Was WeWork Ever Going to Work?
This isn&#x27;t the best article, but there&#x27;s a point that I think is useful:<p>&gt; What the ordinary person might interpret as a con game or sheer lunacy, the heavily credentialed investor, with his TED Talk understanding of things, will reliably regard as brilliant eccentricity.<p>When people hear about typical con games, like the Pigeon Drop [1], their reaction is often, &quot;Thank goodness I&#x27;m so smart I&#x27;ll never fall for a con!&quot; But that&#x27;s incorrect. Maybe I wouldn&#x27;t fall for that con, but that just means the con wasn&#x27;t for me.<p>Things like Theranos and WeWork fooled people who were plenty smart. But they are, like everybody, trying to model the world using 3 pounds of meat. It&#x27;s not enough. We take shortcuts. And all of those shortcuts have flaws.<p>One of our industry&#x27;s collective flaws is a belief in the genius, that revolutionary smart guy who&#x27;s just so smartily smart that they see things the ordinaries don&#x27;t, and will therefore be very successful. But that leaves us vulnerable to people who perform the tropes of genius. Hands up everybody who&#x27;s had to work with an &quot;architect&quot; like that.<p>Another is of course the genius entrepreneur, who has a grand vision to transform the world. As we can see, investors just love that. They&#x27;ve been trained to love it by all the &quot;genius entrepreneur&quot; stories that are generated by finding somebody successful and then filling in the narrative mad-lib with events from their lives. And of course, finding that &quot;genius&quot; entrepreneur lets investors see themselves as geniuses of a different kind. It lets investors justify their belief they deserve to be super rich.<p>Let&#x27;s hope things like Uber and Theranos and WeWork put enough holes in that myth that we&#x27;ll stop being vulnerable to people who put on the genius outfit and do the genius performance. Because personally, I&#x27;ve been tired of it for years.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc7news.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;vallejo-man-loses-$10000-in-pigeon-drop-scam&#x2F;801976&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc7news.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;vallejo-man-loses-$10000-in-pigeon...</a>