Adam Neumann grew up in a communal home in Israel and moved locations regularly. He was a member of the Israeli naval military and moved to USA in 2001 to stay at his sister’s apartment. He found it strange that people in their building hardly interacted with each other and sought to bring about a change, giving birth to Concept Living—a communal approach to real estate. He pursued this business plan at his university, Baruch College. However things didn’t work out as Neumann would have liked and he couldn’t make it through to the second round. He wasn’t even given an opportunity to present his ideas verbally.
After initial failures, Adam got fixated on real estate. With the steady support of Miguel McKelvey and Gil Haklay, he found a warehouse in Brooklyn and convinced the landlord, Joshua Guttman, to provide them work space for a venture called Greendesk. This venture was conceptualised as an environmentally themed co-working space for startup firms. The economy of USA was facing its darkest days in 2008, but Neumann’s business plan was not merely about real estate as it entailed a model that sought to fill the void of the collapse. He knew that companies would be looking to cut costs on rentals and his idea had the potential to meet the needs of small and medium-sized teams. Neumann and McKelvey received impressive returns and decided to expand their work beyond Greendesk. They sold their stake to Guttman and found a new location in SoHo for WeWork, a venture they believed would grow by leaps and bounds. Along with his wife and founding partner, Rebekah Paltrow Neumann, he brought enormous success to the concept of a rental office space and subleased it at substantial profit margins.