“Office” Company WeWork Buys Large Stake in Wavegarden

Outside investment in Wavegarden could bring more potential exciting news in the future

Seabass in the dream zone at The Cove

Original story by Eliot Brown, The Wall Street Journal
Posted on November 15, 2017

Office designing and leasing company WeWork is expanding their company far beyond their normal operations. WeWork focuses on creating modern new-age conscious office spaces for businesses and leasing them long term. They’ve now made a sizable investment in WaveGarden.

Recently WeWork attained a $20 billion valuation and although they’ve already begun expanding their reach into other avenues like “WeLive”, “Rise by We”, and an online academy named “The Flatiron School”, most of their profits come from their original concept of designing workspaces.

Full design and set up of “office” spaces by WeWork

Its clear WeWork is doing quite well financially with an annualized income of $1 billion and raising $3.1 billion from outside investors for expansion. The amount of money invested in WaveGarden is unknown but it’s said to be large. A WeWork spokeswoman said they’ve “made meaningful investments to significantly enhance our product offering”.

Adam Neumann, CEO of WeWork says he loves the ocean. Frequently surfing on Long Island and known to take winter trips to Hawaii, he’s hoping to help grow the sport of surfing. “We are trying to expand the sport to people who live further inland”.

This isn’t uncommon for the CEO of a large non-related business to branch out into this world. NLand Surf Park in Austin TX was opened by Doug Coors, of Coors Light.

This is all part of WeWork’s efforts to be known more as a “community/lifestyle company as well as a platform for entrepreneurs” as stated by WeWork executives. Neumann says, “We ourselves are still discovering what is the best type of company that we want to be. We’re taking best practices out of the for-profit world and best practices out of the nonprofit world.” Adam also says companies that are successful in creating this are given a “really exciting multiple” by investors, implying a high valuation.

It seems from the big picture it all fits into place. WeWork is one of the most valuable new U.S startups with a revolutionary new age service. For them to look to grow a new revolutionary technology in a sport like surfing is a welcome deal.

WaveGarden says that it cost $16.5 million to build “The Cove” and with WeWork’s high revenue stream and an even higher valuation its safe to assume that their “large” acquisition could be revealed as something more in the near future. Although, trying to expand too far away from relevancy of original business plans has turned out poorly for organizations like Yahoo. We’re hoping this investment in Wavegarden works out for both parties seeing how they’re already an established OG powerhouse of artificial waves.