Nearly three years after Adam Neumann stepped down as CEO of WeWork following a failed attempt to take the company public, he is said to be back at the helm of the billion-dollar real estate startup. CNN Business reports: Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent venture capital firm known for its early investments in Twitter and Airbnb, has invested about $350 million in Neumann’s latest venture, Flow, The New York Times reported, citing unnamed sources briefed on the deal. The investment valued the startup at more than $1 billion, according to the report. In a blog post on Monday, Marc Andresen, co-founder and general partner of the VC firm, announced the investment without disclosing financial details. He also explained what he thought about backing residential real estate company Flow and Neumann despite the founder’s high-profile fallout from WeWork.
“Adam is a visionary leader who has revolutionized the world’s second-largest asset class – commercial real estate – by bringing community and brand to an industry where neither existed before,” Andreessen wrote in a post in Monday. “Adam and the history of WeWork have been exhaustively chronicled, analyzed and fictionalized—sometimes accurately. For all the energy invested in covering this story, it is often underestimated that only one person fundamentally re-engineered the office experience and led a paradigm-shifting global company: Adam Neumann.” It’s not immediately clear how Flow aims to revolutionize the housing industry. Flow currently has a bare-bones website with the slogan “Live in Flow” and the two words that it will launch in 2023.
Andreessen positioned the new company as a long-awaited solution to the national “housing crisis.” He used a mix of jargon-filled terms — “community-centric, experience-centric service” — to explain how the new startup would “create a system where renters get the benefits of owners.” “We think it’s only natural that, in his first venture since WeWork, Adam returns to the theme of connecting people by transforming their physical spaces and creating communities where people spend most of their time: their homes,” Andreessen wrote. “Residential real estate, the world’s largest asset class, is poised for just such a change.”
