Street. I'm just standing there. I can't believe what just happened. It was not what I planned.

And I start walking. I was like, I'm going to walk downtown. I'm going to take a second. I'm going to walk. And every step I take, because until this point, this is 2016, we were five years of mission-driven, you asked me about the fundamentals

with all the right fundamentals in New York, because we had the right culture. And when you have the right culture, you can deal with any challenge. We were mission driven. We could break through any wall. We were teamwork. We were later.

We were together. We were friends. We were one team. And I'm starting to walk down from 54th Street to 18th Street. And every step I take, suddenly the ego starts coming up. Oh, 20 billion valuation.

Billion valuation in Japan on top of that, a billion and a half valuation in Southeast Asia. on top of that, $5 billion valuation in China, on top of that. So a billion of that $4.2 was going to everybody, including to myself, and I owned proportionately about 25% of the company at the time. So big numbers, numbers.

I've never seen numbers. Miguel was getting a lot. All our employees, the investors, many times more than they ever invested from that billion. And every step that I'm taking, the ego comes up. Oh, I feel so strong. I feel so big.

You start doing your own math, $20 billion, 25%, but that's $5 billion. Then there's all the other ones, what's my net worth? And before you know it, the guy that sat in the car was a mission-driven entrepreneur who really believed in creating a world where people make a life and not just a living. Every step that I take, it goes higher and higher.

And by the time I walk into HQ, 18th Street, I forgot what we were all about. Here is why ego is on the one hand very good and on another very dangerous. Ego and desire are the same word. Big ego just means big desire. Having huge desire is important to build huge things, but you have to manage it and control it. When I walked in, I got confused.

It suddenly became about the money. All the stuff that Rebecca told me, all the stuff when we met, all the years of spiritual practice, everything, to the garbage. And what happens when the ego gets the best of you? You become blinded. What does that mean?

You make mistakes and bad decisions. And in a high-growth business, you need to make 100 decisions a day. And as we said before, at least 98 of them need to be correct. Suddenly, you're blinded, and suddenly only 95 of them are correct. Or 90. Those mistakes, because you're growing so fast,

the mistakes grow very fast also. The other thing, we were a company led from the top. All great companies are led from the top. The one I lost it, everybody lost it. And it just spread. And the moment, that's the beginning of the end. Look, it took three years after that for everything to unfold, but it was that moment.

That was the moment that went. Is there anything that could have been said or done to have made you when Massa offered you that $4 billion in that cab? Are you ready for this? Sure. I used to be closer. We don't speak as much anymore today. I used to be much closer to Mark Benioff, the founder of Salesforce. He heard about Massa's offer, and he called me and said, Adam, I only know you for a little bit, and I know you're not going to listen to my advice, but I want you to fly to Japan and say no to Massa. I want you to take your company public. What was your last valuation? I said 16. He goes, great. I want you to. I want you to take your company public. What was your last valuation? I said 16. He goes, great. I want you to. I want you to fly to. I want you. to take your company public for $5 billion. I want you to sell 20% of it a billion,

and I want you to learn how to be public CEO. I promise you two things. One, because your last valuation was 16 at 5, everybody's going to think this is a great deal. People are going to rush to invest, including myself, everyone's going to rush to invest. You'll learn, because it's very different to be public CEO and a private CEO,

you're going to learn about profitability, but you're going to learn all these things because I think you're very fast student. And I guarantee you, before you know it, your valuation will be much larger. And he said, but I know you're not going to listen to me. And I didn't. Was there a world that I could have said, no?

Not the kind of person that I was then and not with the tools I have. Why didn't you listen to him? We didn't know each other for long enough. I think it takes a lot of trust to listen to when someone gives you a counteradvise. And by the way, there was another person also who said no, but we'll put that aside for a second. But here's what I think is more important about it. Let's say I said no. And let's say we were going to still be around.

and We work would be a hundred billion dollar company today. Corona would have happened. We would have renegotiated all of our leases. Instead of leases, we would become management deals. And we would have led the return to office. We would have led that concept because obviously people work. I know we spoke about it much better face-to-face than remote work. And we would have been the leaders of the movement of return to office.

And we work was a great company. And even it would have launched We Live. So a version of Flora. But I, Adam, wouldn't have learned all those lessons. I wouldn't be, I am so much happier today. Even as we're speaking, I'm not a discussion like everything you're talking to about makes me feel full. Even the challenging parts. I am so happy that they happen because they made me exactly who I'm meant to be.

Falling is not bad. That's the thing that you and I are actually talking about. Falling is probably the most important part of life. And most of us learn a lot more from falling than we do from success. The thing that's bad is not when you fall. It's how you get up. If you just fell and you're, oh no, everybody saw me fall. I'm not going to hide under the covers for four years until everybody forgets whatever it is that happens. That's what's horrible. That leads to the tragedy. That leads to the trauma. If you fell, you look around, you're like, wow, everybody saw. You clean up,

you get up and you say, let's do it again. If you have that in you, nothing will stop you and it might take 10 times and 20 times and 50 times. But if you fall enough times, then you might avoid falling. There should be a button just down below here. And if it says subscribe, you're already subscribed. If it says subscriber, that means you're not yet. And if you're not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button. It helps to show more than you know.

And according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button. Thank you so much. I'm thinking also about a founder that's 21 years old. They've got a startup or an idea that they want to start. Like when I was 21 years old, my mom tells 18, if you do this, I won't speak to you again. She was warning me against business because she had struggled in business herself. So that's a proxy of love, I guess.

And then you've got other people here telling you that it's going to be amazing and you're going to make millions. When you're in that situation, you've got noise. How do you find this signal? Two ways. One, they have to go back to the mission. So if one had the mission and then someone offers them something and it's off mission, and you're like, oh, I'm going to do it anyway because it's good money, but it's off-mission.

That already is a warning sign. But I think the other one, which is something that I have more today than I used to back then, one needs a practice. Part of the way to drown the noise is with a practice. I've been enjoying meditating lately in the past year, and I've been getting better and better at it, and meditating is something that takes time. Meditating helps drown the noise.

And then the thoughts that I do get while I meditate tend to be very healthy thoughts that are headed in a good direction. There's many things. I do the hyperbaric chamber. Steve Jobs talked about meditation and his sort of spiritual practices. And it's something that actually in the last year I started really looking into. When I say looking into, I mean I started looking into what he did and why he did it. Because he's someone that I look at and go, it was like he was able to see around the corner.

