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(Bloomberg) – Adam Neumann was hosting a sector chief for an early lunch at the company's headquarters, years before he left his post as chairman and CEO of WeWork amid an over-excited public offering . It was the summer of 2017 and he brought it to the office of one of his deputies, Artie Minson. "It's Artie," Neumann said. "He is the adult in the room."
On Tuesday, Neumann stepped down as CEO of WeWork's parent company, We Co., and assumed the role of non-executive chairman, yielding to growing pressure from his board to give up power. The campaign to get Neumann's resignation was closely watched by reports of auto-trading and other governance issues that pushed public investors to reject the company, dropping its expected valuation of several billion dollars.
Neumann has been replaced by Minson and another WeWork executive, Sebastian Gunningham, who are now co-CEOs of the co-working giant in trouble. The two men, who have several years of experience in public companies, but few in real estate, will seek to bring order to the chaos that surrounded the WeWork IPO.
Insiders describe Minson, a training accountant who would have a sense of arid humor, as the opposite of the extrovert Neumann, who is a natural show man with a propensity for noble rhetoric. But Minson has a history with the company, having worked closely with Neumann for four years, most recently as chief financial officer of the company. Gunningham, vice president of WeWork, has spent years at Amazon.com Inc. and Oracle Corp. before joining the startup.
Now they will be responsible for bringing together WeWork's employees, who are all used to staging a charismatic founder, with a penchant for hiring well-known musicians to perform at parties. And they must also relieve worried investors, wary of the company's huge expenses, its history of unconventional governance structures and its persistent failure to generate profits.
"It's an incredible honor to lead WeWork at this important time in the company's history," the two men said in a joint statement. "Our core business is solid and we will take clear steps to balance the strong growth, profitability and unique experience of WeWork members, while assessing the optimal timing for an IPO."
This summer morning, in 2017, after presenting Minson as an adult resident, Neumann and the visiting executive returned to Neumann's office, where the CEO went on to say that he even had matured, according to a person close to the conversation who asked to be identified at a private meeting. "You may have heard that I enjoyed a tequila kick at meetings," Neumann said. "But I like to think that I have grown up."
Instead of tequila, Neumann produced two bottles of Scottish whiskey made from single malt and reserved small strokes. It was before noon.
Accountant
According to a person familiar with the company, Artie Minson is a refined executive who represents a "sober choice" for WeWork. Minson studied accounting at Georgetown University and earned his MBA from Columbia Business School. As an accountant, he worked at Ernst & Young before starting to work in the media industry.
Minson toured New York media companies. This included work at Time Warner Inc. and Rainbow Media Holdings Inc., where he held the position of Senior Vice President of Finance. Later, as Chief Financial Officer of AOL Inc., he oversaw the successful split of Time Warner in 2009, following their merger in 2000. Prior to WeWork, he was the CFO of Time Warner Cable. , a post he left shortly after Charter Communications Inc. agreed to buy the company for $ 56 billion under his guidance.
Minson joined WeWork in 2015 as president and chief operating officer of the company, before becoming its chief financial officer. He was a close associate of Neumann alongside Jen Berrent, director of WeWork's operations.
Despite the large number of people who make up Minson, he still has "seller ability," said one who knows Minson but asked not to be identified as talking about private interactions. Minson often made fun of jokes when he spoke with Time Warner Cable's investors and analysts, he said, and was more likeable than a typical CFO.
He is "gregarious," he said, while remaining "very focused on numbers and operations," making him a "solid person" to counterbalance Neumann's fleeting personality.
A technology veteran
The veteran of Amazon, Gunningham, represents the technical skills of the new management team. He arrived at WeWork last year, after spending more than a decade at the retail giant, where he held a senior vice president position in which he reported directly to Jeff Bezos.
Gunningham grew up in Argentina and is fluent in Spanish. He earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Stanford University in 1985 and in 1989 he joined Oracle. Gunningham rose through the ranks of the company to head its Miami-based Latin American division, before joining Apple Inc., where he helped the company break into corporate computing.
It was not all the tech giants for Gunningham, though. He also ran a company called Peace Software, which specializes in utility billing management, and sold it to First Data Corp. in 2006. He had joined Amazon the following year, at the time when the company still had a relatively flat structure. There, he built a sprawling organization to manage the fast-growing business of Amazon's third-party market. James Thomson, a partner at Buy Box Experts, who previously worked for Gunningham at Amazon, said his first reaction knowing that his former boss would run WeWork was, "Oh, finally there is an adult in the business." At Amazon, he remembers Gunningham as a formidable leader who generally seemed to know more about the business group of each manager than the manager – and asked specific questions at meetings.
At a meeting, Gunningham asked Thomson, who was behind his goals in hiring third party sellers, had he considered using different types of search ads. . Thomson did not have it. In another meeting two weeks later, Gunningham reiterated the idea and Thomson said he did not have time to check. Gunningham said he did his own research and came up with thoughts on what types of ads to pursue and how.
"Everyone in the room is like," Damn, we've called, "" said Thomson. But Gunningham has generally provided comments in a calm and factual way, and has not generally been reprimanded, said Thomson, thus making him well liked from the ground up.
Despite his enormous personal fortune, Gunningham dressed casually. "These are the same clothes as us, but really cool versions," recalled Thomson, highlighting the high-end jeans of the executive.
Gunningham reportedly adopted some of Jeff Bezos' leadership tactics, including asking employees to silently read "six-page, narratively structured memos" at the beginning of the meetings. Gunningham would ask for business proposals in the form of written accounts and could go into more detail. At the time of his departure from Amazon, he was one of the top leaders of the leadership and was a key lieutenant of Bezos.
In a letter to employees on Tuesday, Gunningham and Minson explained how they would divide the roles of the CEO. Minson will oversee financial, legal, human resources, real estate and communications functions, as well as business development, partnerships and businesses. Gunningham will focus on areas such as WeWork products, technology, design and marketing.
While both partners were preparing WeWork for another round of public procurement operations, they committed to "looking closely at all aspects of our society" and anticipating "difficult decisions ahead". In their letter, the co-CEOs urged employees to stay focused on WeWork's customers and on their "daily work," adding "it's more important than ever."
(Add details about Gunningham's management style)
– With the help of Spencer Soper and Ellen Huet.
To contact the authors of this story: Sarah McBride in San Francisco at [email protected] Tan in New York at [email protected] Day in Seattle at [email protected] Davis in New York at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anne VanderMey at [email protected], Tom Giles
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