I signed up to the information for the same reason. Plus they actually have their paywall well designed. I get most of my news from them via email and I can read it right in my phone's gmail, versus everything else that has me sign up somewhere and then re-login every time. I wouldn't mind paying if the experience was at least seamless post payment.
The crazy part about this is that in the meeting of setting targets one option that came up was folding the cloud unit entirely. And this was already after billions invested.
I don't really believe that they will leave the cloud wars, but still goes to show you the scale and profitability of their ad business and how central it is that even after billions of invested they can still decide to shutter something.
Doesn't exactly instill confidence in your customers to trust you for the service you provide.
Very true which is why they focused on free cashflow as a measure of profitability which could be immediately realized if they stopped investing their profits in to growth and market domination.
Though, certainly AWS has been a massive benefit for them. Allowing them to truly be disruptive and industry leading while generating massive revenues, growth, and most importantly profitability, however small compared to their overall revenue, to continue to justify their pitch.
The biggest tech challenge they have is figuring out how many conferences rooms to build out per X number of offices.
Not enough, and you have a huge queue to use them, too many and you have lost office space rental.
Outside of that there isn't much tech to go around.
We used them before they were WeWork, when they were still GreenDesk in Dumbo.
Overall it was great, and it's a great product given the flexibility and move in ready amenities that it provides and if you ever step foot inside of Regus you will immediately notice the difference.
Though now there is a lot of competition from smaller companies and of course I'm sure Regus has stepped up their game in response.
Their growth is amazing, but ultimately it's still a real estate holding company. The same is true for E-commerce. Though their volume is immense, they trade no where near their multiples for revenue as other tech companies given the different margins they have, cyclical sales cycles, and many other factors that make that sector much less attractive than a pure software play in the B2B space.
But looks like we will see how this all plays out.
Really the exposure that Softbank has here is the real worrying issue. It's a massive stake, at a massive valuation, and if this IPO doesn't perform well (and most people think it won't), this maybe a real red blot on their performance.
Wow thank you for sharing this, very interesting read and certainly paints an interesting perspective on the market cap value of WeWork.
Though the growth stocks have traditionally been tech with high margins, or massive markets, it's interesting to see with an eventual IPO if WeWork will fit into this narrative, or if investors will see through that.
Just making sure to reply to each person that raised a concern. There is a lot of fraud that comes into every single cloud provider as root access to a virtual server can be used for a lot of malicious activity. As a result every cloud provider has automatic and manual processes that they run to find these accounts and flag them.
In the case of DigitalOcean when an account is flagged it is locked, which simply prevents a user from creating more resources and an email notification goes out to the user to establish a line of communication.
There is no service interruption, and certainly the account, it's droplets, and other resources are not deleted, and never deleted automatically when the account is initially flagged.
There are numerous communications that go out even if a user is unresponsive.
We have an entire fraud and safety team whose sole purpose is to deal with these situations. Every account that is flagged is notified. Every account is communicated with and there are always replies sent. Unless a droplet is actively being malicious, such as sending out a DDoS attack, or performing some other sort of determined malicious activity, there is absolutely no interruption in service. The account is locked so that the account can not create more resources, but there is no disruption to the underlying running resources such as droplets and otherwise. The intent here is to establish a dialogue with the user and determine if the activity is fraudulent or otherwise.
As anyone who runs a service that provides full root access to servers understands there is a tremendous amount of opportunity for potential abuse. It becomes a game of cat and mouse to catch the abusers and prevent them from creating numerous accounts which ultimately impact system performance and can lead to potential problems for real legitimate customers.
Those guidelines aren't published specifically because if they were, then the abusers would immediately begin to route around them, so it's meant to be opaque for a reason, but that is against fraudulent use, not legitimate use.
Depending on which items are flagged the account is put into a locked state, which means that access is limited. However, the droplets for that account and other services are not affected at all.
The account is also notified about the action and a dialogue is opened, to determine what the situation is.
There is no sudden loss of service. There is no loss of service without communication. If after multiple rounds of communication it is determined that the account is fraudulent, even then there is no loss of service that isn't communicated well in advance of the situation.