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The Daredevil Unicorns: Why WeWork, Juul, and Uber Play With Fire
Lawless startups exploiting the seams of regulation are suddenly feeling the heat—and getting burned
Oh to be a heedless startup founder in an unregulated space. To tromp on legacy players, ignore norms and rules, and generally move fast and break things, as Mark Zuckerberg put it a decade ago. To be not just part of a new company, but to lead a mission, a movement. And, not incidentally, become insanely rich.
Only, what happens when regulators show up, losses pile up — or people start, quite literally, dying?
We are watching a sudden perp walk of aggressively blithe founders who, fueled by chutzpah, raw conceptual genius, and a promise to shatter paradigms, have dominated the last decade of technological history with eye-popping valuations.
WeWork’s Adam Neumann, accused of self-dealing and power-grabbing, has had to vastly curtail the ambitions of his planned IPO, punching a hole in the company’s $47 billion valuation, and offering shares at a reported value of $10 billion to $20 billion. Investors may not even be prepared to buy shares at the lowered valuation, but they suddenly have more time to think about it: Late last night, the Financial Times reported that Neumann is postponing the…
