It was the fundraise heard round Twitter.
Adam Neumann, the notorious entrepreneur behind WeWork, raised a stunning $350 million from Andreessen Horowitz for a yet-to-launch actual property firm known as Move. The funding gave Neumann’s newest enterprise a greater than $1 billion valuation, as reported by The New York Instances, and got here amid what is meant to be an investor pullback in a bear market.
It’s the largest particular person examine a16z has ever written and the second time the agency backed a Neumann-founded company this yr.
There is no such thing as a have to rehash each single factor that Neumann did unsuitable; AppleTV+ did that already within the miniseries “WeCrashed.” His calamitous tenure at WeWork garnered him a fame for employee mismanagement and he led his firm to a disastrous IPO. He nonetheless walked away with a roughly $1 billion exit bundle. He failed up, and the announcement of his a16z spherical was a reminder that he’s nonetheless failing up.
“The information [of Neumann’s raise] was not stunning to me,” Nicole Tinson, the founding father of the inclusion platform HBCU 20×20, advised TechCrunch. “I really anticipated this as a result of discrimination in funding isn’t any completely different than discrimination in any avenue.”
One can’t out-educate, out-network and out-assimilate the systemic boundaries designed to discriminate in opposition to them.
The information put reality in a harsh gentle, a breaking level for a lot of. Ladies are uninterested in shattering glass ceilings; their fingers are slashed from the dropping shards. Some founders are additionally exhausted from taking swings on the concrete ceiling, the place gender, racial and infrequently socioeconomic situations mix to create a discriminatory barrier so robust it can’t shatter like glass; it’s sturdy like concrete and should arduously be drilled by.
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