And for a guy running a big company, how was he able to make these really unpopular, Pula calls today that proved out to be true tomorrow. And, you know, one of the conclusions I arrived at is that he spent just as much time in the trenches as he did in the clouds, i.e. he stood away from the picture enough so he could see the full picture. And that's something that I thought, oh, gosh, that kind of correlates to what you were saying earlier about your redefinition of hard work, not just being in the office and being there, you know, 24-7, but actually when you're on the surfboard, you're doing hard work because you're giving yourself time to see the full picture. And when you're honest with yourself about your weaknesses, like I spoke about my speech, it can elevate things, but it could also break things. We've seen that happen before. So hard work is also personal growth is very hard work. And most people don't have the courage to even look in honestly, let alone change.

What is the exact mechanism that you think would result in me being more successful at 40, in business, let's say, if I did exactly what you said and focused on personal growth? We're going to have to start by redefine the moment you said in business, I'm going to have to push back on it. We are not going to measure your success just in business. We're going to measure your success in life, in relationships, in affect on the world and in business. Do you know why I'm asking this question? Because there will be some people that are listening right now. And they have heard, you know, founders come on and people say, you need to just take a moment, meditate, do these things, focus on personal growth. And for whatever reason, because of their trauma, because of how they are raised, the lens that they will receive that message through or the thing that will be the carrot will be a promise that it will make them better at the thing they currently care about. Now, we might be tricking them a little bit because we're going to get them to do the work and they'll realize that other things matter. But just for those people that have that lens. No, we're going to help. We're going to say something, and I hope people have said it here before, but I'm not sure they did. But tell me if people said it.

We're going to, all these founders that are listening, falling is not just okay. It's the best thing that ever happened to you. If these founders can all redefine success, think about if in school, instead of learning about all the successes, spoke about Steve Jobs and he's a real hero of mine. But would I have wanted his life? How old was he when he passed away? How was the relationship with everybody around? How did he affect people?

Now, I don't know I wasn't a friend, I don't know him, and I am not judging or measuring. I'm just telling you, we cannot measure a person just through their business achievements. We must look at people holistically. So I'm telling all these young founders, forget, take time to meditate. You asked how I do it, and I saw how we quiet the noise,

and I answered meditation. But that is not my first advice to them. My first advice to all of us, by the way, you talk a lot about one year olds with AI coming and everybody's about to be a founder. Everybody can start a business. It's true for everyone. It's true for 12 year olds and it's true for 60 year olds. This is for everyone. Have the courage to actually look inside and say, where can I become a better version of myself?

Don't work on three things. Work on one thing. And choose that thing and work on it. And by the way, if you do, when you fix it, how are you going to know that it's better? Because you're going to see the next thing you need to work on. It is like an onion. And every time you pill it, you will see another layer and another layer and another layer. That is the advice I'm actually giving them.

And I'm promising them that if they look deep enough, what they're going to find is their calling. And when they find their calling, when you match that call and with that energy of wanting to be a founder, that's when everything works. as we are able as human beings to do that, find our true journey, find our flow, the world is open for us. So let's zoom back into the story. You're walking down towards 18th Street. You've just raised all this money.

You feel like a king. That's the way you're just on paper. It just signed. It didn't actually happen yet. What was, you said over the next year, that was the start of the end. Over the next three years, decisions changed. specifically in terms of business.

It became about money. It became about money. It became about valuation. And that was just... And that was a slippery slope. It's not my truth. And that means that you grew even faster. You opened up even more leases.

We blew up. We went even faster. We were going... We went really fast. We went very fast. One of the things that I read or something from when I was doing the research is that you had lots of sort of tangential ideas at that time, maybe because of the money, things like surfing and...

Fake news. This was before we work ever started. I had all these ideas. Anybody who tells the story that we had a lot of ideas in 2016 because we raised money doesn't know that this was done before we work ever started

in a green desk office. And all the ideas we had were right here. This doesn't look like focus to me. I feel like if I showed my investors this now, they would shout at me. Could be. Today I would choose,

what is the real focus of all these things? The person. And if we can actually, and I would do, today I would do it one foot ahead of the other. It's a little bit more like we're doing flow. But when you build a business, it's art, not science. If you're going to have some investor who tells you, oh, you put this first and this second and this third, they're limiting you. You do need to have a very strong foundation. And that's, as you said before, both as a human being and as a business person.

So for anyone that can't see, you just circled the sort of stick person in the middle of all of these ideas. and you said really I would have focused on this person. I would really have focused on the person and only added things that made it's a way to mission, create a world where people make a life and not just a living. Yeah.

We should have just only added things that are in support of that mission. It reminds me of Amazon and Jeff Bezos. They're famous saying of working backwards from the customer and what's the customer's pain points? I've just, we just hired a wonderful person, our CTIO from Amazon. She's called Aida.

And she says to me that at Amazon, there's always often an empty, seat of the meetings, and that is the customer. So they leave an empty seat so that they can make the decisions through the lens of this person. So they're always in every meeting, so you don't get distracted of who you're doing it for. And that's kind of what you describe. It's actually become, you know, since she's joined our business, it's always friend to mind for all of us, which is like, work backwards from the customer. Because sometimes you might work forward from your own ego. Like, I like that. Remember, I'm going to give you my best advice. I've met,

I've had the pleasure to meet Mr. Bezos and he's phenomenal. And he's one of the best operators on the planet, by far. Some would say the best. My best advice for you, build the culture that is authentic and true to you. So I love that you're focusing the customer, but I can tell as we're speaking, you're very honed in on your user. Multiple times you've told me how your listener is going to interpret what we're saying. You are aligned with your listener. I have no doubt about it.

Isn't that a form of working backwards from the customer? Because I'm sat here about thinking about 21-year-old Dave, Jenny, I'm thinking about, and every time you answer questions. Again, I'm sorry, I don't. I don't want to. No, we're being very, I'm repeating myself and I don't mean to be boring. And if we did this podcast three years ago, maybe I would go all over the place. If you actually today went to the depth of your truth, what is your correction? What do you need to work on?

Where are you going? And then you found that? And then you brought that back into your team? I am telling you, I don't even know how far it would be. So are you saying I don't need to work backwards from the customer? What are you saying? I'm saying your truth has to be yours first. I'm not pushing against this theory.

Of course, we need to work. Again, my truth. A lot of times people keep telling what the customer wants. I, Rebecca, and I build what we think is correct. You don't listen to the customer. No focus groups, no way. There's a famous saying, I think it's Henry Ford.

If I asked the customer, they would have asked for faster horses. Never invented the car. No. You know what you want. I think it's about finding our own truth. I think when a person finds his own truth, they can express it. Of course, I'm not going to tell you we shouldn't listen to.

to the customer. And Flow, we have a lot of things. I could tell you 10 things that the customer has pointed out to us that of course are right and we do. But again, we have an opinion. If we listen to our customer at Flow, we'll have prettier buildings so more influencers can take more pictures. So you're saying hear your customers, but don't always listen to them?

