Scott Galloway on the timing of business startups (and WeWork's IPO timing)

I've started nine firms and I'm, generously, 3-4-2 (win-lose-tie). In retrospect, and I think about this a lot, the only reliable forward-looking indicator of our firm’s success or failure was … timing. Specifically, the part of the economic cycle at founding. The firms we started in recessions had an easier time finding talent, controlling costs, and getting immediate feedback about if this thing worked as clients/consumers held their purse strings closed. Then, armed with a battle-tested value proposition, as the recession ended, we enjoyed the afterburner of confidence to spend more and try new things. #disco.

In frothy markets, it's easy to enter into a consensual hallucination, with investors and markets, that you’re creating value. And it’s easy to wallpaper over the shortcomings of the business with a bull market's halcyon: cheap capital. WeWork has brought new meaning to the word wallpaper. This is more reminiscent of the cheap marbled panelling you'd find in Mike Brady's home office — panelling whose mucilaginous coating will dissipate at the first whiff of a recession, revealing a family of raccoons or the mummified corpses of drug mules. 

~ Scott Galloway, "WeWTF," No Mercy / No Malice blog, August 16, 2019