DECEMBER 201919to pay him a massive sum for the "We" trademark and the costs it bore for buying and maintaining Neumann's luxurious private jet. While the public market had earlier entertained the likes of Uber and Lyft despite their checkered histo-ry of poor profitability and opera-tional losses, the word on the Wall Street was clear with respect to WeWork: investors were simply not going to put up with yet another overpriced IPO that wouldn't bring them returns. WeWork did attempt to woo these investors by cutting down on Neumann's voting rights, and waiv-ing the right of Neumann's wife Rebekah Paltrow to choose a chief for the company in case of her husband's death or grave illness. Moreover, in a show of token in-clusivity, it announced the addition of a woman into its all-male board of directors. Sadly however, these moves failed to make a mark and, things soon went south for the proposed IPO. In fact, even Neumann's decision to step down, and his re-placement by two new co-CEOs proved insufficient to salvage the IPO, and soon enough, the offering itself was pulled from the market. As of now, the firm is reportedly busy chalking out a debt financing package with the likes of Goldman Sachs and plotting a more con-servative comeback in the days to come.WeWork's tryst with the public market leaves us with some crucial takeaways that will possibly char-acterise Wall Street developments in the months and years to follow. What lessons did we really learn from the whole debacle?Venture Capitalists Should Probably Start Tightening Their Purse Strings As multiple commentators have pointed out in the past couple of weeks, the recent years have seen startups raise an obscene amount of money from private equity in-vestors and venture capitalists. Contrary to the earlier trend of businesses eagerly pitching to the VCs, the tables have turned so that it is the men with the money who are chasing these startups these days. While such spirited fund infusions in innovative unicorns might sound great on paper, they also allow these new companies to expand recklessly without pay-ing heed to profitability, which is ideally a key component of the very definition of what constitutes a "business".That is exactly what seems to have happened with the likes of Uber and Lyft earlier (both of which
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