WeWork’s Growth Outran Its Founder—and Its Operating Systems

Adam Neumann explains WeWork’s collapse as a mismatch between the company’s growth and his own development. “The business grew faster than I could grow,” he says. As the company’s scale and valuation rose, he lost sight of the purpose that had animated its growth. “I forgot what we were all about,” he says, adding that when he lost that focus, “everybody lost it.”

Neumann says WeWork began with a mission to “create a world where people make a life and not just a living.” Its ambition, as he describes it, was to build a community around people’s lives, not merely to provide desks. But in 2016, after SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son offered $4.2 billion for WeWork and several international businesses, Neumann says he began calculating what the company’s valuations might mean for him personally. The change in his attention, he says, started on the walk back to headquarters.

He uses “ego” and “desire” almost interchangeably. A large ambition requires desire, he argues; the danger comes when a founder stops managing that desire and becomes blinded by it. Neumann says that as he walked, he began thinking about WeWork’s possible valuations in Japan, Southeast Asia and China, and about his own stake in the company. By the time he arrived, he says, he had forgotten what the company was for.

Neumann describes the shift as the beginning of a slide that took years to play out. In a high-growth company, he says, a founder may make a hundred decisions a day, and most of them need to be right. If the founder’s judgment weakens, mistakes can accumulate quickly because the company is expanding quickly. In his account, WeWork’s top-down culture carried his loss of direction through the organization.

The warning he draws is not simply to grow slowly. It is that growth can outrun a founder’s ability to handle what it brings. When Bartlett asks what might go wrong for someone offered rapid expansion, Neumann says that if the business grows faster than its founder can handle, something will crack. By “handling,” he means more than operating capacity: ego, money and relationships are also part of the burden. A founder, he says, should understand what the growth requires and whether it is right for both the company and the person leading it.

That warning sits alongside another part of his account: WeWork’s early growth depended on moving quickly. Neumann says the company opened one building in its first year; by its ninth year, it was opening two buildings a day across 130 cities, 50 countries and 70 languages. Many of the same people who participated in the early work later led parts of that expansion. For Neumann, speed was not inherently the mistake. The company’s people, systems and leadership had to develop as it grew.

He says that development can be practical as well as personal. Early employees learned to do more than they had done before, he says, while the company needed systems and processes to support the expansion. Technology, including AI, might help accelerate some of that work. But operational tools alone cannot make a founder ready for a larger company. Neumann says the founder has to grow alongside it.

Neumann traces WeWork’s idea to Green Desk, an earlier business he started with architect Miguel McKelvey. The story begins with a landlord who told Neumann that his baby-clothing company was not doing well. Neumann replied that the landlord’s real estate was not doing well either: much of it was empty. They traded complaints for several months, he says, until the landlord asked what Neumann would do with one of his buildings.

Neumann proposed dividing a large floor into smaller workspaces and renting them separately. A receptionist would serve the tenants in common; the landlord would receive more rent than he was getting from an empty floor, while Neumann and McKelvey would share the remaining proceeds. The landlord agreed not just to one floor but to an entire five-floor building. They advertised on Craigslist, Neumann says, and Green Desk was 92 percent full within a week. It was cash-flow positive within a month.

After six to twelve months, Neumann and McKelvey began discussing taking Green Desk national. Their landlord did not want to finance the expansion, Neumann says, and later offered to buy the company. The business sold for $1.5 million, divided among three partners. Neumann says the buyer paid $300,000 upfront, with the rest paid in installments over four years. He told McKelvey to keep his share because Neumann expected to waste the money and wanted it preserved for their next business.

That $300,000 became part of the story of WeWork’s first building. Neumann says the landlord required a check for exactly $300,000, and that the money was sitting in McKelvey’s account. He and McKelvey had held it for their next venture. WeWork began in February 2010.

The idea they were carrying forward is visible in the hand-drawn diagram shown during the interview, titled “Office Space vs. Ecosystem.” A person sits at its center, surrounded by circles labeled with parts of daily life: work, health, travel, social life, friends, living, life essentials and day-to-day services. Neumann says the concept included WeWork, WeLive, WeGive and WeShare. It was about creating a world where people could make a life rather than just a living, he says.

Neumann says McKelvey drew the diagram on a glass wall at Green Desk, before WeWork had a desk. The office is one element in the circle, not the whole circle. In Neumann’s telling, the aspiration was always a community and a fuller way of life. He connects the sketch to Flow, his later residential real-estate company, saying the ideas share an interest in working, living and the other elements that make up everyday life.

