#5 - Oh, the stories these (glass) walls could tell.

We are living in a golden age of scam artists. Beyond your typical roto-calls, wire frauds, and failed music festivals, I believe the nexus of scammers is currently congregating in the Venture Capitalist over-funded world of “tech” companies. So when Hulu recommended a documentary about the downfall of WeWork, I immediately hit play. I came away unsatisfied, I felt like they had glossed over the more nefarious aspects of the founder’s plan, how he exited a failing company with billions of dollars and seemingly not a care in the world for the staff that had made the company a success in the first place.

One of the biggest things it skipped over though, was the millennial pink #riseandgrind culture perpetuated inside of WeWorks highrises. Beyond the glossy services that WeWork offered (whoa! a snack bar! like a vending machine but with open planning!), the prestige of the office and “networking opportunities” were the real draw. How else would these companies justify the $3,000 rent of these glorified closets to their investors out west?

My first foray into WeWork was when I was summoned by a Direct To Consumer raw dog food company that wanted to hire me to write their blogs as well as advise on customer inquiries and product development when the time came. I read through their existing blogs on the website, chock full of 30 Rock references and thought to myself ‘these are my kind of people’.

Spoiler alert: they were not.

First up, a phone interview with one of the co-founders. I’m not gonna lie, I crushed it. I fully dazzled Annie. I started off with a perfectly subtle Bossypants reference and we were off to the races. I was asked to come in to meet the other founder the next day. “Nat’s going to love you,” Annie told me as we got off the phone.

My in-person interview with Nat was conducted mostly while power walking through the halls and stairwells. We were continuously booted out of pre-booked conference rooms and on the hunt for a quiet space to talk. I spent most of the interview pretending I wasn’t super out of breath while detailing to her the current state of brick & mortar pet retail and their pathetic response to their booming millennial customer base. (Which, while that may be true, please support your local independent pet store! Your dog doesn’t care how pretty the bag their food comes in is!)

Once we finished up the 5k, I was brought to the glass fishbowl that was their office. Something to know about the Annie & Nat duo is that they met at Harvard Business School. They introduced themselves to me with typical rich kid establishing credits, informing me where they went to undergrad (MIT & Tufts) and what their parents did for a living (doctors & lawyers). I contributed a business executive dad, cuz we’re all made out of ticky tacky and we all look just the same.

My job offer came via email the next day. They admitted that they didn’t really have a clear role for me yet, but would I want to start working one day a week and increase my role as the growth of the company allowed? For $50 an hour, you bet your ass I did!

My first day was a blur of keycards and setting up apps on my phone that would link my debit card to said keycard so that I could seamlessly pick up peanut m&m’s from the snack bar. (They were $3 per pack, so I never got them again, preferring to dash to a bodega for that sweet sweet $1 deal.) I was given a detailed tour of the floors, the kitchens, the kegs of beer and cider, and the numerous coffee stations that were available. Every floor had a water dispenser infused with beautifully sliced citrus fruits, stacks of aluminum cups next to them with the phrase ‘glass half full’ written on the side.

Sidenote: because the cups were tin, they would react with the citric acid and the water was undrinkably metallic-tasting within minutes.

The company was making frozen raw food, a field I happen to have a weird amount of expertise in. I tried asking them basic questions about their ingredients and the philosophy that led them to create this product. (The secret about the holistic side of the pet industry is that every single product has a personal story. At some point, someone made this food/supplement in their kitchen, got their friends dogs hooked on it, and wow! Look where they are now.)

This company was…different. Annie got a puppy my first week, only to give it away a month later (a story for another time, but know that I was the dog’s pet sitter and never got the full story on the disappearance of the pup). Nat fed her dog a low-quality kibble and was baffled by his indifference towards food. They developed “vitamin bars” that contained wheat flour—an ingredient that has been controversial in the pet space since 2008 and had been completely exorcised from the holistic side of the industry. (Also, like humans, dogs don’t need vitamins if they’re eating a bio-available well-balanced diet and I abhor the unregulated supplement industry with a passion.)

Raw food is not just another dog food. For most people who feed it, raw becomes a way of life. (I mean, if your dog dealt with chronic health issues only to suddenly have amazing skin, fur, teeth, and teeny-tiny poops, wouldn’t you become an amateur evangelist too?). These people care about quality and sourcing, they want to know your entire process when it comes to the treatment of the animal, the quality of the meat, and how you deal with potential contaminants. They’re not going to switch foods just because the packaging is cool, because they actually care about what’s inside the bag.

When I was finally tapped for product knowledge, we all quickly came to the same conclusion: they didn’t like what I was going to telling them.

“So, what is the quality of your meat?”

“Restaurant quality.”

To which I ask: what restaurant? Le Bernadin or McDonald’s? Is it GAP rated? Could I see the bills of lading? No, they weren’t planning to offer different proteins, just the one would be enough. Why would having a bone meal on the ingredient deck be a problem? Were people really going to care about the individual probiotic strains they had added in?

I begged them to understand that their ultimate customers were the dogs themselves. If this food isn’t super palatable and highly digestible, there were going to be major problems. What happens the first time a dog gets diarrhea? Were they doing humane feeding trials? What is their pathogen protocol?

At the end of the day, I said, you are a dog food company.

