The Anti-Adam Neumann

techcrunch.com:

According to earlier reports this week, Adam Neumann, the famed, controversial cofounder of WeWork, is in the process of creating a vast network of residential real estate properties that — we’re guessing — can be rented on a highly flexible basis to people who don’t want to be confined to one location or lease but to live as “global citizens.” It was the vision behind an earlier company that Neumann started, WeLive, a short-lived offshoot of his far better-known company, WeWork, and it’s an idea that in a post-Covid world where remote-work reigns, makes more sense than ever.

Here’s Neumann talking to The Guardian about the idea in 2016: “It’s going to be a new way of living, day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year. You will be a global citizen of the world. If you’re a member of one, you’re a member of all of them.”

The idea is so timely that another serial entrepreneur may be even farther along with his version of it — even if you haven’t heard of him before. He’s Bill Smith, the 36-year-old founder of the three-year-old, 600-person, membership-only flexible, furnished rental company Landing.

Smith, who favors button downs to graphic T-shirts, is the anti-Neumann in many ways. While Neumann’s real-life drama with his investors became fodder for a television series, Smith has, with little fanfare, made his own backers a lot of money. After raising capital from friends and family for a reloadable Visa card company in his 20s, Smith sold that outfit to the bank-holding company Green Dot for what Forbes says was tens of millions of dollars. His next startup Shipt, a same-day delivery company that Smith founded in 2014, sold to Target in 2017 for $550 million.

Smith — unlike Neumann, who famously sold too much of