But a broad mission does not settle what a company should build first. Looking back at the diagram, Neumann says that if he were starting again, he would focus on the person at its center and add only the things that supported the mission. He does not present the image as proof that every possible extension belonged in the business at once. It is a reminder, he says, to test each offering against the purpose it is meant to serve.

His practical advice follows from that tension: dream as far as possible, then return to the immediate work. “If you don’t shoot for the stars, you’re never gonna get to the moon,” he says, but a founder must also be willing to knock on doors, meet people and do whatever work is necessary to get started. Vision and execution are not alternatives; entrepreneurship requires moving between them.

Green Desk’s basic economics made the idea concrete. The landlord had an empty floor that brought in $5,000 a month, Neumann recalls. Neumann proposed dividing it into 15 smaller units and charging $1,000 for each. A shared receptionist would cost $2,500, leaving enough to pay the landlord more than he was getting from the vacant floor while leaving a margin for the business. The landlord agreed to give them the whole building, which made it possible to share the receptionist and other costs across five floors. It was a proposal built around a vacant building, not an abstract plan for a global company.

Neumann resists the suggestion that the broader WeWork concept emerged only after investment arrived. The ecosystem drawing was already there, he says. But its existence does not mean every possible extension belonged in the business at every moment. His later reflection is that he would have made the person at the center—not the number of possible offerings—the test of what to build.

Neumann’s account of WeWork’s economics turns on the difference between how a building performed and how a city or company appeared in consolidated results. He says the business model worked well “inside the four walls.” But each new building required an initial period of investment before it filled. A location that had been open longer could be doing well while one opened more recently was still ramping up.

He compares this to a retailer whose stores can perform well individually while the wider business is not yet profitable. A new restaurant or retail location might take two or three years to ramp up, he says. At WeWork’s peak, he says, the return on investment for a building could come in six to nine months. Later, it extended to twelve or eighteen months.

That timing matters when a company keeps adding locations. If a city already has 30 buildings and adds another 30 the next year, the new buildings will be in their early, money-losing phase even if the older buildings are profitable. The combined results for the city—or the results for a country—can therefore conceal differences between established locations and newer ones. The same issue applies inside a building: an earlier-opened floor may be profitable while a floor opened later is still filling.

Neumann says WeWork’s technology could not measure its operations at that level of detail. The systems could not reliably show which building, floor or area was profitable, he says. He contrasts that with Flow’s technology, which he says can identify performance down to an individual corner. His point is that a high-growth business needs detailed operating information. Without it, the performance of older locations and newer ones gets blurred together.

This is the context Neumann gives for a plan discussed at a WeWork board meeting in 2016: raise $300 million to $400 million, stop signing leases at the same pace, let existing buildings fill, and prepare for a public offering. If the company stopped adding supply while demand remained greater than available space, he says, the existing locations could fill and the business could become cash-flow positive. In his account, the problem was not a lack of demand. It was the pace at which WeWork added supply and whether the company could see clearly what its locations were earning.

Neumann says WeWork’s revenue roughly doubled each year and that the company met its revenue targets. But revenue growth did not mean every part of the company was ready for a public offering. New buildings carried ramp-up costs; established ones were at a different stage; and the company’s technology, in his telling, could not show those differences with enough precision. The company could be growing and still have difficulty explaining the economics of that growth.

He illustrates the operational side of WeWork’s early expansion with the flooring for its second building. The company had about $90,000 available, he says, while the quotes for a floor exceeded that amount. He asked contractors to break down their prices: how many floorboards, nails, pieces of glue and rubber; how many labor hours; and what each worker cost. No one could answer those questions, he says. He then told three contractors he wanted them to earn 15 percent above cost and that he would check the price of each component himself.

Neumann says the cost of one floor fell from a quoted range of $30,000 to $45,000 to $12,000. One contractor told him that no one had worked with him that way before. The contractors later joined WeWork’s internal construction operation, he says, because the company needed control over construction to get the right price and move quickly enough.

His point is not simply that a founder should negotiate harder. He says that asking what sits behind a quote can reveal whether an assumed constraint is real. He tells Bartlett that if he is going to pay 20 percent more than necessary, that is 20 percent less available for another building or community. He also says he begins by telling suppliers he wants them to make money. The question is whether the price and process make sense for both sides and for the company’s mission.

