It is a company that did not exist eight years ago but was valued at nearly $20bn this year. Its chief executive is 38 years old and looks like a nightclub DJ. His wife is the chief brand officer, a yoga fiend who doubtless had a hand in the company’s mission statement: “We get shit done and we get it done well.”
This is WeWork, the shared office outfit that has grown from a single building in Manhattan in 2010 into a hipster hot-desking behemoth with more than 170 sites in 19 countries and 58 cities, from Beijing to Bogotá.
I have taken almost no notice of its rise until now, except for its extraordinary $20bn valuation — and the growing band of sceptics who think that figure makes no sense. They may be right. Documents leaked to Bloomberg last year suggest the privately held company slashed its profit forecasts for 2016 from $65m to $14m. Yet in the past few weeks, as I have bumped into more and more people who have moved into one of its offices, I have decided that WeWork is doing something interesting to modern corporate life.