Newmark's Door

Scott Galloway talking smack about the current VC scene.

Related, a prediction that fierce reckoning is coming: "Blitzscaling Or Just Plain Old B.S?"

". . .as his wife and co-founder set about creating an IPO document for the SEC 'like it was the September issue of Vogue'".

One would hope that the explosion of this bit of dopiness would sober up banks and investors for a while. But even after Theranos the lesson seemed to wear off quickly. (Article linked is drawn from "The Sun Sets on We".)

And if you want the words of an Old Testament prophet raining rhetorical hellfire on We, read, once again, NYU professor Scott Galloway. This is nice:

Essentially what happened is that the employees of We who didn’t get a chance to sell, SoftBank, and some other institutional investors have lost $47 billion. Had this consensual hallucination gone on for 60 more days, retail investors would have experienced that loss. So this is a good thing! This is the markets working. 

I'm a sucker for turnaround stories. (And especially this one because I've been in a couple of Targets recently and I was impressed with what they've done.)

Andy Kessler sharply exclaims "No!"

I’ve dug into the curricula at dozens of M.B.A. programs, from Booth to Kellogg to Fuqua. They’re all more or less the same: The first year has introductory courses in finance, accounting, managerial skills—my eyes are getting droopy, too—along with modeling and organizational behavior, each no doubt chock full of case studies that are probably no longer relevant. And virtually every program now has a mandatory ethics class, which awkwardly suggests that students had no ethics coming in. . . . 

Any halfway-on-the-ball undergrad could construct a virtual M.B.A. himself by taking a finance course and some in marketing and psychology, plus any course that teaches how to use spreadsheets. Then get buzzword-compliant and, voilà, an M.B.A. in a box.

. . . professor of marketing at NYU, offers his hot take on the postponement of WeWork's IPO. Entertaining. (2 minute video.) And he followed that video with this humdinger of a post.

C'mon, Scott, express yourself. Don't hold back.

Related: "WeWork Looks To Be The New Pets.com".

If you've had some statistical training you know the answer is "Not much."

It sounds like yet another socially positive action from big bad Amazon.

Wait . . . I thought big, bad Amazon had driven them all out of business.

Apparently not.

If it weren't for the fact that when it soon comes public WeWork could well be one of the most "crowded" short trades ever--like Beyond Meat, for which I apparently massively overpaid for a few puts--I would short WeWork. This article quotes the registration statement as follows: “We are a community company committed to maximum global impact. Our mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness.”

Oh yeah, I really want to short elevating the world's consciousness.

This is yet one more example of why government should not try to pick business winners.

. . . the administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo hoped it was catching lightning in a bottle by spending $750 million in taxpayer money to land what then was a fast-growing business in a hot, environmentally friendly industry that promised to bring nearly 1,500 jobs to job-starved Buffalo. . . .

For $750 million, you expect more.