Bartlett offers a parallel example from his own company. A video animator had told him that a 30-minute animation took nine days. When Bartlett asked what it would take to complete it in two, the employee said he needed a new laptop. Bartlett says the employee had worked for him for four years without mentioning the problem. Neumann draws attention to both sides of the exchange: a manager may not ask the question, and an employee may not realize that a perceived barrier can be raised.

Neumann says that a person who is comfortable examining their own weaknesses and asking why is more likely to ask others why. He is not arguing that every answer is wrong or every constraint can be negotiated away. In the flooring example, he says, he might not have been able to get a better price if he had broken the quote down. The useful step was to investigate rather than assume the first estimates were fixed.

He connects that habit to WeWork’s ability to scale. The company’s first year saw one building open, he says; in its ninth year it was opening two buildings a day. Many of the same people who had helped open the first building later participated in the expansion. As people learned to challenge assumed limits, Neumann says, they became capable of doing more. Systems and processes still had to be put in place, and he sees technology as one way to accelerate that work. But the founder also has to grow.

Neumann says he met Son in 2016, the day after a WeWork board meeting. The company had recently been valued at $16 billion, he recalls, and was approaching $950 million in revenue for the year. The board had been discussing a raise of $300 million to $400 million, a slower pace of new leases and a possible move toward a public offering. Neumann describes that as the plan before Son arrived.

The meeting kept shrinking. Neumann says Son’s team initially arranged 90 minutes, then reduced the time to 75 minutes, 60 minutes and half an hour. Eventually, Son had only 12 minutes because he was due to meet President-elect Donald Trump. Neumann says he asked Son whether he had Jared Kushner to introduce him, then texted Kushner, a friend, to arrange it.

With little time left, Son looked around the WeWork lobby and called it a “factory of dreams.” Neumann says the phrase captured something about the company’s atmosphere. He recalls people working together in a way that felt connected and purposeful, rather than like a conventional office. Son asked him to continue their conversation in the car.

Neumann says he remembered being told there would be no discussion of investing. In the car, Son asked how much the company was raising. Neumann gave the figure of $300 million to $400 million. Son said it would not be enough to build a global business, Neumann recalls, and asked about the company’s prospects in Japan and Southeast Asia as well as its existing operations in China.

The offer grew to $4.2 billion for WeWork and its businesses in China, Japan and Southeast Asia. Neumann had gone into the meeting expecting no financing discussion and had been preparing for a much smaller raise. He says the scale changed in a short conversation about what a global business might require. He does not blame Son for proposing the investment: “Every decision I made was my decision.”

That distinction matters to Neumann’s account. Son had large ambitions and Neumann did too. The company had grown each time capital went into it, he says, and it needed money to build more spaces. Neumann describes WeWork as working well inside its buildings, with the key constraint being supply. Son saw an opportunity to expand, and Neumann says he was drawn to it.

But Neumann also says he should have paused before accepting the change in scale and asked what the investment would do to the business and his own priorities. On the walk back to headquarters, he began calculating possible valuations. A portion of the investment was for existing shareholders, including him; he says he owned about a quarter of the company at the time. He imagined what the company’s different businesses might be worth and what that might mean for his personal wealth.

He describes the shift as a movement from a mission-driven founder to a founder focused on money. It was not, in his telling, a change Son imposed. It was the effect of the offer on his attention. As he walked back, Neumann says, his sense of power grew alongside the numbers in his head. By the time he reached the office, he had lost sight of the mission.

Neumann says Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s founder, heard about the offer and advised him to fly to Japan and say no. Neumann recalls Benioff recommending that he take WeWork public at a $5 billion valuation, sell 20 percent for $1 billion, and learn how to operate as a public-company CEO. Benioff said, in Neumann’s recollection, that the company could grow in value after Neumann learned about profitability and the demands of being public. Neumann says he did not follow the advice. He and Benioff had not known each other long enough for him to trust the counter-advice, he says, and he was not then equipped to step back from the offer.

Neumann’s retrospective question is not whether every large investment should be refused. It is whether the founder has asked what the money is for, what commitments it will bring, and whether those commitments serve the original purpose. The larger offer expanded what the company could attempt. Neumann says it also changed what he was thinking about, and that he did not sufficiently account for that change.

