I met WeWork founder Adam Neumann for the first time yesterday. “Met” might be a stretch—I charged over to him as he was coming out from behind stage at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Deer Valley, Utah; just in time to catch him putting on a black baseball cap and saying how he wished he had gotten to talk more about his new startup Flow. I quickly offered him the opportunity—10 minutes to sit down with me, so I could ask a few of my burning questions about the business he is building that has garnered what is reportedly a16z’s largest check ever, and that sounds quite a bit like WeWork 2.0 (more on that later).
Neumann quickly turned me away. And one of his handlers, right on cue, swept in, saying Neumann had a flight to catch. I will hand it to him—Neumann showed up. He was here, talking publicly on stage. Since the (first) WeWork IPO went bust and Neumann stepped down as CEO, these kinds of appearances have been few and far between. In the meantime, Neumann has turned into a Silicon Valley character of lore, with a television series, documentary, and books all detailing WeWork's tremendous rise and tremendous crash. (Since Neumann’s departure, WeWork has since gone public and is currently trading at a $532 million market cap, an incredible depletion of value from the $47 billion valuation it once boasted.)
Neumann emerged on stage yesterday in a suit, rather than a T-shirt, I’ll note, and told us that the noncompete and nonsolicit agreements he signed with WeWork expire in October, as our own Anne Sraders wrote yesterday. But what exactly happens after that? Neumann offered a hint: “I think Flow has only two choices: compete or partner.”
Which route he plans to take remains a mystery.
So what exactly even is Flow? Neumann would only say that his new company is a “consumer-facing residential brand” that is integrating technology, community, and an operating team. Flow owns 3,000 apartments and has more than 150 employees, he said, and the business model is a “vertically integrated system.”
“We own the buildings, we operate the buildings, we build the technology, we build the community...And when you bring all that together…The moment the resident is happier, more fulfilled and stays longer, the building’s churn goes down.” Neumann said Flow has “proven this with the first two buildings.”
Some founders are highly successful at eliciting sympathy—even after a high-profile blowup. I didn’t find Neumann to be one of them, or at least not yesterday. While Neumann said he has spent plenty of time reflecting on what happened at WeWork and has learned to listen, he stopped short of taking any kind of responsibility for the company laying off thousands of people or WeWork employee stock options becoming worthless—even going as far as to argue there is little in an entrepreneur’s control, apart from who they surround themselves with.
“As an entrepreneur, there are many things you don’t control,” Neumann said. “One of the only things you control is the people you surround yourself with, and not just people you surround yourself with but exactly what kind of people they are.”
This seems like a stretch for a company once so closely entangled with its former CEO and his family, and whose personal leasing arrangements with the company caused such a stir around the time WeWork was first trying to go public.
To be sure, Neumann has said in the past that WeWork’s $47 billion valuation got to his head, and he has said he is “disappointed” employees lost their jobs. And to his credit, Neumann yesterday said other entrepreneurs may have deserved the hundreds of millions of funding he received more than himself: “I'm sure there are people who deserve to get investments more than me. I'm sure there's a lot of people who deserve it, but don't get it.”
A quick photo from the mountains…A group of us hit the mountain biking trails at Brainstorm Tech on Monday. Here is a photo mere moments before I crashed and bent my bike seat. Don’t worry—all is well now.
More to come. Until tomorrow,
Jessica Mathews
Twitter: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.
Jackson Fordyce curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.
