For some reason the investing public seems to be giving the WeWork IPO a suboptimal reception. After multiple reductions in the IPO sticker price, from 40B down to 20B and now perhaps even less, the lead investor Softbank is recommending that the IPO be shelved. For some reason when the CEO cashes out 700 million ahead of the IPO in a company whose losses exceed total revenues people aren’t overly eager to put in more money....

The WSJ today reported on how WeWork co-founder and CEO Andrew Neumann has extracted $700,000,000 in share sales and loans from his money-losing, pre-IPO unicorn. So far Neumann has purchased 4 homes around New York, funded an elementary school his kid goes to, and paid $14,000,000 for a 13,000 squarre foot crib in the Bay area that has a guitar-shaped romper room. He also buys properties and leases them back to WeWork. All very confidence instilling for...

On demand food delivery start-up Munchery is bankrupt and shutting down effective immediately. They’ve burned through $125 million in VC, their last round was $87 million in 2015 at a $300 million valuation. Apparently the early effects of this are bare shelves in Amazon’s Go Stores. It’s like a Lehman Brothers moment which could cascade throughout the entire dime-a-dozen mobile food-on-demand-delivery service start-up sector. Read more.

The inaugural post of this blog was a review of Dan Lyon’s “Disrupted”, which put a point to the unicorn economy, where money losing companies crowd out real businesses by sucking up all the oxygen in the space. That bubble hasn’t popped …yet, although it may this year. In the meantime, here is another personal account of life within some VC-darling branding darling, this time up here in Canada. Read it here…

“Social Capital arrived in Silicon Valley seven years ago with a charismatic co-founder, former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya who also owns a piece of the Golden State Warriors. It raised more than $1 billion and made early bets on companies like Slack.” …and then it all went to shit. This Axios article tracks the implosion. (Sometimes I think by building a real company that actually has a real service and a customer base for 20...