Neumann says focus is not his natural strength. He describes himself as good at moving ideas from zero to one, but says ideas he has can quickly become real projects. Ben Horowitz, he recalls, once contrasted Neumann with a founder who might bring nine ideas to a board meeting and implement one. Neumann might bring nine ideas and have nine new businesses by the next meeting.

He describes himself as a creator rather than a protector. Rebekah’s grandfather, he says, used to say, “It takes one lion to make a fortune and 10 lions to watch it.” Neumann says he needs people around him who can tell him that a good idea can wait three, six or nine months. He may be able to handle three to five priorities, he says, but ten to fifteen would be too many. The practical answer, for him, is to build a team that can compensate for his weaknesses.

Neumann’s account of WeWork’s later financing centers on a proposed SoftBank buyout. He places the offer in March 2018, after SoftBank’s investment had come into the company. Son proposed buying WeWork for $20 billion in cash, Neumann says: $10 billion for existing investors and $10 billion to put on the company’s balance sheet. Neumann and the management team would remain involved, with their ownership initially reduced to 30 percent and the possibility of reaching 51 percent if they met agreed goals.

Neumann describes the proposed transaction as a way to give existing investors an exit while leaving WeWork with money to keep building. SoftBank would own 70 percent, he says, and the company would have $10 billion available to fund its plans. Neumann took the offer to the board. Because he expected to stay in the company, he says, a special committee was set up to negotiate, and he did not participate in its discussions.

Neumann says the committee spent months trying to raise the price, negotiating from March until October. The deal was not completed. By the time the paperwork was ready in December, he says, SoftBank’s position had changed. On December 24, Son told him he could no longer go through with the purchase. Neumann says SoftBank’s stock had fallen and circumstances had shifted.

Neumann criticizes the committee’s handling of the offer, but his account of the directors’ motives is his own. He believes they should have accepted the offer or asked him what he wanted rather than negotiating for a higher price. He says they thought they could move Son from $20 billion to $30 billion, and characterizes their approach as greed. He was not part of the special committee’s negotiations, according to his account. His central claim is that an offer he expected to fund WeWork’s next phase remained unresolved while the company continued making commitments to grow.

Neumann says SoftBank provided another $2 billion in January 2019, but he attributes that money to the earlier failed buyout rather than to the company’s IPO filing. He says WeWork had continued expanding and committing to new leases in anticipation of growth. After the buyout fell through, he says, the company found itself pushed toward going public before it was ready.

When Bartlett asks why it was not ready, Neumann points to both the company’s systems and his own readiness. WeWork’s technology could not show location-level economics as precisely as he thought necessary. Its systems were also not prepared for the requirements of a public company, he says. He adds that people around him urged an IPO, even though he says he tried to push against going public. “I, Adam wasn’t ready,” he says.

The distinction between operational readiness and the founder’s readiness is central to his account. WeWork’s systems were not equipped to provide a sufficiently detailed view of performance, but Neumann also says that a founder’s inability to handle the next stage makes the business unready. The proposed buyout did not close; WeWork continued to add commitments; and the operating systems and leadership were not ready for the public scrutiny that followed.

The S-1 document shown during the interview is part of the story Bartlett uses to introduce that scrutiny. Bartlett describes WeWork as valued at about $47 billion when it publicly filed in 2019, and says the filing showed nearly $3 billion in losses over three years, including about $690 million in the first half of 2019. The figures bring the conflict into view: WeWork had been growing quickly and meeting revenue targets, but the public filing made its losses visible.

Bartlett also raises the claim that Neumann trademarked the word “We” and sold it back to the company. Neumann rejects it: “That’s not true.” He says there is a story behind the issue but that the allegation does not describe what happened. He does not offer the fuller account in this exchange. He says he is less concerned with what the press says than with what kind of person he knows himself to be.

Neumann also rejects the description of his departure as being fired. He says he still controlled the board and the votes and chose to step down. In his account, that decision came after pressure from investors and a meeting with the head of one of the two largest banks in the world. Neumann says the banker told him that if he left the CEO role and became executive chairman, the bank would provide $2 billion to give WeWork time to move toward profitability.

Neumann says he had $460 million in personal debt to that bank and two others, and that he asked what would happen to it. He recalls being told not to worry and that the debt would be worked out. He also says an adviser later told the board that he had spoken to the bank and that everything would be fine. Neumann says he stepped down believing the arrangement would support the company, its employees and investors, and allow him to remain as executive chairman.

