Dance with the Devil for a Cool $350 Million

Happy Friday! I know what you’re thinking—who is this stranger in my inbox. It’s me Kinsey and I know I haven’t sent an email in a really long time BUT…when the mood strikes it strikes. This week, it striked (struck?) in a big way.

So in lieu of releasing an interview today, I’m sending this email. There’s an interview that goes with it, and that’s coming out Tuesday(ish). There’s also a second interview that goes with it, and that’s coming out a week from today(ish).

But today, there’s this newsletter, born of frustration and, if I’m being honest with myself, a little resentment. I would make a joke about being a grudge-loving Scorpio here if I weren’t so serious about what you’re about to read. This is how the system works, and this feels like the only way I can attempt to dismantle oppressive power structures. By writing to you, in this email, on this day.

I hope it makes you think—as always, I’m eager to hear your ideas.

—Kinsey

Dance with the Devil for a Cool $350 Million

To believe that any of us are redeemable requires the extension of forgiveness even where there’s indignation. Sometimes, forgiveness manifests in days gone by that render anger, bitterness, or jealousy as small feelings, fractions of what they once were.

Other times, even as months and years pass, forgiveness and the redemption it introduces feel more impossible to come by. I often feel unsure that the whole of humanity is redeemable.

But the systems that govern those tallies of who wins and who loses and who gets to play the game at all appear to have more faith in man than I do. This is, of course, because they are systems that regularly reward familiar bad behavior. Over and over again, inequity multiplying its stranglehold with every headline and every cashed check. There’s no need for redemption when you’ve gamed the system.

Earlier this week, the alpha male of America’s venture funds, Andreessen Horowitz (pledge name: a16z), announced an investment in Flow, a residential real estate startup founded by former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann. The check, which was worth $350 million and valued the yet-to-debut Flow north of $1 billion, was the largest single check a16z has ever written.

And they wrote it to Adam Neumann.

The same Adam Neumann who so impressively mismanaged WeWork that the company had to delay layoffs in 2019 because it couldn’t afford severance packages after its valuation sank from about $50 billion to about $8 billion.

The same Adam Neumann who brought weed on a plane, enforced heavy drinking at company events, walked barefoot through the streets of Manhattan, and laughed most of it off when the Wall Street Journal published the kind of exposé that would swiftly and permanently torpedo the career of anyone less privileged.

The same Adam Neumann who lost investors tens of billions of dollars and was subsequently awarded $1.7 billion to step down (at the time, that was estimated to be about $850,000 for each of the 2,000 employees WeWork had to lay off in the wake of its failed IPO).

That’s the Adam Neumann cashing a check for $350 million to create what could fairly be described as WeWork for residential buildings. He has failed up so spectacularly that the people who often call themselves the smartest in the room appear to have already forgotten the fables of Neumann’s earlier corporate exploits.

So has Adam Neumann been redeemed? I suppose that’s between Adam and whatever higher power he answers to (and apparently Marc Andreessen, who masterfully got a jab in at journalists (??) while coming to Neumann’s defense in one of the more condescending press releases I’ve read lately).

But as far as I’m concerned, this isn’t really about redemption or redeemability or whether Adam Neumann has learned his lesson or even if he ever will. It’s about the reality of a system that was designed not for you, not for me, but for keeping its biggest beneficiaries powerful. For the Adam Neumanns and the Marc Andreessens of the world. For people who view accountability as an afterthought.

And that’s not to say that Flow isn’t a good idea—while I contest the capitalist exploitation of something that should be a human right, housing is a monumental problem in need of solving.

I take issue with Adam Neumann being given the resources to solve it. He’s the one getting a second chance.

For too many other founders, namely women and people of color, there are no second chances. I’ll spare you the statistics because this isn’t about statistics—it’s about broad, consuming inequities. If I’m to be taken seriously, I have to dress a certain way, think a certain way, laugh a certain way, eat a certain way, speak a certain way, Tweet a certain way.

And even if you go by the book from start to finish—even if you build that empire, recoup every investor dollar and then some, redefine a stale category in a way the men never could…the NYT writes about your decision to move on as if you were ceremoniously ousted. It appears women can only ever fail spectacularly or be put out to pasture. They don’t get to walk around Gramercy Park barefoot. They don’t get the second chance.

All we get to be is fed up.

As the newsletter writer Eric Newcomer put it, this could very well be a case of a16z simply needing to spend money. It has an enormous fund to spend from, and that money has to go somewhere. Where better than a capital intensive real estate business helmed by a notoriously irresponsible spender?

Andreessen Horowitz has so much money it doesn’t know what to do with it. While we scrimp and save and wonder aloud in the grocery store how butter came to be so expensive, Marc Andreessen’s biggest problem is how to spend $350 million.

And Adam Neumann’s problem is…what, exactly? His redemption arc has been completed.

I tried and tried and tried to think of a more eloquent way to put this, some way that would absolve me of being labeled jealous or bitter or some other emotion we villainize women for feeling. But all I came up with was f*ck this noise.

Marc Andreessen can say “our nation has a housing crisis” and oppose local efforts to add more affordable housing to his neighborhood, where the median home value is more than $8 million. Adam Neumann can fumble the bag so spectacularly that Apple makes a show about it. Founders can say they want a more diverse startup and still hire their unqualified buddies from college on the basis of “trust.”

As Dominic-Madori Davis put it, all news like this does is tell the world that the ceiling is not glass; it is concrete.

But even concrete can be blasted to smithereens with the right tools and the right team and the right force. That takes 1) investing in the undervalued—women, people of color, founders of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds 2) eschewing the persuasive tales of late-stage capitalism that seek to weaken us by telling us someone like Marc Andreessen is worthy of adulation and 3) getting and staying loud. I’m starting with that last one.

—Kinsey