Is that a distinction? I am saying, do you know yourself? I'm saying everyone rushing, building all these businesses when they don't even know who they are leads us to going into dinners and talking about nothing, going into part. going into parties and doing whatever it is that we're doing. And instead of living life to the potential, life is so beautiful and amazing and full that if you're going to now be busy listening to your customer

because you want to build a business because you want to make money, not only do I think it's not going to work for you, or is the fun in that? I think I'm asking this in part selfishly for myself. Okay, for you, I'm ready. So at a stage of my business, you know, where we're being offered lots of money from lots of people, Our last valuation was about 450 million, something like that.

And so I reflect on your story a lot because I, although the numbers were wildly different, you were at a moment where, you know, you could raise whatever money you wanted. And with that comes opportunity and distraction dressed in the same dress potentially. And in this particular season of your story, I go, oh, Adam like bought this, like, apparently you bought like a surfing thing and a thing over here. Let's say something just because you said it, because I love it. The surfing thing we bought for $7 million was 48% of a company called Wave Garden. We bought it because we thought you could build amazing communities around Surf. Wave Garden today, that's north of, as far as I know, north of 500 million in sales for

27. I think this year maybe around 250. They're extremely successful. The founders are so happy. I saw them not too long ago because when I stepped down, we worked famously sold it back to them for 5 million, even though it was worse. so much more. They own 100% of their business. Their business is thriving. And I stand behind. And I'll tell you again today, the best amenity for, if we wanted to build a big global

community, real estate, best amenity number one, school. Because if you have a great school, everybody wants to live around. Let me don't click there then. Even though Wave Garden was a great, idea, like great, spotted a great business that went on to be very, very successful. in our situation, there's lots of those. And I would end up giving a different business. Yeah, like in my world, there's lots of these, like, we could do that and that and that and that. And do you know what, objectively, maybe they're all good ideas.

But when we talked about this point of focus, I would then be splitting myself 10%, even though they're great. I have a great answer for you. Best recommendation to you would be the same one I gave you when we spoke about your fiancé. I think you needed a little bit time for yourself for a second. I think you need to soul search and see exactly where you want to go. Ask yourself what I just said.

Assume that in six years you're huge. What for and why. And when you answer what for and why, then go back to the day and say, well, who's the right partner to get me there? That's the only way to make that. Because if you make your decision based on anything else, you might suffer what happened to me, God forbid,

and we don't need this for you. First, understand who you are. then decide where you want to go because of it. Then go back to all of the investors and see who is the right investor. And again, I want to say it again, I think it's worth it. I think you should choose all of us. Should choose our partners, our friends, and our business partners based on how they will treat us in our worst day when we show the worst, not the best.

If I don't pause for a second and I don't do the work and I don't get clear on what my mission is and why I'm doing it before I make these decisions now to grow, to grow. And that could be for anyone listening. That's at the start of their journey. It's going well. They're being pulled by opportunity, not by mission. What is the mistake around the corner there that I'll end up making, that you referenced that you said you made that I can't currently see? So I think the rule of thumb that we gave is, well, you've said a few things. If your business started with a mission, then you're already doing better than most. Because a lot of people don't have a real mission. So first, you needed to have had a real mission.

Now let's say you actually have a real mission and you found that truth and now you're there and now this growth is offered for you. If the growth of the business is going to grow faster than you're capable of handling, handling is ego, handling is money, handling is relationships, there's a lot of handling, we can translate it in many ways. Then in definition, something is going to crack. There will be a short circuit. So before you jump on that growth without understanding that growth, you have to make sure that you, you have to make sure that you, you're ready for it and that it's actually correct for you. What is the most effective practice you've ever deployed to know yourself better?

For me, Adam, it's just my truth. About 10 years ago, I started keeping Shabbat, which for those who don't know, it means that on Friday, we disconnect from technology for 25 hours. And I just spend my time with my family, my friends, and taking part of something greater than myself. That disconnection actually makes a lot more connection than anybody understands. So the best practice I can suggest is technology Shabbat.

Forget religion. This is nothing to do with religion. If you take 24 hours off of your phone, completely off, put it aside. We say put it in a cookie jar. Here's what I forecast. When's the last time you were off your phone for 24 hours, by the way? Oh, God. Oh, God.

Okay, we're going to have to lead by example. So we're going to ask people, this is connecting, by the way, to my idea. If we're going to have to lead by example. So here's what I suggest to the founders. To everyone. Choose a day, make it Saturday, make it sound. day, make it in the middle of the week, it's easier on the weekend. Make it the day that's true for you. And take your phone away for 24 hours and put it in a place that you genuinely are not going to

touch it. Give it to a friend if you can't trust yourself. The first two hours, the amount of times your hand is going to go to your pocket, thinking your phone is there, will show you how addicted you are because it's an actual addiction. But then what you'll notice, especially if you scheduled it in advance, you planned a dinner with your friends, some activities that include going out to nature, little things. From my experience, when those 24 hours are over, and you take back that phone, two things will happen. One, you're going to feel amazing at hour 22, 22, 23, and 24.

Amazing. And you're going to take out that phone and it's going to take you exactly 10 minutes to drop back down to the wrong frequency. That's one. Two, some of the best ideas you've had in some time are going to come to you, including who you should be surrounded with, but business you should focus on what is your next move. For me, the best practice is that 20,000,

hours once a week. Now again, remember, I have six kids, I'm married, that 24 hours where it's us together has been phenomenal. And I think in front of everyone, if you committed to do 24 hours one time and then report back to all of us, A, how hard it was, which will be a definition for the addiction. But B, was it positive?

Because you talk a lot about giving your listeners tools. Well, I think we should test the tools on ourselves first, And only if they work, we should really recommend them for everybody. But I have a feeling it would be amazing for you and even better for your fiancé. I have a feeling you're correct. I bet she wants it, by the way. Oh my gosh, she's asked me a million times. Well, why haven't you said yes if she asked you a million times?

Oh, gosh. Why haven't I said yes? What's the answer? Because I don't see the upside. It's because you're religious, not spiritual. Hmm. Whenever someone can change something, I think they're religious. I keep telling to people on spiritual, not religious.

I'll change. I can change. I can go, I'm not stuck in a box. Whenever you're stuck in a box and you're not ready to change something, of course you can't see the upside. Give you an example. Fasting. Have you ever fasted? Have you ever fasted from water and food or just water? Or just food? Both, yeah. Have you ever done a whole day, no water, no food? Yes. No food. I have done ketosis as well. Ketosis also is a little different. Have you noticed when fasting after 12 hours, 18 hours, 24, depending how clear your head becomes? Your body doesn't want it. Your body doesn't see an upside in it, but you've tested it and you know that you get clarity from it. You know that there's a benefit to it. Same thing here. Saying I don't see the benefit of putting my phone away from 24 hours is the way an addict will speak about.

