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WeWork CEO: “Demand is higher now than prior to the pandemic.”

Lat year’s COVID-19 pandemic forced closures of office, retail and social spaces across the globe. Marcelo Claure, WeWork Executive Chairman, says that the office spaces of the past have changed forever. Tune in below for more of his thoughts on the future of office spaces and how demand for WeWork space continues to grow.  …

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Lat year’s COVID-19 pandemic forced closures of office, retail and social spaces across the globe. Marcelo Claure, WeWork Executive Chairman, says that the office spaces of the past have changed forever. Tune in below for more of his thoughts on the future of office spaces and how demand for WeWork space continues to grow.

“[COVID] allowed us to reinvent ourself. It allowed us to learn how to operate.” 

Claure: Companies are not looking forward to going back to the traditional way of signing a 20 year lease, setting up this non flexible headquarters, the office is very different today. You know, the biggest or most of our larger customers are the world’s most valuable companies who basically are sending us their employees because they don’t know, you know, how many of these are going to be working because they don’t know where their business is going to grow. And when you’re sitting in the only company in the world that has over 1,000 buildings in pretty much the most important cities around the world, the demand for WeWork space today is higher than it was prior to the pandemic. [COVID] allowed us to reinvent ourself. It allowed us to learn how to operate.

Like I said before, you know, WeWork should be a profitable company by the end of this year or by the beginning of next year. The latest on demand for this type of flexible office space is higher than ever. And I think the world is going to redefine in terms of where flexibility becomes the most important part, that a company that offers employees.

*Bloomberg contributed to this content

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Video TranscriptExpand ↓

Companies are not looking forward to going back to the traditional way of signing a 20 year lease, setting up this not flexible headquarters, that's that the office is very different today. You know, the biggest or most of our larger customers are the world's most valuable companies who basically are sending out their employees because they don't know, you know, how many of these are going to be working because they don't know where their business is going to grow. And when you're sitting in the only company in the world that has over 1,000 buildings in pretty much most important cities around the world, the demand for WeWork space today is higher than it was prior to the pandemic. So what if pandemic allowed? We weren't allowed to reinvent itself. It allowed to learn how to operate. And it was a cost, flexible basis. And now you have if we work. Like I said before, you know, we work should be a profitable company by the end of this year or by the beginning of next year. His latest on demand for this type of flexible office space is higher than ever. And I think the world is going to redefine in terms of where flexibility becomes the most important part, that a company that offers employees. I've got to go, though, with the crypto question, obviously, we work last month announced that it would be accepting payment in the form of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. It also said it would hold some on its balance sheet today. We saw Elon Musk come out and say Tesla would no longer be taking Bitcoin over concerns about the impact it has on the environment. Obviously, the environmental impact of mining Bitcoin has gone up significantly over the past few months. Is that the right move? that something we're likely to see. We will follow? Or is that just the sort of reaction to a short term trend? No, I mean, the reason why we decided to accept cryptocurrency was because our customers were asking for it. We know one of the things that we do with Sandeep is we listen to our customers a lot. We have to write. It tells it that profits, they are looking. They tell us the type of stuff that they want. And the crypto world, quite a lot of our employees say, you know, we would like to pay your group, that we have accumulated a significant amount of wealth in crypto that we would like to use it to pay for rent. That rent becomes an important part of many companies. So we decided to basically give that crypto at the same time, you know, people pay us, encrypt it. To us, it's just another currency. Currencies like we're holding onto it would have us dollars, euros. We've got piles, we got crypto, we've got Japanese yen. We got our song to us. It makes no difference. Then when our customers ask for reimbursement in crypto, we're paying crypto. We have you know, we've had some of our customers who are paying us and cryptocurrency and we have some landlords who said, look, I would like you to pay me cryptocurrency. So, you know, we were looks at it. You know, we are we're going to listen to what our customers want from us. If they demanded that they want it to be encrypted. That's why we took crypto as a form of payment. Do you have a level that you would be comfortable going to in terms of your sort of total money going in and out in the form of krypto? I mean, today, it's a very small part of our business. And I think is the beginning, I think crypto is a megatrend. I think crypto cannot be ignored and, you know, it's going to grow according to whatever our customers want. If our customers want it being crypto more, you know, we're going to accept crypto to have customers want to pay on traditional currency. We're going to accept form of payment as a traditional currency. So to us, this was nothing more than a move to basically help our customers satisfy some of their needs that our customers were ousted from, obviously, our first customer and the large one was Coinbase. Not a lot of people know about, you know, the headquarters of most of the real estate at Coinbase users is we work and been them the largest exchange of cryptocurrency they had. They were the first customer to person cryptocurrency.

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