Their response floored me. I was wholly incorrect. They were a tech company.

See, their product was not the food. Like most of the other products that come out of these thinktank style startup buildings, their actual product was community. You didn’t feed their food because you believed in the nutritional value (silly goose!), you fed it because you wanted to belong.

This kind of thinking seemed to be rampant throughout the offices. We sat for hours tippity typing away, carefully curated Spotify playlists buzzing in the background, perpetually interrupted by the ping! of Slack notifications. Meetings always went for an extra 20 minutes while we brainstormed cool, funny, ever-so-slightly-ironic names for the Slack channels. We were promised that later these would be the names of the boardrooms so it was really important that we nail the brand identity. (I once mentioned that the detail I most loved from an article about the downfall of the Away luggage company was that their internal office channel as @here. Here/away? Get it? They renamed ours to @here later that day.) (I don’t think they got it.)

The main perk of working at WeWork was feeling super important. Everyone wore the latest styles, plucked straight from the front page of ShopBop. They slapped around in slide-on mules and discussed the finer details of click-conversion rates over catered vegan meals. The provided desks were basic, the chairs were bad, seeimngly none of the ergonomics had been considered for anyone over 5’4”. But they had a nitro cold brew keg, unlimited oat milk, and every day at 5:00 the douchebros from across the hall who once described their company as “bitcoin but cooler” would stop by with two pitchers of beer and gallantly offer us cups.

(After we declined, they would lumber back to their glass cubicle and we would watch as they pretended to squeeze imaginary boobs. I wish I was kidding, however, it does strengthen one of my truest beliefs is that frat culture is like mold. Given the proper conditions, it can fester anywhere.)

Everyone left midday to grab a protein bowl of their choice, only to come back sit down and shovel the contents directly into their mouth without looking. If you swapped out the contents of their Dig Inn/Kava/Sweetgreen containers with Soylent Green, I doubt anyone would notice. Everyone was addicted to seeming busy, because it artificially bolstered their importance. Every hour was time-blocked on the Google calendar, including socializing. Dinner at Tacombi, drinks at Cafe Select, gallery openings, tipsy painting parties at the park.

My bosses had just moved to New York and had never ridden the subway. When I referenced Keano ads, I was met with blank stares. They were car to building, building to car girls. They lived life to see and be seen. Enjoyment was secondary to documenting the experiences, to others seeing your life as aspirational.

A few months in, one of them had left a draft in the backend of the blog titled “If my apartment was on fire, there is nothing I would save”. Fucking bleeeeeak man.

After months of meetings, I was finally getting a clear picture of the work they wanted from me. My next step was to throw an event with treats and samples for all the dogs in the WeWork office. Introduce ourselves, the company, the customer base for this product didn’t exactly exist outside these walls anyway, we may as well take advantage of the proximity.

I reached out to my Rolodex of companies, throwing my name and old credentials around to secure dozens of different samples for the event. I imagined it as more of a seminar-style, where I would walk them through the basics of alternative diets for their dogs, and then spend time answering questions.

Due to my bosses negligence with responding to emails from the event coordinator and a weird delay due to a lack of permission to use photos from a photoshoot, the event ended up getting scheduled a few days before Christmas. I implored them to wait until after the new year since so many people would be out of the office. I was told the event would go forward and to go get some wine for everyone. A white, red, and rosé were purchased from the tiny wine store on the corner for a whopping $80.

Literally, one person stopped by.

I was both humiliated and angry. I knew it wasn’t going to work. I had thrown several successful events at my last job and understood how to gauge interest in these types of things, but they never wanted to actually listen to me. I went back that week on Friday for a team meeting (because everyone was obsessed with jargon, these were called bi-weekly “sprints”). They never showed up for it, eventually canceling via text message.

Over the New Years’ break, Nat slacked to inform me that I had spent far too much money on an event that had no provable results.

I was done. Cooked. Fucking stick a fork in me, I’m outta here. I couldn’t convince them of anything, no matter how many gently worded emails I sent them about their inabilities to manage a company, my skills that they were completely wasting, or my discomfort with their safety protocols when it came to the food product they produced.

We had scheduled a meeting for the three of us the first day back in the office. I came in that morning and noticed a meeting on their Gcals for the hour before—the subjects were listed—one of which was me.

I quit an hour later. And to give them some credit they were as cool about it as they could have been. Annie even sent me an encouraging text later in the day, saying she admired my ability to speak my truth.

Honestly, whatever. It was the definition of too little too late. I left the startup world with the worst taste in my mouth. Like, I’m sure that there are companies who rented offices in WeWork that were creating real products, services that were cool and innovative. From what I saw, most people were repackaging existing products, making them slightly worse, but the big change was that they would ship it straight to your door. How novel! How convenient! Everything was networked and marketed via Instagram, with feeds so cultivated they became clinical.

While I was working there, it felt like every day there was an exposé on a startup. The downfall of Adam Neumann was documented with gleeful commentary in our #dailynews channel, along with the articles ripping apart Outdoor Voices, Juicero, and Casper mattresses.

But did the constant flux of articles about the downfall of #girlbosses and these companies ever cause anyone to reflect on the fact that their company was built to emulate those same exact cultures? Not for a single second. After all, the walls are made of glass, not mirrors.