Startup myth meets business reality.
WeCrashed is a business story about how WeWork turned shared desks into a spiritualized startup movement. It follows Adam Neumann’s grand promises, the company’s frantic early buildout, and the gap between world-changing rhetoric and financial reality.
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WeCrashed is a brisk, reported business narrative about WeWork, the coworking company that sold office space as if it were a social revolution. At the center is Adam Neumann, a charismatic founder whose early ambition was already oversized. A 1 a.m. email promised the largest networking community on the planet. The show keeps returning to that gap between plain business mechanics and grand spiritual language. WeWork had desks, leases, construction dust, tenants, and deadlines. It also had chants, consciousness talk, movement language, and a founder aura that made ordinary office work feel like a mission. That tension drives the series. The early episodes show the company being built floor by floor, with people rushing through unfinished spaces, giving tours, assembling furniture, and trying to make chaos look inevitable. Lisa Skye Hain’s memories give the story an inside texture, grounded in the practical labor behind the myth. Miguel McKelvey’s design work adds another layer, showing how exposed brick and carefully shaped spaces helped sell the feeling of belonging. The show is skeptical without becoming flatly dismissive. It understands why WeWork worked on people. It also sees why the rhetoric started to sound strange, inflated, and dangerous. The companion material broadens the story into a conversation about founders, investors, performance, and belief. Scott Galloway frames the saga through questions about unicorn-hunting capital and the line between a company and a cult. David Brown’s narration gives the main series a polished Business Wars-style pace, with reported scenes, character beats, and sharp turns. The result is startup history with a thriller’s sense of acceleration. WeCrashed is not only about a famous valuation or a failed offering. It is about how a business can become a story people want to believe, even when the underlying model is wobbling. For listeners interested in entrepreneurship, venture capital, workplace culture, and founder mythology, it turns the WeWork collapse into a case study in modern business faith.
Made for: For listeners drawn to founder psychology, venture-backed ambition, workplace culture, and business stories with a dramatic rise-and-fall arc. It especially fits anyone interested in how startup language can turn ordinary operations into a movement.
What sets it apart: WeCrashed combines reported scenes from WeWork’s early days with a skeptical look at the company’s spiritualized sales pitch. The companion material adds media, investor, and insider context without reducing the story to a simple recap.
The founders of WeWork thought they were on the brink of making history. The company was valued at $47 billion dollars, ready for a huge IPO, and its charismatic CEO Adam Neumann believed he was going to change the world. Adam and his wife Rebekah had a prophet-like vision—but did it ever match the company's reality? Now the inspiration for a new AppleTV+ series starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway, WeCrashed: The Director’s Cut is a complete refresh of our original six-part series. Hosted by David Brown of the hit podcast Business Wars, this six-part series includes new interviews and ne...
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A startup origin story where ambition, labor, and performance share the same frame.
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This is a short promotional trailer for WeCrashed, the companion podcast to the Apple TV+ miniseries about the rise and fall of WeWork.
Episode one of WeCrashed traces the founding of WeWork from its scrappy first Soho location in 2010 through its rise to unicorn status in 2014.
This is the trailer for WeCrashed, a Wondery podcast series about the rise and fall of WeWork, a startup that reached a $47 billion valuation before collapsing.