Representatives for Flow and Andreessen Horowitz did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In a blog post on Monday, Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of the VC firm, announced the investment, without disclosing financial details. He also explained his thinking behind backing Flow, a residential real estate company, and Neumann, despite the founder’s high-profile fall at WeWork. “Adam is a visionary leader who has revolutionized the world’s second-largest asset class — commercial real estate — by bringing community and brand to an industry where it didn’t exist before,” Andreessen wrote in a post Monday. “Adam, and the story of WeWork, has been exhausted, analyzed and imagined – sometimes accurately. Despite the energy spent covering the story, it is often not appreciated that just one person has fundamentally redesigned the office experience and led an example – Changing the global company in the process: Adam Neumann.” It’s not immediately clear how Flow seeks to revolutionize the housing industry. Flow currently has a bare-bones website, with the slogan “Live life in flow” and two words stating that it will launch in 2023. Andreessen positioned the new company as a long-awaited solution to the nation’s “housing crisis.” He used a mix of jargon — “community-driven, experience-centric service” — to explain how the new startup would “create a system where renters get the benefits of landlords.” “We think it’s only natural that for his first post-WeWork venture, Adam returns to the theme of connecting people by transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes,” wrote Andreessen. “Residential real estate — the world’s largest asset class — is poised for just this change.” Under Neumann’s leadership, WeWork expanded from shared co-working spaces with elaborate perks to experiment with gyms, schools and housing. The latest of these efforts, called WeLive, allowed customers to rent a bed or private room in a location where they lived, with communal areas for yoga, ping pong and more. through a disastrous attempt to go public that was largely thwarted by IPO filings that revealed Neumann’s unchecked power and many potential conflicts of interest, as well as WeWork’s staggering losses. Neumann was eventually ousted as WeWork’s CEO, but walked away with a severance package reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars. WeWork’s dramatic rise and spectacularly failed first attempt to go public inspired a TV show, which in part portrayed Neumann as the poster child of startup culture excess. WeWork eventually went public through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in 2021. WeWork currently has a market value of about $4 billion.