Ten minutes later, he says, a legal letter arrived. It said that because of a change of control and a breach of contract, he had 15 days to repay the debt or the bank would take his shares. He says the change-of-control issue had been discussed but was not in writing. His shares carried five-to-one voting rights, he says, so taking them would transfer control of the company. He later describes the demand as roughly $450 million, with interest compounding daily.

Neumann calls what happened a betrayal. His phrase, “If you’re gonna stab the king, kill,” expresses his anger at the sequence as he recounts it: he says he stepped down believing the company would receive funding, then learned that his debt was due and his shares were at risk. He says Son paid the debt and took control of the company. Neumann places the episode within what he describes as an older venture-capital playbook of forcing founders out, while saying newer venture investors operate differently.

Neumann says he chose to leave the CEO role because he thought it would help the company and its stakeholders, even though investors were pushing him to do so. The surprise, in his telling, came after the decision, when the bank’s letter arrived.

Neumann says he went from 13,000 employees to three people in a week. He describes the three people who stayed with him as partners in his family office, not employees, and says he had not known them well. Many friends who had been present during the company’s rise were not there when it was in trouble, he says. The contrast changed how he thinks about friendship: it can be hard to know who is a friend until a person needs help.

The same test, in Neumann’s account, applied to his marriage. A few days after the bank demanded repayment, he says, he woke in the night beside Rebekah, crying. He told her they had lost everything. She asked whether he had put money in her name, as they had discussed. He had not. She asked whether he had signed a personal guarantee. He had, despite their agreement that he would not.

Neumann says Rebekah did not respond by blaming him or leaving. She told him her mother owned a house in upstate New York and that they could stay there while he decided whether to return to business. If he did not want to, she said, they could move to Costa Rica, she could homeschool the children, and they could surf. Neumann says that response helped him realize he had a foundation even after losing the wealth and security he thought he had.

For a moment, he says, he felt like the child who had no one to rely on. But he was no longer that child: he had a wife and children who had his back even though he had made serious mistakes. Rebekah then told him she found him more attractive when he was broke, he says. That made him smile. When he later went to see the three people in his family office, his belief that the crisis would work out was grounded not only in his spiritual teacher’s advice but also in his knowledge that he could rely on his family.

He turns the experience into advice about choosing a partner. A life partner, friend or business partner should be judged by how they treat you on your worst day, he says, not only when you are successful. He also says that a life partner should help make you a better version of yourself: “the one that you need, not the one that you think you want.”

A later dispute over SoftBank’s settlement tested Rebekah’s judgment in another way. Neumann says SoftBank had agreed to pay $3 billion in cash to him and other investors. On March 31, 2020, he says, SoftBank sent a letter invoking force majeure after the pandemic began. The dispute later settled for $1.5 billion, he says. Neumann and his lawyer were preparing to accept terms that would delay payment again.

Rebekah objected. Neumann says she asked why they would agree to another delay after SoftBank had already failed to pay the original settlement. The money was not just for Neumann, he says; it also included payments to employees and investors. Rebekah wanted SoftBank to pay before she gave birth, or for the parties to go to court. Neumann says his lawyer was uncertain what would happen if they rejected the proposed terms, but he decided to follow her advice.

According to Neumann, SoftBank reacted angrily and threatened further legal action. Two hours later, SoftBank executive Marcelo Claure called and asked Neumann to bring Rebekah onto the call. Neumann says Claure told them the money would be in the bank before the birth. The funds arrived at 4:30 a.m.; later that morning, Rebekah gave birth. Neumann presents the episode as an example of her willingness to speak plainly and hold her position when he was prepared to accept less certain terms.

Neumann says loyalty can be a weakness for him. If someone stood by him when things were difficult, he may remain loyal even when he should not. But he treats the support of those who did stay as a foundation for starting again. The people who matter in a crisis are not only the ones who celebrate a company’s success. They are also the people willing to tell the truth and remain present when the outcome is uncertain.

Neumann connects his capacity to endure setbacks with the childhood he describes as unstable and painful. His parents were doctors, he says, and they divorced when he was in second grade. He moved to the United States with his mother and sister. He says that after the move, he experienced his mother’s bipolar moods when the three of them were largely on their own. His mother worked with patients during the day and came home at night, he recalls, and evenings could end in anger and distress.

