He is back ! Not Voldemort no, but Adam Neumann, the sulphurous ex-boss of WeWork. 3 years after the setbacks of his former company – especially in coliving – , the founder returns with Flow; a startup specializing in the residential real estate market. Adam Neuman’s new baby would also develop a digital wallet capable of storing cryptocurrency according to Forbes. Only problem: that’s about all we can tell you about Flow. Unless…
A fundraising of 350 million dollars to finance the technology of Flow
As we previously explained, Adam Neumann’s new startup should be able to store cryptocurrency. To achieve this, he raised $350 million from fund Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) – also an investor in Facebook, Pinterest, Airbnb and Lyft – which allowed him to value his young company at $1 billion. The ambitions of this proptech strangely remind us of those of WeWork…but also the reason WeWork went under. Neumann has returned to his first and tumultuous love: developing a tech company.
Responding to the housing crisis in the United States….
The tech…and real estate company wants to solve housing problems in the United States with a residential real estate company. The a16z fund sees this real estate project as “The largest asset class in the world”. To date, the former boss of WeWork has already bought more than 4,000 apartments, for a heritage of more than a billion dollars. However, does this investment, compulsive to say the least, meet a need for home ownership…or something else?
….by (re)creating communities
Option 2 my general! Since we find some basics of WeWork, we thought that the creation of community – so dear to Adamm Neumann – was going to be at the heart of his project. The Andreessen Horowitz fund confirms this: “We think it’s only natural that for his first company since WeWork, Adam returns to the theme of connecting people by transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes”.
Should we see in Flow, the replica of WeLive, WeWork’s former coliving offer ? Everything leads us to believe so. Except that our imagination does not stop there! Let’s first take a few keywords from this startup and put them together: residential real estate (well, gosh!), storage of crypto-currencies, creation of communities, coliving….this gives us a real estate concept of Web3.
In a dedicated and detailed article, Vincent had developed the concepts of tokenization of co-ownerships and communities where each community would hold rights thanks to a token. In order not to confuse you further, it would be best if you made up your own mind by reading How Web3 Will Transform Real Estate. Also remember that this parallel that we draw with Flow and Web3 is only a guess on our part. It’s up to you to give us your opinion, the bets are on!