Adam Neumann, the former CEO of WeWork, has made public his new business venture: Flow, a company focused on the real estate sector. The history of its founder and the fact that it does not yet exist as such – its launch is scheduled for 2023 – have not prevented the company from obtaining the support of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which even already values it at more than 1,000 millions of dollars.
Few details are actually known about Neumann’s new company and its plan to revolutionize the residential housing industry. At the moment, only one idea “Live life in Flow” appears on his website, very much in line with some of the mantras on which WeWork was based while he was in charge of it. Apart from that, it is known -from an article in The New York Times- that the founder of the coworking startup has bought more than 3,000 apartments in the US (specifically in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta and Nashville), which Flow will put into rental and that will also offer its services to new promotions and other third parties. Likewise, the American media has published that the co-founder of the aforementioned investment firm, Marc Andreessen, will join his board of directors.
Davidson Goldin, a spokesman for Flow, has dropped to Forbes that the company’s intention is to develop real estate management software and a digital wallet to store both legal tender and cryptocurrencies. However, he has clarified that the latter could not be used to pay the rent of the homes managed by the company, only to make external purchases. What is being considered is to launch a tokenized rewards program that includes cryptocurrency.
For Andreessen, the US is mired in “a crisis” in terms of housing, characterized by a shortage of supply and very high prices. As he points out on his blog, they have teamed up with Adam Neumann and Flow because they directly address that problem. In addition, he calls the former WeWork CEO a “visionary leader” for his ability to redesign the office experience, something the investor hopes he will repeat in this new foray into residential real estate.
Neumann is a billionaire again
Adam Neumann stopped being a billionaire in April 2020. More than two years later, he has regained his title and, according to Forbes, his fortune currently amounts to 1,300 million dollars. Despite being a not inconsiderable heritage, it is far from what he came to be worth in the 2010s.
When WeWork was booming and expanding, Neumann was worth $14 billion. A figure that was considerably reduced as a result of and subsequent to him as CEO of the startup.
While running the company, Neumann and his wife Rebekah spent more than $80 million on at least five properties. Among them, a row house in the exclusive Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan for which they paid $34.7 million, another for $1.7 million in the Hamptons, and a $21 million one in the area of the San Francisco Bay.
Over time, the Neumann couple has been getting rid of some of these properties. According to Business Insider, they sold the house in the Hamptons in February 2020 for $1.25 million. That same month, they put the Gramercy Park row house up for sale for $37.5 million. Also, they got rid of the farm in the San Francisco Bay for 22.4 million dollars.
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