Adam Neumann opens up about his billion-dollar plan to transform apartment living and explains why he wants to buy back WeWork

WeWork Cos. co-founder Adam Neumann Flow; Romain Maurice/Getty Images; BI

• Former WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann started a new company, Flow, to transform apartment living.
• After more than a year of secrecy, Flow launched two apartment buildings in South Florida.
• Neumann addresses whether Flow is a tech company and why he wants to buy WeWork.

In August 2022, former WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann announced he was back, starting a new company called Flow to transform apartment living. Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious venture firms, invested $350 million, its single largest investment ever, which instantly made Flow worth a billion dollars on paper.

Late last year, I was the first reporter to tour Flow’s first residential building in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I spoke with residents and staff, but my many requests to speak on the record with Neumann himself were always rebuffed.

But then on Thursday, Neumann finally agreed to take my call.

He was calling me from the official opening of Flow, which after more than a year and a half of operating in secrecy is now launching two apartment buildings in South Florida and a new website.

Whatever happens with Flow, Neumann will always be remembered for WeWork, which he resigned from in 2019. The launch occurs as Neumann is trying to buy back his bankrupt former company for more than $500 million.

In a print exclusive, we spoke about Neumann’s WeWork bid, how it would fit in with Flow, and what he learned from his time at the company, something that made him one of the most talked-about and controversial CEOs of the last decade. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

I think people are skeptical of how Flow is a tech company. What’s your response?

The official answer would be Flow as an experience first residential real estate company. You are leveraging tech as one of the things that you’re doing to bring people together and encourage community. So for example, you are rebuilding the backend, literally rebuilding the backend systems that run the buildings. You’re building a native app so everything can work perfectly.

But it’s not that we need to define ourself as this kind of company or that kind of company. We love being a real estate company. We’re leveraging tech. We’re also the only real estate company of this manner that I’m aware of that builds its own technology.

You said last year that Flow would either partner or compete with WeWork. Right now, it seems like you would prefer to partner?

In the new hybrid world, working and living are very correlated. So we’re focused on living, but we have a co-working space. I can’t say too much because [WeWork] is in the midst of the bankruptcy right now, but we’re having positive discussions with multiple stakeholders and for now that’s where we’re at. And our partners are very, very large and best in class institutional investors. It’s not just us.

Are you able to share any of the partners?

Because it’s in the midst of the process, I don’t want to create any challenges just because discussions seem to be positive. But what I will tell you is the company is aware of each one of their names.

What’s the likelihood you think you’ll be successful at acquiring WeWork?

I can’t share more, but what I can tell you is the future of living has working integrated into it and this is something we understand a lot. And another thing I’ll say that connects to what you asked before is part of the lessons of what we learned from the past. We obviously learned a lot about, we built a global brand, we helped redefine a category with an amazing group of people that helped lead this thing and everything with around community.

So you take all those thoughts, you bring them back into Flow, you take the lessons learned, you apply them, you bring better partners, you recruit the best talents in the world, you take your time on delivering a great product and it’s really going to be headed in the right direction.

When I visited, I thought Flow seemed better situated for the the future because it’s post-pandemic [with people working at home], whereas WeWork seems pre-pandemic [when people were still going into offices]. So I was a little surprised that you even still needed WeWork?

Work is part of living and I don’t know if we need or don’t need anything, but whatever it is that I’m doing, I’m going to do through Flow and I’ll do whatever is best for Flow.

It’s been more than a year and a half since you announced this company. You’ve been taking your time, as opposed to WeWork where everything moved very fast. Why did you want to move more slowly and behind the scenes this time?

Part of what is nice about doing a venture for the second time

is you get to take the best things you did last time and do them again. But you also get to take lessons and learn. One of [the lessons] is when you have a product you’re really passionate about, it’s a great thing to take your time, and really perfect it.

How have you been spending your time personally with Flow, and how do you see the CEO role differently this time having been through the whole WeWork experience?

As I said before, we’re taking the things that were great, but then we’re also taking lessons. I have a different set of partners. I think Mark [Andreessen] and Ben [Horowitz] are unique investors separate from how great they are as venture capitalists. They’re both entrepreneurs. So I get to sit in the boardroom with both of them and we have real discussions. They helped me personally choose the CTO and the leader in product and they helped us with a lot of the different things we did to make sure we have world-class talent.

What does Flow look like to you in five years?

Flow is multiple things. We’re a vertically integrated company. We build our own technology, we built our own property management from scratch. We own the buildings and on the tech side we build the app, we build a backend, we build a website. And in our new app, our payment system is fully integrated.

There’s a lot of things that are going on, which means Flow in five years has a tremendous amount of potential to go in many different ways. Right now we’re still focusing on learning, testing and seeing what works. Of our current two buildings, the one in Fort Lauderdale is 95% full and the one in Miami is 96% full and there’s a lot more coming soon.

If you enjoyed this story, be sure to follow Business Insider on Microsoft Start.