I don't see the benefit of stopping to take the drug. Trying it and after doing it two, three times, being like that didn't work for me, I respect that. But by the way, I think you know that it would work. Yeah, this is what I was going to say, is like conceptually, of course I know it's going to work. I've like sat here with the neuroscientists that I've done the studies. I think there was probably a more honest answer that I've just sort of uncovered,

which is it would be very uncomfortable. And even the thought of it is like really uncomfortable. But now you and I are going somewhere. How do we know what to do in life? Whenever we feel that we're in a crossroad, the decision, one is comfortable, one is not. Keep going after the uncomfortable one. Path of most resistance, path of least resistance.

Always go after the path of most resistance. journey, short journey, go after the long. But you know what happens? It takes less time. It ends up being easier and has a lot more value. There are rules to the game of life. No one one taught us. So I, we go back to the time. Wait, are we getting a commitment? I need a commitment. If you fancy listening. Can we do one? Can we do one time? We can do one time. Okay, perfect. We can do one time. Can we make sure to do it this month in September? Well, that's a great question. Um, yes, we can. Yes, just before I shake, because I want I'm trying one of my word.

No, because we're going to, we both keep our word. Can I define? Let's define it. You just said something I teach my kids. If you're having a problem keeping your word, do a better job defining it before you ever say it. So go right ahead. It's not going on my phone or my computer or any electronic device for 25 hours. You can drive, you can turn on the lights, do everything else.

I can talk about business. No, no, we're not asking you to. Pen and paper. I'm not asking you to keep Shabbat. I said technology Shabbat. We're just, we're just going off. I can brainstorm on a whiteboard. encouraged.

Okay. Encourage to bring us out of it. Now, again, next level will be, we'll take business out of it so you can really connect. But let's do the first. Okay. Okay, so right, let's define it. No screens, which includes your computer, your iPad, your... Watch, whatever, yeah.

Watch, good, I like it. Does your car have like a big screen? Because some of the cars are like big iPads. I won't be in my car because I'll be in Europe in September, so... We're done. Okay, great. Deal. Deal.

I'll let you know how it goes. Let all of us know how it goes. I will. Now we can go back. So let's go back to this, because I really wanted to nail this point of focus. Please do. I'm obsessed. I'm pretty obsessed with this point of focus.

In part, I remember this Johnny I've seen it around for the last couple of years to all of my team. Johnny says, Steve had this remarkable ability to focus. And he said, focus isn't saying no to things you don't want to remotely don't want to do any way. It's saying no to things that with every bone in your body you want to do and you wake up thinking about, but you say no to them because we're going to do this. And famously, in Steve Jobs' story, when he came back into Apple after being fired, he was sat in a room with all of his executives. they've all got a million initiatives they're working on.

And famously, he goes up to a whiteboard and draws four things. Like, I think it was a four quadrant thing. And he says, this is what we're going to do. Everything else is cancelled. Cancel that. One of the things that I concluded from the period after you'd raised all this money was that there was a lack of focus. Because you ended up doing lots of things at the same time.

And that's something that I find myself almost at like the foothills of being tempted to do. So that's why I wanted to ask you the question. Let's answer it. So first of all, we talked about superpowers and super weaknesses. I cannot tell you that my superpower is focus. It's not my superpower. I actually have the opposite of it. My challenge is, and Ben Horowitz and Mark and Driss

and helped me understand this, I'm very good at zero to one. So the problem with many entrepreneurs have a lot of ideas. The problem with me having a lot of ideas, they actually become a reality. So one entrepreneur has, Ben was telling this to me here. So another entrepreneur is going to come with nine new ideas

and the next board meeting, maybe he did one of them. You have nine ideas. say anything in the board meeting. We come next board meeting. There's nine new businesses. So focus is something that I need to work on. So now let's go a little deeper. And this is how I do my own personal growth. I'm a creator. I'm not a protector. I'm really good at creating. I'm not that great at protecting. Rebecca's grandfather famously said it takes one lion to make a fortune and ten lions to watch it. His name was Andre Hertz. One lion to make a fortune, ten lions to watch it. It's very smart saying.

Because I'm now aware that I'm more a creator than a protector, there needs to be someone else around the table on the team, whose job is to say, Adam, sounds great, and maybe we should do it in three months or in six months or in nine months. But right now, really need to focus not on one thing, I'm not a one thing kind of guy, but let's say on three things. Where other people can only do one at the time, I'm probably very good at three to five.

But once you go above that number, 10 to 15, which I could fall into that trap, not going to succeed. So for me, with my personality, I would have to surround myself with people I trust to say, no, did you have that at WeWG? A little, but not really.

Because again, remember, back to that horrible moment where I walk back into the office and the ego got the best of me, what happens next when you lose yourself? You start attracting the wrong people. So the people that were hired after that were just there for the money.

The energy that was being projected was let's go public, do this, let's do that. The energy that's projected was, was wrong. You filed for an IPO, and I think soft bank invested a further two billion into Wii. So you really are trying to get to the story. The challenge with what you're trying to do is there's so much context to the story missing. Here, I'll give you the little piece. The high level. No, I understand. I'm all good with it. I'll give it to you if this, this is your podcast. No, no, no. I'll tell what I want to get. I just want to win this. Tell me we're going after and then I'm going to tell you something that I

mentioned once, but no one has your viewership, so we'll mention it again. I want to close this now. Yeah, I'll close this for you. I'll close this for you. So we, Master gives the money. Yeah. We lose our mission a little bit. But he's very clear what he wants.

He wants the fastest, he wants the largest company on the planet. A trillion dollar company. I can deliver big company. I can, by then, back then, by the way, no one said numbers like that. Today, we've seen companies five years old that are getting to those numbers. See, look how the world's moving. What was impossible? And then no one could talk about it and made fun of it.

10 years ago, suddenly is everyday reality. Not a big word anymore, but it's a huge number, obviously, and very few companies are going to be there and stay there. But more, as time moves forward, more and more. Masse invests in, the money ends up coming in only in 2017. It takes quite a long time between when the investment is offered in 2016, that piece of paper, to the money coming in in 2017. But we deliver on our 960 million in sales,

and the following year, we deliver on our 1.8 billion or 1.9 to, whatever the exact number we said, We hit our number. And Masa comes and says, wow, you really delivered on your number. So, of course, Masa San, we always deliver on our number. And he said, well, Adam, I've invested with Vision Fund, a lot of companies. Everybody promised me to double the revenue. You're one of the only ones who did it.

He said, well, that's what we did. I said, well, so our expenses grew, I have no problem with the expenses. When the time is right, we'll stop the growth and profitability will catch up as we explain that happens in businesses that are actually successful. And he comes and basically comes up with this idea. He says, how about your investors are going to want an IPO and they're going to want an exit? They're going to want focus. I have no problem with how wide we're going.

