KIYOSHI OTA/BLOOMBERG
OCTOBER 2017 FORBES ASIA | 43rent office space,” says Josh Kushner, the founder of the VC firm
Thrive Capital and cofounder of Oscar Health, which launched
its Los Angeles market from a WeWork site. “It’s a one-stop shop.
Business is hard enough, and these guys take out all the friction.”WITH ITS SPRAWLING MANSION, ancient stone walls, fish
ponds and acres of tightly mowed fields, Eridge Estate, a one-hour
train ride south of London, is straight out of Downton Abbey. But
in mid-August, the tidy, aristocratic park—where Henry VIII led
royal deer hunts—looks as if the freewheeling Burning Man tribe
has invaded from across the Atlantic.
More than 1, 200 tents, trailers and tepees have sprouted in the
meadow. There are food trucks and beer trucks and dozens of
bars. On one edge of the field (near the roller disco, rock-climb-
ing wall and a building façade that reads “Mac ’n’ Cheese”) ama-
teur acrobats dangle from a full-size trapeze. On the other side is a
strobing Coachella-worthy stage, where indie band Florence and
the Machine will later play to a crowd of 5 ,000-plus.
Packs of twentysomethings tour the scene in jeans, galoshes
and tight T-shirts printed in half a dozen lan guages: English block
letters, Japanese characters, Hebrew script.
Branded on the back of each shirt is the word
“We” enclosed in a white circle. Welcome to
“WeWork Summer Camp.”
Summer Camp started in 2012 as a gath-
ering of 300 customers and employees in up-
state New York. For this year’s gathering,
WeWork flew in 2 ,000 employees from 15
countries to the English countryside for three
days of dancing, crafts, company presenta-
tions and plenty of booze (some 3 ,000 We-
Work members will join the party halfway
through).
Neumann, who has never met a micro-
phone he doesn’t like, takes the stage a half-
dozen times. Channeling Tony Robbins, he
talks about finding your superpower, ex-
plains that if you have a higher purpose the
money will follow and encourages everyone
to carry the love and vibrations of camp back
to the WeWork offices.
For a cynic, it’s easy to dismiss Summer
Camp as the cash-burning boondoggle of
an overheated startup. To Neumann it’s a
distillation of what WeWork does. “Culture
is our intellectual property,” he says. “Sum-
mer Camp is a way of telling our employees
they are extremely important, even though
sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. And
there’s a team around you here that believes
in the mission.”
Mixed in with executive presentations
and workshops are paddleboarding and
poetry, basketball and basket weaving, a
class on wild foraging and another on howto infuse vodka with almost anything. There is finance team flip
cup, real estate versus legal department kickball, an internation-
al soccer tournament (which the U.K. squad wins), a talent show,
and a music set by TenaciousWe, an employee band.
“Both Adam and Miguel come from community upbring-
ings and understand the power of it,” says Michael Gross, the for-
mer Morgan’s Hotel CEO and current WeWork vice chairman. “It
helped them survive.”NEUMANN AND MCKELVEY grew up on opposite ends of the
world, but their childhoods, critically, were transient and commu-
nal. Neumann was born in Israel to a pair of doctors who divorced
when he was young. He lived in 13 places during his first 22 years,
including two years in Indianapolis and a stint on a kibbutz where
his mother was the doctor. Severely dyslexic, Neumann couldn’t
read or write until third grade but still won entrance into the Is-
raeli Navy’s elite officer program. After serving, he moved to New
York to live with his sister Adi, then a professional model and a
former Miss Teen Israel.
McKelvey, meanwhile, was raised in Eugene, Oregon, in a col-“MASA TURNS TO ME AND ASKS, ‘IN A
FIGHT, WHO WINS—THE SMART GUY OR
THE CRAZY GUY?’” NEUMANN SAYS. “I
SAY, ‘CRAZY GUY,’ AND HE LOOKS AT ME
AND SAYS, ‘YOU ARE CORRECT, BUT YOU
AND MIGUEL ARE NOT CRAZY ENOUGH.’”Masayoshi Son