The excerpt the platform analyzed
“We define "Community Adjusted EBITDA" as net loss excluding interest expense, income taxes, depreciation and amortization, stock-based compensation, and building and community-level operating expenses. We believe this metric provides a useful measure of our operating performance by eliminating the impact of costs that we do not consider indicative of our core operations.”
4 red flags in the document
Each flag below was detectable from the document text alone. No outcome data. No hindsight.
6 biases across the document
Questions the steering committee would ask
Predicted from the document's own signals. In the live product, these are generated from your memo — no two runs produce the same list.
What a bias-adjusted process would have done
Board eliminates super-voting share structure in 2017 before SoftBank investment; independent directors block the Neumann "We" trademark payment; SoftBank caps valuation at $15–20B (real-estate operator multiples); Neumann's related-party real estate holdings divested pre-IPO; Community Adjusted EBITDA not permitted as a headline metric.
WeWork is the canonical "framing effect + founder control + capital abundance" case. Each individual governance failure was addressable. The S-1 rejection by public markets is retrospective proof that public-investor-grade decision intelligence existed — it was just walled off from SoftBank's Vision Fund judgment.
What was visible, and when
Every event below was documentable before the outcome was known. The platform looks for signals like these in live memos.
- 2010-02Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey co-found WeWork in New York.Brown & Farrell, "The Cult of We"
- 2017-08SoftBank leads $4.4B investment at $20B valuation; Son reportedly doubles the round after a 12-minute tour.Brown & Farrell (2021); Bloomberg reporting
- 2019-01SoftBank valuation round of $2B at $47B post-money — peak valuation.WeWork 8-K equivalents and press reporting
- 2019-04Neumann sells ~$700M of his shares through loans and secondary transactions before IPO.WSJ, July 2019
- 2019-08-14The We Company files S-1 for IPO.SEC S-1 filing
- 2019-09-17WeWork postpones IPO amid investor pushback over governance, valuation, related-party transactions.We Company press release
- 2019-09-24Neumann steps down as CEO under SoftBank pressure.We Company 8-K equivalent, September 24 2019
- 2019-10-22SoftBank rescue package values WeWork at $8B — an 83% decline from the $47B January round. Neumann receives ~$1.7B exit package.SoftBank investor presentation, October 2019
- 2021-10-21WeWork goes public via SPAC (BowX Acquisition) at ~$9B valuation.WeWork / BowX merger announcement
- 2023-11-06WeWork files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.D.N.J. Case No. 23-19865
Stakeholders and positions
Who advocated, who dissented, who was overruled, and who stayed silent — the most reliable single signal of decision-process quality.
Other decisions with the same pattern
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