Was WeWork’s Business a Copy/Paste Job?
Cheni Yerushalmi of Sunshine Suites says Adam Neumann copied his business. Here’s what their story says about the gap between ideas — and execution.
Over the last decade, as Adam Neumann built the co-working startup WeWork into a global office space juggernaut — and, for one heady interval, the most valuable venture-backed entity on the planet — the wispy, longhaired co-founder and CEO has cited a number of inspirations for the company’s enlightened approach to commercial real estate.
In one interview, he credited the idea to the sense of community he experienced at the Kabbalah Centre, a spiritual self-help organization based on Jewish mysticism that has counted celebrities like Madonna and Ashton Kutcher among its devotees. “I wanted to translate that into business,” he told the reporter.
To Charlie Rose, he said he’d been inspired by his upbringing on an Israeli kibbutz, adding that he’d refined the idea years later by making a point of speaking to everyone he met in the elevator in his Manhattan apartment building. “Within a month, the whole energy of the building changed,” he said. “Everyone wanted to be part of it.”
And in an interview with the Young Entrepreneur Council, he said he’d come up with…