How about we buy the company for $20 billion? And this is the story that a lot of people don't understand. How about I buy the company? I'll give it a $20 billion dollar valuation, which is very similar to the valuation he came in before. But I said $20 billion, isn't it a little low? He said, no, no, $20 billion of actual cash. we'll give $10 billion to the investors, and we will put $10 billion on the balance sheet.

In the bank account, basically. In the bank account. You Adam won't sell. Your employees can sell some so they make money. All the investors are out. You and your management team will go down to 30%. Me and the new, me, SoftBank Vision Fund, whoever is going to do it, will own 70%.

And when you hit goals that we agree, you and the management team will go from 30% to 51. and we will go to 49. And I understand that we're growing too fast and I understand that we'll have too much expenses but I'm putting my money where my mouth is and I don't care because I think this is going to be one of the biggest companies in the world.

This happens is a very important part of the story. This happens in March of 2018. This is before the IPO. You can't bring this story back if you don't understand this part. March of 2018, he only invested the money really came in in the middle of 2017 or like you two. This is only a year after he's with us.

He's on the board. board, yes, to board. They know everything that's happening in the company, no secrets. I take the offer to our board. So look at this amazing thing, 20. Remember, they invested pre-money valuation of 84 million. This is 20 billion. They invested at 84 million. By this point, they've already pulled out, because of all the secondaries, they've already pulled out, somewhere between 3 to 500 million. I'll check the exact number so you have it, maybe even more, maybe even 700 million by this. They've pulled out a lot, whatever the number was.

at least $350 million, on an investment of $21 million. I take it to them, the offers. It must have sounds like a great offer. But I, Adam, am going to stay in the company, I mean the management team, so we can't make a deal like this. So in boards, when someone has a deal that they're staying behind, you need to create a special committee.

And a special committee is created the board member from Benchmark and another board member that we had in the, that we had, which out of respect to him, I'm not saying his name. And they create a special committee. And they decide to negotiate a $20 billion all-cash deal that would have made money for everyone. Remember, Masa came in at 20s, the only one who's not making money from this deal, and he's staying in. Everybody else came in at $50 million, $100 million, $400 million, a billion. Everyone's making money.

And there, and this word is a dangerous one, but it's greed because the company at that point is losing, well, $2 billion a year, forecasted to, lose over $3 billion the next year. He knows the forecast. He wants to put $10 billion to give it run rate of three years so we can build whatever we want between the two of us. He'll be the majority shareholder. They say no and negotiate a $20 billion deal from March till October.

For a company losing $2 billion, I don't know how you value companies. We can talk about how we should value companies because there are very valuable companies who are losing money. Of course, at high growth. But still, they have a company losing $2 billion. Masa's son is offering them 20 in return for that pleasure and they negotiate these two special committee,

special board members. Now, I'm not part of it because I'm staying in the deal, so I have zero part of it. In a normal world, if I were to sit on your board, and I'm sitting on your board and someone comes and gives this crazy offer to buy me and all the other friends out, and I invested in you now in this $400 million,

and you gave me a deal at $20 billion, and I'm making $2, $3 billion on my $50 million. First, I come to and say, Stephen, thank you. Thank you for being such a great entrepreneur and doing this for me, it's number one. But number two, I say, Stephen, I'm a little offended that you don't want me with you anymore. Is this really what you want?

And if you would tell me, yes, Adam, this is what I want, and this is how I 16th, this is why they're so amazing. They go with the founder. I'll tell you, Stephen, it's not what I wanted, but I'm grateful for all the money you've made for me. you've worked extremely hard and I wish you good luck and maybe next time

when you do your next business come back to me again they don't do that they don't ask me what I want they negotiate because they think they can push myself from 20 billion to 30 their number was 32 billion they don't know how they invented it

they were thinking a hundred billion remember they're the same one sitting around the board that never gave the feedback on the technology never they've never done any of they have one thing in their eyes and one thing only in that's dollar signs But the problem with greed and dollar signs, if you're greedy, you even lose what you have in your hand.

So they're negotiating this 20. I must have from the first day said, guys, this is my final offer. There is no $21 billion. Even $20, it's crazy. It's as high as I'm going to go because I believe in Adam and I believe in me and we're going to build together.

They do that until October. And somewhere around the end of September, beginning of October, they realize that it's not moving. Stock market is starting to go down and Japan and this. and these growth businesses are starting to take a hit, they see that things are changing,

then they decide to engage and actually negotiate the deal. By the time they're done to documents is December 24th, 2018. Softbank stock is really down for reasons that had nothing to do with us. There is no world in which they could do a $20 billion-dollar cash deal and Masa still stays in his place. And Masa calls me and said, Adam, I'm so sorry, I cannot do the deal anymore.

it was offered in March. Again, what these two board members should have done is gotten on a plane the next day, came to Masa San and said, Masa, please sign. You know everything about the board. You're in the board. You don't need any diligence.

Here's our bank account. Here's the signature. We're disappointed. We're not staying with Adam. But if that's what he wants and that's what you want, good luck to both of you. Thank you for the very fair price.

We'll take our benchmark at the time, at least $2.4 billion they would have put. We'll take our cash and walk away. Now, Travis said very, in an interview, I just saw. Travis Kalanick, being the CEO of Uber, the founder of Ubi. And he said that being an entrepreneur is like playing eight-dimensional chess. Being a venture capitalist is like watching the game.

Again, remember, as you're choosing your investors, choose the one who play eight-dimensional chess, not the watchers. So they didn't do that. Massa calls me, it's December. He says I can't do the deal, and I actually understand him. I actually say I understand, because they did waste all that time. Then I found myself in trouble. because from when he offered the deal, remember he was going to have 70%,

we were going to have 30%, and the goal was a revenue goal that we needed to. We were already all working towards that goal. We signed the leases, we made the commitments, we were already rushing. We found ourselves in a way

that if we weren't to, it gave the $2 billion, because to try not to really ruin the business, he's already put a lot of money in the business already. We found ourselves being forced to go public. So we actually went public when we weren't ready.

That's what actually happened. So it's very important this piece of the story because without that context, then you don't understand. And again, it's back to all the founders you're talking about. You've got to choose your investors wisely. Because if you choose the wrong investors, when the time counts for that big move, if they're not going to prioritize you, they're going to do what's best for them and everybody's going to lose. Why weren't you ready? When you say ready? Yeah. Now you're going back to systems. We were growing way too fast. Yeah. Our tech was not catching up with us so we couldn't measure things correctly.

There's this thing called Sox Compliant when you go public. Our systems weren't able to do the thing I told you before to show that one building is profitable, but the neighborhood is not. One city is profitable, but the state is not. It wasn't able to divide. But now, in hindsight, connecting to what we talk today, I, Adam wasn't ready.

