The WeWork “Acquisition” (with Dan Primack)

No, yeah, we'll cut this part out. This is a first on acquired. Dan's gonna take care of it. Hello. Yeah. Welcome to season five, episode six of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them.

I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and early stage venture fund in Seattle. I'm David Rosenthal, and I'm a general partner at Wave Capital, an early stage venture firm focused on marketplaces based in San Francisco. And we are your hosts. Today we tell an episode that in our initial season five planning calendar we had as an IPO episode. And then uh that was pitifully canceled, and we were just gonna tell the crazy story of the antics that got it here.

But now it's shaping up to be a tried and true acquisition episode for us. So here on this episode, we will dive into the existential question of if we work, a once forty seven billion dollar company can be saved by soft banks. Effective acquisition of the company. And we are going to try to accomplish two goals. First, to dive into the history of this company from the very beginning, and second To try and see the core economic forest through the under governed trees and understand precisely the position that the business is in today. Listening to Dan's face during all this is priceless. If only we were a video podcast. Which brings me to the only appropriate way that we know how to tell this story is with the expert help of Axios's.

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