From what I can see in the commercials, the gimmick is in the screen attached to the handlebars. It allows the user to see the spin class instructor and try to keep up with the lesson (and the other participants who are in the same room as the instructor. I assume the interactivity is why they charge so much for the exercise bike. And I assume they charge either a monthly subscription or a per-lesson charge, so unlike a conventional exercise bike, the company gets ongoing revenues.
yeah, I’ve looked into it and the cost is about $2500 for the bike and another $500 to actually keep access to the site every year.
Seems a hell of a lot to me and not something that’s patentable or can’t be copied.
I mean, I’m not saying that humanity has reached a great enlightenment moment and we’ll no longer be taken in by charlatans.
Just that the existence of fraudsters doesn’t mean that the entire mechanism by which businesses are formed and talent performs and so on is invalid. Sometimes you can keep a scheme going for a while. Very very few people can keep one going forever.
WeWork sounds crazy, but I do not see how’s its anything like Theranos.
WeWork may be wildly overvalued, but that is not the same thing. WeWork actually sells things of value. It’s not like they’re lying about having workspaces you can rent. They really do, and they really rent them and charge money and collect that money. They’re getting buzz by using fancy tech words and whatnot, but it is, at its core, a legitimate business that isn’t engaging in deception about their core service offering being anything other than what it is. Perfectly legitimate companies headed up by saner people have been wildly, insanely overvalued at some point, including a lot of legit outfits in the tech bubble.
Theranos was NEVER what it claimed to be. At no point did they have the technology they claimed to, nor was there any chance whatever that they ever would.
Yeah, and three weeks after fraud one is exposed another conman is talking to chump #2 saying, “this is nothing like that. Trust me.”
Well quite. The same is true of booms and busts in economies. I’m sure after 2008 people were convinced they’ll never make the same mistake again. They will. Seeing as the “smartest people in the room” refused to see it coming we shouldn’t have any confidence that it’ll be different next time, and there will be a next time.
As long as the possibility exists of making huge financial gains, the possibility exists of being conned or wanting to be the conman.
True, but it’s something that affluent people who live in the burbs can stick in their basement rather than having to commit to gym memberships and making trips to said gyms when it’s freezing cold outside. Of course exercise is only half the reason to go to the gym anyway; perving’s another - a negative for Peloton in that regard.
Of all the bright new ideas that I see getting marketed, I’d put it in the top 20%. Because most of them seem fuckdumb, even some of those that actually end up catching on.
I’d never use it myself but I can see a potential market.
For anyone interested in WeWork and the zaniness of the financial system in general, I highly recommend Matt Levine’s 4-times-a-week Money Stuff article. He has been writing a lot about WeWork lately (and wrote a lot about Theranos when it was in the news).
It’s basically… a financial news article and also a humor piece? I’m not sure quite how to describe it, but it’s both edifying and regularly hilarious.
I second the Matt Levine recommendation. It’s probably my favorite thing in my inbox every day.
Today he linked to an interview with marketing professor Scott Galloway discussing the WeWork debacle.
paging thunderf00t
How does this support the notion that merit is a myth?
Does that YouTube video have anything to say that you couldn’t use your own words to say?
That interview is great. And it
supports Little Nemo’s point that WeWork is basically just as fraudulent as Theranos. Like, how much can you bullshit about a business before it’s just fraud.
It seems to me that in some way WeWorks is hoping to be the Uber of office space. Their real business model is to price in risk. The pay for long term leases, and charge users for short term leases. Their factors are number of customers vs. vacancies. So, they have to price for the risk of vacancies.
Now, like Uber, they are probably actually operating at huge losses buffered by the investment money, hoping for that future inflection point where the become profitable. So, in that respect, they are basically a ponzi.
Not sure whether this should be its own GQ, but this thread is what’s making me wonder so I’m asking it here: where does a privately held company’s valuation come from?
I understand why a publicly traded company has a valuation because it has a share price, the price investors are currently willing to buy or sell one share of the company for, and you just multiply that price by the number of shares outstanding and that’s the valuation. But if somebody says a privately held company that’s owned by one person or a handful of people is “worth,” say, $20 billion, what does that mean? Where does that number come from?
Many of these private companies still sell shares, just not to the general public. So if someone offers to give a company a billion dollars in exchange for ten percent of the shares, the company is valued at ten billion dollars.
Not exactly. A valuation can be made using several techniques, such as a Discounted Cash Flow analysis or comparing a company to similar companies. So a company might be valued at $20 billion because it is expected to generate $20 billion (discounted to current dollars) over its lifetime. Or, if it is highly speculative, it may share similar characteristics to companies that ended up being worth around $20 billion.
Whether or not the stock price is considered a “good deal” is largely a product of the valuation. For example, if I value a company at $20 billion and the market cap is $50 billion, that might be a pretty good indication that the stock is overvalued.