And if the founder is not ready, the business is not ready. By the way, I tried to push not to go public. Master called me, said, please don't go public. all the people around me, some of them that came after this point, and not all, but a lot of them were all go public, go public or public, I was getting pushed by the wrong people back to surround yourself with the wrong people. But we weren't ready. But the timeline is pretty crazy because obviously COVID is around the corner here. It's called COVID-19 for a reason. And we're in, that's at the end of 2018. You file in January, SoftBank does invest a further

$2 billion into WeWork. That $2 billion was because they passed on the deal before. It's not because we filed. So that was kind of a, I guess, compensation. Respect between Massa and myself. In May 20... Another great deal that Masa sent it, that he didn't have to. In May 2019, you have almost 500 locations, 400,000 members,

12,000 employees around the world. And then in August, 2019, WeWork publicly filed its S-1. Company valued at around $47 billion. The WeWorks showed some losses. A lot of losses, not some losses, showed the truth. The company was losing money. It showed that WeWork had lost $690 million in the first six months of 2019,

bringing the total losses to almost $3 billion in the past three years. WeWork was making losses of $219K every hour it operated. Yes, one revealed that you'd also trademarked the word we and sold it back to the company. That's not true. Which you deny? It was not. It's not true. No, no, no, there's not denying.

If you want, we could talk about there's a story, but that's not what happened. It's not true. I don't really care about the stuff. It's not true. But again, all these little details, just so we understand, just for the founders who are watching, right? So now you're telling a story about something that happened to me. There's supposed to be huge emotion that I'm supposed to have with this. Even if it's not correct, if it's what people said, some of it is correct, not correct, so much context is missing. Not the point. Life is not about what other people say or what the press say or even what you say. It's about what kind of person I know I am.

And the reason I want to tell this to you and to the listeners is we can all be that person. Please keep going. September 2019, WeWork announced it was postponing its IPO as a result of investors questioning the company. And then, I mean, around this time, COVID shows up. But then you resigned as CEO of WeWork in 2019 after the IPO didn't pan out. So that's not why I resign. So I stepped down. And what people don't know is I had full control over the business.

board and the votes. So I had to choose to step down. People sometimes think I was fired because the Wall Street Journal said so. Not true. Step down. I had full control. Control the board and control the... Why did you step down? So when people understand the context, and again, this is an old story, but I'm happy to go there. The only reason a person in control chooses to step down is because they think that it's the best choice. At the time, and again, this is part by the way of the play. This is the same playbook, but now we're going to say his name again. Travis, the founder of Uber.

Famously, Bill Gurley comes and puts a piece of paper in front of him. He's Bill Gale. He's one of the benchmark partners. He famously puts a piece of paper in front of him, I think, and either you step down or we do this, this, and this, some threat that makes him step down. I have a different version of it, but they're pushing me very, very hard to step down.

And at the beginning, I'm like, I'm not stepping down. And then I have a meeting with one of the heads of the two biggest banks in the world. And he sits with me and he says to me, Adam, if you step down, then we will fund $2 billion into WeWork, which will give a time to move profitable. Step down, by the way, from being CEO, become chairman. And I at the time had personal debt, which is a story for another time, but I had personal debt of $460 million to that bank and to other banks

and I said, but what about my personal debt? My board member was next to me and the guy who runs my family office was next to me. We said, what about our personal debt? And he said, don't worry about it. We'll figure it out. There was also an advisor to my board and he came in front of the whole board

and he said I spoke to the bank, they said it's all good, everything will work out. So I stepped down out of choice, because I thought it was going to fund we work. I thought it was going to take care of Massa. I thought it was going to take care of the employees. I thought it was going to take care of everybody. And it sounded like it wasn't the best of everybody.

But I wasn't going away. I was just stepping down from being CEO and becoming executive chairman. I do the board call. I step down. And 10 minutes later, a legal letter comes from the bank and basically says, because of your breach of contract

because it's change of control, something very technical, something we talked about to them and they said no problem, but we didn't have it in writing. Because of your breach of contract and because you had the change of control, you now have 15 days to pay us back our debt, that 460 million, or we will take your shares. And because of my super voting rights, my shares were 5 to 1, which means that by taking away my shares, they would have taken control over the company. Now, what I'm describing to you, and you talked a lot about founders, but you

didn't know a lot of the names. It's important to know the names and the history, because I'm not described to you something that happened for the first time. This famously happened to multiple entrepreneurs in history. This used to be the venture capital playbook. Today there is a new crop of venture capitalists and they're very different, but old school venture capital,

this is a lot of times this is how it used to go. That was the surprise. That's how we found ourselves suddenly so low because I stepped down because I thought it was the best for everybody. And a second after I did it, we got stabbed in the back, and the only lesson there, if you're going to stab the king,

kill. If you're not going to kill, we're going to take a deep breath. We're going to learn our lessons. We're going to know what's really important in life. We're going to come back again. And that's what actually happened there. And the only reason the story is a little challenging for you

is because we never corrected it publicly. And the reason corrected some of it, but not all of it. And the reason we didn't correct it publicly, for what? The best way I can talk about the past is by what I do today, by how we're speaking right now, by how my kids are, by the businesses I build, by the non-profit I do, by the friendships I have, by the relationships I hold.

And the reason a lot of entrepreneurs come to take money from us, and again, we don't invest anymore, but we have a huge inbound of people wanting us to invest in them, is because we don't talk about our successes all the time. We talk about the lessons. Measure us by how we're going to be next to you when time is very tough. So that's what actually happened there,

and I found myself out of it very quickly, and from there, without making the story confused, Masa came, Master saved the day. He paid the debt to all the banks, $460 million, and in return, I gave him my control of the company, I gave him whatever shares in. I gave him whatever he asked for, because we were done and the company was done,

and he came to save it, and then the rest was running under them. You get an email from the bank within sort of, I think it was nine minutes, I read. Nine minutes. Nine minutes asking for you to immediately repay, I think, was it about $450 million? $450, compounding daily, because you're in default.

Just for anyone that doesn't know what compounding daily means. So I have $435 minutes. But if you read it, it's only for my Rick Rubin interview, because the first time I said it was only a few months ago. I never spoke about this. Okay. Compounding daily means every day. So if you have debt of 10% annual, or let's do 12, so it's easy, which would calculate to 1% a month just to keep things really easy.

Compounding daily. is when your debt suddenly goes back then, I think it's 5% became 50%, 15, and you calculated on daily increments. So each time it compounds again and again and again. It ends up that when you do the calculation for the year, it's more than the debt number. Your debt is growing by more than a million a day. No, it's not, we would have to do the math. It's not a million there.

