The Cult of We

Chapter 1

The Hustler

Adam Neumann believed he would be the man to reinvent baby clothes.

It was 2006, and he was twenty-seven years old. Neumann was already running his own fledgling business that aspired to mass-produce pants and onesies with built-in knee pads for crawling babies. He named it Krawlers. Despite his sincere belief in the brilliance of his concept, Neumann was still hunting for ways to get the business moving, let alone to turn a profit. He flew to China to meet with suppliers. He pushed his product on baby retailers.

Neumann had arrived in New York from Israel in the fall of 2001, landing in a city reeling from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Yet, in times of boom and bust alike, New York always beckoned dreamers like Neumann. His reason for the move, he told his friends, was simple. He wanted to get rich. New York was where opportunity happens.

He moved in with his younger sister, Adi, and lost no time making connections. Adi, a model who appeared on the covers of magazines including international editions of Elle, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan, brought in plenty of money to support a flashy lifestyle. The two shared an apartment, which doubled as Adam s office, on the fifteenth floor of a building in Tribeca that attracted a gregarious crowd. Twentysomethings flitted in and out of one another s apartments or socialized on the roof.

While Neumann had flirted with modeling himself he had a distinctive look, lanky with long, flowing dark brown hair and a face marked by high, rounded cheekbones he opted to pursue dreams of another sort.

Neumann had launched Krawlers while a student at Baruch, a public college in Manhattan known for its business program. The budding entrepreneur had tested out a string of business ideas, including a collapsible high heel, before eventually landing on padded infant clothes. Friends say he got the idea by seeing a similar product in Israel. He took to Krawlers with his trademark intensity,

Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell

[The] ultimate portrayal of . . . an empire built on sand. Newsweek

Like Bad Blood . . . The Cult of We is novelistic in detail and often thrilling. . . . It s like watching a car careening toward a wall at 90 miles an hour. The Washington Post

If I had to make a list of top five business books of all time, this would be on it. It s just so damn engrossing. Christopher Mims, Wall Street Journal tech columnist

A juicy guided tour through the highly leveraged, not-quite-rags-to-billion-dollar-parachute saga of WeWork and its cofounder Adam Neumann . . . Brown and Farrell show an agility for explaining key business dynamics. . . . It s also very funny. The New York Times

Absorbing . . . The Cult of We is both a ticktock of Neumann s self-immolation and a primer on the ways and mores of a start-up culture populated by visionaries, grifters and moneymen. . . . Like Bad Blood . . . The Cult of We is novelistic in detail and often thrilling. . . . It s like watching a car careening toward a wall at 90 miles an hour. Allison Stewart, The Washington Post

Deeply reported and compellingly written. Harvard Business Review

Only a handful of books capture the zeitgeist of a business era. Add this one, a wild saga that caps a decade when founder-worshipping investors threw billions at well-spun visions even those of a megalomaniac whose new-age real estate enterprise s losses piled up as fast as its valuation climbed. The duo who broke the story of WeWork s rise and fall have now artfully fleshed it out in a book whose colorful narrative is undergirded by deep context about the times, and enablers, that made Adam Neumann possible. John Helyar, #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of Barbarians at the Gate

The Emperor s New Clothes of the Silicon Valley age. The Real Deal

Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell owned the WeWork story as it was unfolding. And now, with The Cult of We, we