One recurring memory involved the dishes. Neumann says that when he and his sister did not wash them, their mother would throw the dishes on the floor, then cry and clean them up. The pattern continued for about two years, he says. One night, they noticed she was throwing only the inexpensive dishes, not the ones she liked. In hindsight, he says, that gave them a hint that the situation might not be as uncontrollable as it felt.

He also describes a moment when he was 12 and his mother threatened suicide during an argument. Neumann says she held a large knife, and he tried to take it from her while his sister cried nearby. He remembers feeling that it was up to him to stop her. Separately, he says that between second and fourth grade he was sexually molested by someone at least six or seven years older. He says he did not understand at the time that what was happening was wrong; years later, Rebekah helped him understand it differently.

Neumann says he went to sleep crying most nights until he was 14 or 15. His sister later told him that he used to say he would become successful and take care of them, though he says he did not remember saying it. He interprets that promise as an attempt to control and repair the difficulties he had lived through. At 16 he wanted to be a millionaire; by 21, he says, he wanted to be a billionaire. He thought money would fill the hole he felt from childhood.

Meeting Rebekah changed the question he was asking. After a week of dating, he says, she told him that he was not the person she wanted because he was focused on material things and did not understand what made life fulfilling. She urged him to develop a spiritual practice. Neumann says he began studying Kabbalah and learned to think about the relationship between what is “meant to be” and what remains a matter of choice.

He explains the idea through a person who chooses a path that ends badly. The person can stop, learn, take responsibility and return to life stronger, he says; in that sense, what happened can become meaningful after the fact. He compares this to a sword being forged through heat and repeated blows. The framework does not mean that a painful event was good when it happened. It means a person can decide what to do with what happened and may turn a catastrophe into a source of learning.

Neumann says the adult collapse felt less frightening than the challenges he remembered from childhood. “When the world did crash on me as an adult, it was nothing compared to what I had to deal with as a child,” he says. A few days into the WeWork crisis, his spiritual teacher, Eitan, called and reminded him of two ideas they had studied: “love thy neighbor as yourself,” and that “the darkest moment of the night is the second before dawn.”

Neumann interprets loving others as beginning with the ability to acknowledge one’s own strengths, weaknesses, failures and mistakes, then forgive oneself. Without forgiveness, he says, people carry guilt rather than treating mistakes as lessons. The reminder about darkness before dawn became a way to think about whether belief persists when things are going badly, rather than only when others are praising a founder.

The morning after the call with Eitan, Neumann says, he went to meet the three people in his family office. They were worried about the company’s position. They asked why he was smiling, he recalls. He told them that belief is measured when things are difficult, not when they are going well, and that he believed they would learn from the crisis. He says they began coming out of it about ten days later.

Neumann’s argument is not that failure automatically produces a good outcome. His emphasis is on what a person does after falling. People may feel exposed when others have seen them fail, he says, but hiding from the experience can make a fall more damaging. A person can instead look at what happened, learn from it and try again. Practicing how to get up, he argues, can make someone more capable of facing setbacks.

That view informs his definition of success. He asks people to imagine being at the end of life, with no time left, and to consider what would remain: the love around them and the love they had cultivated. A person who measures success by money and a person who measures it by fulfillment may be pursuing different goals, he says. His own measure is whether life feels full and surrounded by love in its final moments, rather than dominated by regret.

Neumann says that one leadership change he has been making is moving from leading top-down to leading bottom-up. He used to assume that because someone reported to him, that person should do what he said. He now argues that a company is not a dictatorship and that talented employees can choose to work elsewhere. The more talented they are, he says, the less likely they are to accept being managed simply by authority.

In his account, strong employees want to be inspired, to be understood as more capable than they may yet see themselves, and to have room to make mistakes and grow. They also need feedback. If a manager sees an employee making a mistake but avoids saying so for 90 days, Neumann says, frustration can build until the eventual conversation comes too late to help. Respect means giving feedback close to the moment it matters and leaving room for the employee to respond with feedback of their own.

Neumann says influence has to be earned. If an employee agrees only because the other person is the boss, he argues, the manager will not get the best work from them. He also says that when he has a problem with an employee, he begins by asking what he did as a leader. Responsibility for a team does not mean giving up authority; it means recognizing that a title alone cannot create commitment.

