Your Guide to WeWork's CEO Redesign – TechCrunch

Hello and welcome to Equity, TechCrunch's venture capital podcast, where we reveal the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Kate and Alex were back at TechCrunch headquarters in San Francisco to snuggle around the week's biggest story: WeWork's infamous CEO leaving his post. Adam Neumann is now simply the non-executive chairman of The We Company, a company he has helped to found and direct public history over the past five years.

His exit comes after several revelations have seemed chaotic and very chaotic. After WeWork's assessment fell as she headed for a financially critical IPO, something had to be given. The firm tried to improve the situation of investors by making changes (read: improvements) to corporate governance, but this was not enough. Snakes do not rot at all, and WeWork needed new leadership, in the form of co-CEOs..

We work is now led by Sebastian Gunningham and Artie Minson, senior executives with positions at Amazon and Time Warner Cable, respectively. They were responsible for driving the company into an era of maturity, cost reduction and perhaps even profitability! But probably not. Anyway, we think there are a lot of parallels to draw between Uber and and WeWork, as we have explained in the past.

Kate and Alex also addressed the issue of corporate governance, particularly with respect to higher voting shares. The advice of private companies TL; DR: look and work very differently than public companies. More often than not, start-up boards are venture capitalists focused on protecting their capital and future returns. It's a dog world to eat, everyone.

Wapping, it seems likely that WeWork will try to get new liquidity in the short term, because it blocks its activity, gives up or eliminates non-performing assets (do you remember?) and seeks to temper both its growth rate and its losses. If this is enough to allow the company to float in 2020 (2019 seems unlikely), it is not clear.

Icarus.

We are back on Friday morning with our regular episode and a guest. Stay tuned!