But let's say it's 15%, let's just use clean numbers. Let's say it's 15% over 400 million, which would have been 60 million. It's actually more than 60 million. And if you divide it to it, it's huge numbers. that we don't have money to pay. Okay, so you have no money. No money. And the bank have asked you for 400, let's say, 450 million.

And gave us 15 days to pay. Giving you 15 days to pay. Or they take everything. You say, this is what broke me. When did I say that? I think you said on the podcast. Yeah, you said on the podcast. You said on the podcast, you said, this is what broke me.

I don't know if I meant. I was broke. Because I don't think that's what broke me. You described waking up in the middle of the night crying because you thought you had lost everything. Yes, that's more accurate. So at the moment where that happens, We were okay. A few days later, I wake up in the middle of the night next to Rebecca, crying. Now, we talked about my childhood. We talked to your night today about childhood. We didn't get the tears out. I don't cry. Not for that.

First time Rebecca ever sees me cry. She looks at me and she's like, why are you crying? And I said, we lost everything. I think that's what I said there. I said, we lost everything. She goes, what do you mean everything? I was like, everything. She goes, the cars? I said the wheels on the car. everything. I was, yeah, but remember we said you're going to put a hundred million on my name just in case. He said, yeah, I remember. She goes, and at least we have that? That I never did it. That you never did that? I said, okay, but it's no problem. You didn't sign a personal guarantee. We said, you'd never sign a personal guarantee. I said, I signed the personal guarantee. It's a long story how that happened, but I signed. Again, this is why who you marry is so important.

How many partners do you know? a second ago thought they were worth whatever that number was and lived a high life and find out in one minute, no preparation, that not only is it all gone, it's all gone, and on top of the fact that it's all gone, the promises that was made to them in the relationship were not kept. So it's gone, and money was not put aside. And a personal guarantee was signed, because if I'm signing a personal guarantee, I'm signing for both of us for a merit. And a personal guarantee was signed that was agreed to, not to sign. This is why you have to choose your partner really well.

Choose your partner for the day, something like that happens, not for any other day. I'm lucky that I chose well or she chose me or the universe chose us. She looks at me and she goes, hmm, okay, this is a surprise. My mom owns a house in upstate New York. She bought it 30 years ago. She has no mortgage.

Let's go live with my mom. Take a few months, think about it. If you want to go back into business, I know you'll be successful. And if you don't, we'll move to Costa Rica. I will homeschool. And we will serve every morning and serve every night. And we'll have a great life. Both cases, don't worry about it.

And at that moment, this is when I think I grow up for the first time. And you asked about this, and now as we're talking, you're helping me understand something. You talked about the child and the pain. as a child when we're facing these very difficult things, we've known to count on, only our parents. For a moment, I think I was the child again crying. But I wasn't a child anymore because I had an amazing wife and kids that I could lean back on.

I have my back, even if I messed up, even if I didn't keep my word, even if I didn't do things the way they're supposed to, even if I took all the potential in the world and messed it up or lost it, even though it was ours for the taking. And the moment I realized that, I felt a little stronger.

I felt better. I stopped crying. I was like, okay. But Rebecca says that I'm still not smiling. She goes, by the way, when I met you, you were broke. I think you're much more sexy when you're broke. then I smiled now I was happy then I walked downstairs

and now you're completing the story from before that morning after when I go to my three employees two things happened before that morning one was the story with the spiritual teacher who taught me that the darkest moment of the night is the second before dawn and that belief is measured when we're down not when we're up and two

I knew that I could rely on Rebecca which means I had a foundation and I had a real partner and I can make it through anything So when my three employees said, why are you smiling? They didn't add everything. I told them the darkest moment of the night is the second before dawn and I believe.

But I also told them, and my wife thinks I'm sexy. For a kid that didn't have much stability, that was a moment where you realized your foundation was probably rock solid, I think. I go back to where you started. Biggest decision any of us can make in our life is who is our partner. And how do we know who they are?

We now said two things. One, do they make us the best version of ourselves? Two, how will they be in that very tough day if everything was gone? And all that is left is not only our nice side. You talked before about the dark side and the light side. How are they going to treat us if for a moment? It's just the dark side. If the light is not turned off, but diminished.

I can see all the emotion in your face when you recount that moment and how much that means to you. probably more so than anything else you've said. Sometimes Rebecca is quick to anger with me, and I can be upset for a second. But when I have a second to take a deep breath and remember how, what a great wife I have and what a great partner I have,

there's nothing she can do that can actually keep me upset for more than a little bit because our relationship has been test in fire. There's another remarkable story I remember you saying about how giving you some advice to stand your ground in the post sort of we work era where there was negotiation still going on about, I think, your compensation that you're going to get, and she gave you some really, really good advice about standing your ground. She did. What was that for those that haven't heard that story?

It inspired me because, you know, I do tend to think my fiancé is always right. So when I heard that, I thought, huh. So first of all, it's very hard to stand our ground when we think we have a lot to lose. It's back to that fear. Rebecca has many superpowers. One of them, she has no fear. To a fault, she's all truth. She sees people for who they are.

And therefore she's honest, and she's not afraid of her truth. If someone's not going to be our friend, if someone's not going to talk to us because of it, she doesn't care. She calls it as it is. And at the end of this whole negotiation, when it came time to finish everything,

my litigator at the time, today is my partner. name is Eric Seiler. He called me. And we talked and we said, I think we can get to a deal. And we talked about the deal, and we got to the deal. With her, between her and here. Between so fast to finish for the story for everyone.

I stepped down. The world, I get the letter from the bank. We have nothing. Masa San comes in, saves the day, funds the company, funds us, pays our debt, but we don't get money, but we don't get the big number. And agrees in April 1st, 20, 2020 to pay myself and all the other investors three billion dollars cash, out of which we would have been 30%. So a billion dollars for us.

Corona happens really in March. And on the last day of March 2020, we had a letter from SoftBank saying that this is force major. For those of you don't know what force major means is when an event happens that's greater than life, that's out of control, like a flood or something, force major, force of nature, something unexpected, and they don't have to pay the money, and they don't send the $3 billion. I remember by this point, I've taken so many hits. One, at this point, I'm already practiced. I look up to the heavens, and I say, thank you, God.

What do we need to learn from this one? This one I'm already ready to learn. And the lesson there was, apparently litigation. Here's what we need to learn for this one. And we go into a very complicated litigation. When the litigation ends with a settlement of a billion and a half, So instead of the $3 billion, it ends up being half. So everybody gets half, but it's done.

We negotiate a certain negotiation, and it was going to take a certain time for the money to come in. And Rebecca was just about to give birth. This was four days before she was giving birth. And I walk in with my best friend, Andrew Finkelstein, who was there with me for this whole experience, and we walk in to tell, because this is Corona. So everything's on Zoom.