He applies a similar principle to investors and other partners. When Neumann and his Flow partners Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz finish a board meeting, he says, he asks them what he could do better. The first time he asked, they were uncomfortable; later, they came prepared with feedback. Neumann sees the exchange as part of a genuine partnership, in which people around a founder are expected to say what they think rather than simply affirming the founder’s plans.

He says founders should study an investor’s history: whether the investor supports entrepreneurs like them, or has a history of clashing with founders. Choosing the right investors, employees and partners is among the most important decisions a founder makes, Neumann says. The right people can complement a founder’s weaknesses; the wrong ones may reinforce decisions that should have been questioned.

For Neumann, self-knowledge and partner choice are connected. He says he did not build strong technology at WeWork. When starting Flow, he wanted people with the right expertise and says he allowed them to lead in their fields. When hiring a chief technology officer, he had four candidates and let Horowitz conduct the final interview. The example addresses a problem founders can face when they do not know enough about a field to assess a candidate’s technical claims themselves: Neumann says he relied on a trusted partner to help make the judgment.

He also argues that a founder’s personal development is part of the work. Hard work, he says, is not measured only by hours in the office. It includes time spent becoming a better leader or fundraiser, and, for someone with a family, work on a marriage and relationships with children. He says the decision to start Flow was difficult because he knew that being partly committed would not work. But he does not equate commitment with filling every hour. He invokes Warren Buffett’s open calendar as an example of leaving room for reading, connection and important meetings while remaining committed.

Neumann cautions founders against running multiple companies simply because they can. Building one business is difficult enough, he says, and only a few people he knows can successfully run two. When he has met people managing more than one, he says, he has sometimes wondered whether the additional work is taking the place of attention to personal growth or life outside business. He offers that as a question to examine, not as a rule that no founder can build more than one company.

He also recommends having people around a founder who can say no. Neumann says he can move several ideas forward, but that beyond a certain number he risks losing focus. He needs trusted people who can tell him that a promising idea can wait. That advice is not an argument against ambition; it is a way to keep a creator’s capacity from turning every possibility into a simultaneous priority.

Neumann recommends taking 24 hours away from electronic devices once a week, a practice he calls a “technology Shabbat.” He says he began keeping Shabbat about ten years ago, disconnecting from technology for about 25 hours and spending the time with family and friends. The practice need not be religious, he says: people can choose a day that works for them, put the phone somewhere they will not touch it and plan activities in advance.

He predicts that the first hours will reveal how often a person reaches for a phone automatically. If it is difficult to leave the device alone, he suggests giving it to a friend. He recommends planning a meal with friends or time outdoors rather than leaving the day unstructured. In his experience, the final hours can feel especially good, but returning to the phone can quickly bring back the old sense of distraction. He also says that some of his best ideas have come during the break, including thoughts about whom to spend time with and what business to focus on.

Bartlett says he understands the idea but finds the prospect uncomfortable. Neumann challenges his first explanation—that he does not see the benefit—and suggests discomfort may be the more honest reason for avoiding it. The exchange becomes a discussion about trying a practice rather than deciding its value from a distance. Neumann compares it to fasting: the body may not want to go without food or water, he says, but a person who has tried fasting may recognize its benefits.

Neumann urges Bartlett to consider the more uncomfortable path when he faces a choice. He calls it the path of greatest resistance, and says it can take less time and have more value in the end. He does not present discomfort as proof that a choice is right. His point is that avoiding discomfort can keep a person from discovering what a practice might offer.

Bartlett agrees to try 25 hours without a phone, computer, watch or other screens. They clarify that ordinary activities and work on a whiteboard are allowed. Neumann says that can be a first step; a later version might also take business out of the day, to make more room for connection. The exchange turns the recommendation into a specific commitment rather than leaving it as general advice.

Meditation is another practice Neumann says he has been developing. He says it helps quiet noise and that thoughts arising during meditation have tended to take him in a healthy direction. He connects these practices to the broader need to make space for self-examination. A founder needs to be able to see their weaknesses and change, he says, and that work can be difficult.

When Bartlett asks how personal growth might make him more successful in business, Neumann pushes back on business as the only measure. Success should include relationships, friendships and a person’s effect on the world, as well as business, he says. Rather than trying to change three things at once, he advises choosing one. Once that has changed, another layer will become visible.

The pause, in Neumann’s account, is not a retreat from ambition. It is a way to notice whether the ambition still belongs to the person pursuing it. Before taking money, accepting partners or accelerating growth, he says, founders should understand what they want and why.