Here’s what one of Apple’s first investors thinks went wrong at WeWork
This is not the year for unicorns. In 2019 alone, WeWork imploded before it even went public. Shares of Uber, Lyft, Slack and other ballyhooed startups have tanked following their Wall Street debuts.
Alan Patricof, chairman emeritus of venture capital firm Greycroft and an early backer of Apple and Office Depot, says part of the problem is that founders of these companies want too much control.
Many tech giants set up multiple classes of stock and give top executives shares that wield super voting rights. That means that a founder may have voting control of their company — even if they don’t own a majority of the stock.
“If you want to be a publicly traded company, you should act like a public company,” Patricof said in an interview with TechCrunch in September.
Patricof will discuss this and talk more about the problems in the IPO market with CNN Business correspondent Alison Kosik on the “Markets Now” live show Wednesday at 12:45 pm ET.
WeWork is the most recent poster child for startups gone bad. The company, valued at $47 billion just a few months ago, has seen its worth plummet to $8 billion, according to research firm CB Insights.
VCs should have challenged WeWork earlier
Patricof told Fox Business in October that he believes the biggest problem for WeWork was that former CEO Adam Neumann had too much power and that investors like SoftBank and board members didn’t challenge him.
The WeWork board should have asked more questions but instead “they were all seeing the pot at the end of the rainbow.”
Patricof told Fox Business that he met with Neumann and visited WeWork a few years ago but that the company was not looking to raise funds at the time. So Greycroft has mostly avoided the meltdowns at high profile unicorns like WeWork as well as Uber and Lyft.
But Greycroft has invested in one company that underwhelmed the market after its recent IPO in June. Greycroft has a more than 7% stake in TheRealReal, a luxury consignment marketplace that lost $75.8 million in 2018 and $23.2 million in the first quarter of this year.
Even so, The RealReal enjoyed a strong debut but has since been hit by customer concerns about damaged goods and reports of counterfeit items. Shares of TheRealReal are down about 7% from their IPO price and nearly 40% below the peak they hit on their first day of trading in late June.
Samantha Azzarello, global market strategist at JP Morgan Asset Management, will also be joining Kosik Wednesday to talk about the broader market and economy, US-China trade talks and the Federal Reserve.
“Markets Now” streams live from the New York Stock Exchange every Wednesday at 12:45 pm ET. Hosted by CNN Business correspondents, the 15-minute program features incisive commentary from experts.
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