REALITY

Real estate is not passive income. It is mostly passive income with occasional calls about a broken toilet at 2am.

WeWork was a real estate company that somehow convinced Silicon Valley it was a tech company. The S-1 was the moment the spell broke.

Uber was the villain. We were the hero. Turns out the hero still needs a business model.

Being the nice guys in ride-sharing got us a lot of goodwill and about 28% market share. The market rewards ruthlessness more than kindness.

Our valuation went from $10 billion to $2.7 billion. That's painful. But we're still the third-largest hotel chain in the world by room count. The company is real. The valuation was the part that wasn't.

The whale demo was the most effective piece of vaporware marketing in tech history. Millions of people believed AR glasses were ready for consumers. They weren't. They still aren't.