So Eric Seiler, the litigator, is in his house in New York. We're in the Hamptons. there in Japan, everybody's all over the place. And we walk in to tell Rebecca the settlement that we agreed and we settled, but the money will come in two months and this will happen and that will happen. And she says, no. And we're supposed to, if we don't close the deal,

Monday we're going to court. And court was not, A, not going to be great for anyone. And B, it wasn't great for WeWork. Because if we weren't going to go to court, another investor was going to come, they're going to take the, we work at least to the chance. And she goes, no, we've already had.

They were supposed to pay April 1st for 2020. They didn't pay. The $3 billion. Why are you now settling the $3 billion with another agreement to delay payment again? What if they don't pay? And now you missed your court date. Either they pay and then they settled will all say thank you and everybody will walk away. And it's not just paying to us.

That billion a half is to all the employees and all the investors. It's half a billion to us. and a billion to everyone else. Either, and I know for all of us listening, that these are outrageously large numbers, I completely acknowledge and understand. Either they pay or they don't. And I say to her, what do you want to do?

We agreed on it. And she goes, tell them you agreed on it, but your wife didn't. And she goes, you didn't do the money aside that we talked. You signed the personal guarantee. It's not just your money. This is our money. And I don't accept the settlement.

Go back and tell them that either they, pay it. Tomorrow's, this was like Thursday, this was Wednesday. Before, we had the schedule C-section. So Friday, 8 a.m. Either they pay it before Friday, 8 a.m., or we'll see everybody in court on Monday. And she said also tell them that any horrible thing

that's ever been said about you has been on the press and public. It's all out there. So Eric Seiler calls me and he says, so actually Rebecca called him and he said, Adam, I have a question for you. Who do I work for you or Rebecca? I said, well, you work for me and I work for Rebecca, so you work for Rebecca.

Because that's what I thought, because she called me and told me I'm a lousy lawyer. He said, you're not a lousy lawyer. She just doesn't like our settlement, but we did get to a resolution. I go, what do you think we should do? You said, they have no choice. You should tell them there's no deal. I said, what are they going to do? They said, they're going to explode.

Said, and then, I don't know. Either they'll meet you in court and this was a horrible decision or they'll break and send the money. I said, what do you think is going to happen? Said, I've never been in this position. I don't know. I said, okay. Got on the phone, we told them what we told them.

They screamed, bah, blah, blah. We're going to sue you for this and sue you for that. They hung up the Zoom. I called Eric, what now? He goes, now we wait. Okay. Torres later. Marcello calls, and Marcello is not the person

who made the original investment in me. Marcelo Clark, he was, at the time, it was very big personality in SoftBank today, he has his own business. Every time that I've had an interaction with me, He's always kept his word and always did the right thing. Even when I didn't agree with him, he told it to me straight, so I respect him. And a lot.

And Marcelo calls me, he's on the walker. He's like a tall guy, like he's on this walker. He goes, call Rebecca. I was like, are you sure, Marcelo? She's like, on the couch. Call Rebecca. I was like, okay. I call Rebecca.

She's coming in again, right before birth. And she's standing there next to Mercero goes, Rebecca, I wanted to tell you that you and Adam were ahead of your time. he's so correct. He said the world is lonely, the world is disconnected, people need we, people need to bring people together,

people need community. You're 10 years ahead of your time. I don't think we were 10 years, I think we were 5 years out of time because the world's moving so fast. Because I just want to tell you, the money will be in the bank before you give birth.

I'm sorry we had to go through all of this. This is just business. Nothing here was personal. We'll take the keys. Hopefully we do well by the conference. company, but we're good. It gets off the Zoom. I look at her, I say, now what?

She goes, fine, sign the documents. I said, but you said we can't do it. If the money's not in, what if you're all good now. We signed at 4.30 a.m. The money hits the account. We all get on a Zoom. At 8 a.m. I'm in Mount Sinai Hospital.

Great hospital. Rebecca is giving birth to Moses. Everybody took a deep breath, and we're here today. Adam, I have, I'm going to wrap up, but I have these five pieces of empty card, and I wanted to give you the opportunity to write on it. Are you okay with the writer or shall I write it for you? You'll write for me. With my dyslexia. Just the five most important lessons that you have learned over since the beginning of We Work, well, I guess from the beginning of your early years.

How about we just do the five lessons I feel we learned today by talking? Sure. Lesson one. Choose your life partner, friends and business partners for the worst day in your life. not for the best. Okay. Great voice. Listen too.

Life is not about when we fall down. It's about how we get up. Okay. Number two. Choose the life partner that will make you the best version of yourself, the one that you need, not the one that you think you want.

Okay. Control doesn't come from power. It comes from influence. And influence needs to be errant every single day from the beginning. And last but not least, we all have a destiny and a journey. Get to know yourself

so you can start living yours. That one's for you. Yeah, I thought so. Adam, thank you so much. I couldn't be more excited by all the wonderful things you're doing at Flo at the moment. I've got some wonderful photos here of the team and I've looked into the business.

I also had your partner, one of the greatest investors of all time. Ben Horowitz will write me this beautiful letter where he talks about the amazing journey he's had with you, why he backed you and how amazingly collaborative you've been, what a sponge you are for learning, and how he strongly believes that you are now building a generational business that will change the world and how proud he is to be associated with a man like you. He tells us all, Ben Horowitz. We should never judge a founder by his worst moment. But with Adam, that was easy because his light shined and shines so brightly.

You have over-delivered in every sense of the word, including on your promises. Thank you, Adam. It's beautiful. I want Stephen to thank you. I know we had a real discussion because I learned a few things for the first time. And you made me talk out loud about a few things that I've almost never had. I appreciate it, and I'm going to think about it, and I'm going to learn from it. What's your last word?

Is there anything at all that you wanted to leave the audience with? We all came to this planet with a purpose and a destiny. We started this life as this perfect light. Noise came, challenges came, people came, ego came, everything came. This is up to all of us to have the curve. to look inside, see whatever are the things that are stopping us from really becoming the best version of myself, of ourselves. Surround ourselves with the right people, with the right family, both real family, spiritual family, whatever you consider your best and closest, and go and chase your dream, your journey, your truth.

And I know as a fact that if you go through the process, if you remember that life is, not about how we fall and how many people saw us fall, it's genuinely about how we get up. And if you have the courage to really be the full version of yourself and you're truthful about not just your strength, but also the weaknesses. And if you remember that it truly is a journey, that when you get to that last few minutes of your life, you're going to look around, you're going to be surrounded by loved ones

and by a lot, a lot of love that you've created and cultivated for your entire life, and that you're going to live this world and this planet much better than it was before you came. I wish you and all of us good luck at this journey of life. Amen. Amen. Thank you. We're done. Thank you.