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The ‘MeWork Generation’ and the 2 Metrics That Define Them
Meet the executives who burn millions daily and enrich themselves while creating no real value
I’ve lost a lot of other people’s money. The most stressful times in my life have been when people believed in me and invested tens (if not hundreds) of millions in my company or idea, only to see their capital go up in smoke. I’ve also made a lot of people a lot of money — but only in America would someone with my (lack of) pedigree be given this many swings at the plate.
To be a truly great investor or operator or CEO, you need to be a bit of a sociopath: You have to be able to sleep at night even as you lose other people’s hard-earned money or lay people off. Working with OPM (that is, Other People’s Money) is often phrased as a positive, but the real luxury is to be in a position to lose your own capital. If things go wrong, it’s a private failure.
The willingness to risk capital on a captain and harpoons (the 19th-century whaling sector was proto-venture capital) has always been a key ingredient in the secret sauce of the U.S. economy. But the secret is out. While the U.S. still produces the most unicorns, and the most mega-corporations, China is gaining… fast. Interestingly, despite the rhetoric re: China challenging U.S. hegemony, it’s European innovation that has drowned in the rising red tide. But that’s another post.
We should celebrate billion-dollar successes, so long as they come at the risk of failure — the whaling captain and the entrepreneur earn their wealth in part thanks to their willingness to come home empty-handed, or not at all. However, there’s a new class of billionaire in America. Meet the MeWork generation, who make their fortunes despite returning to harbor with less than what they embarked with.
To help identify members of the MeWork generation (they can be any age), we’ve devised two metrics: the Daily Benjamin Burn™ (DBB) and the Earn-to-Burn Ratio™ (EBR). The first is how much money an executive lit on fire per day during their tenure. The second is the percentage of…
