Founder's note by Anupam Kundu, founder of Kiido
Also available in French.
Adam Neumann is probably not very well known in France unless you followed the whole WeWork story.
I did, partly because I was living in New York when WeWork was taking off. I remember seeing the offices appear, the brand becoming more visible, the company becoming part of the city. At the time, it felt like you were watching a new kind of company being built in front of you.
Watching the interview now on YouTube, years later, I realised that what was changing was not only the company.
Watch the interview with Adam Neumann on YouTube
The person was changing too.
I think that is easy to forget. We talk about founders as if they are fixed personalities and then success or failure simply reveals who they already were. But people evolve. Money changes you. Responsibility changes you. Children change you. Success changes you, and sometimes probably more than failure does.
That was one of the things I found interesting in this long conversation with Adam Neumann.
Not the WeWork story itself. There is enough written about that already.
What stayed with me was the way he talked about his childhood, about his wife, and about what partnership meant to him when everything was going wrong.
His parents separated when he was young. He moved around a lot with his mother and sister, and he talks about a childhood with quite a bit of instability around him.
Later, he talks about his wife Rebecca and the period when WeWork had collapsed and his own financial situation had become very serious.
Towards the end of the interview, he says something simple:
Choose your partner for the worst day of your life, not the best day.
I kept thinking about that.
Most of us probably choose very differently. When we meet somebody, we are thinking about attraction, chemistry, whether we enjoy being together, whether we can travel together, whether we want similar things.
That is normal.
But we are not usually asking what this person will be like when everything becomes difficult.
And, to be fair, we are not asking what we ourselves will be like either.
- What happens when somebody loses a job?
- When money becomes a problem?
- When a child is struggling?
- When one person is exhausted or frightened?
- When somebody makes a serious mistake?
- When there is disappointment or anger?
Do you still feel that you are on the same side?
Neumann tells a story from the period after WeWork fell apart. He was facing huge personal financial exposure and went home to explain the situation to Rebecca.
Her reaction, according to him, was basically: okay. If everything goes, we can live with my mother. And if you do not want to build another company again, we can go to Costa Rica, homeschool the kids and surf.
That part stayed with me. Of course, Costa Rica is a genuinely good idea any day.
It was more the silent strength behind the idea. We can lose this version of our life and still have a life. That your worth is not completely tied to what you have built, how much money you have, whether your company is working or whether you are having a good year.
I think there is a kind of quiet confidence in that which is easy to underestimate and hard to put your arms around.
This does not mean agreeing with everything your partner does. In fact, sometimes the strongest partner is probably the one who tells you when you are going too far. And then Neumann gives another example where his wife Rebecca helped them get half a million dollars just before delivering their child.
And that matters because people change. The person you meet at thirty is not going to be exactly the same person at forty-five. Neither are you. That change can be good. It can also be messy.
People can become more confident, more capable, more generous. They can also become consumed by work, more defensive, more afraid, more difficult.
A relationship somehow has to survive the fact that both people are moving.
What is moving me now
I have lingered on Neumann's ideas quite a bit.
As a separated father with two young children, I think it is important to give children a broader idea of what success means. This feels particularly important when we think about the large-scale transformation of work that is likely to happen over the next ten or twenty years because of the AI revolution.
A lot of the things we currently associate with success may change. Jobs will change. Some professions will disappear or become unrecognisable. New ones will emerge. The connection between education, work, income and identity may become much less straightforward.
So what do we want our children to believe success is?
Is it a title? A salary? The size of a company? The number of people who know your name?
Or is it also knowing yourself well enough to make good decisions when the world around you is changing?
I think it is important to understand yourself early on. Not because you will remain the same person forever. You will not. You will evolve, change your mind, and become someone you could not have imagined when you were younger.
But some of your core values will stay with you for a very long time. They will shape your decisions, often without you noticing.
It is also important to know your weaknesses. Not to be ashamed of them, but to understand them. To know where you are vulnerable, where you tend to make bad decisions, where you need help or perspective. And then to protect yourself by having friends and close people around you who give you strength in those areas.
The people who know us well can sometimes see the things we cannot see in ourselves. They can slow us down, challenge us, or simply stay close when we are not at our best.
That is part of what a partnership can be too.
This is also something I think about through Kiido.
At Kiido, we spend a lot of time thinking about what happens after separation. How parents communicate, how they manage schedules, expenses, children moving between two homes, how conflict can be reduced, how they can take professional help, etc.
The fact is that the relationship between two parents does not suddenly become important on the day they separate. Children have been watching that relationship for years.
They see how adults disagree. They see whether one person humiliates the other. They notice when one parent becomes the enemy. They also see when people are able to disagree and still show respect.
I do not think this means people should stay together at any cost. That can be equally damaging.
But it does make me think that we probably do not spend enough time talking about what a partnership actually needs when things are not going well.
Entrepreneurs should probably understand this better than most people.
When you choose a co-founder, you do not only ask whether you enjoy being around that person.
- You want to know what happens when the money is running out.
- What happens when you disagree.
- Whether they tell you the truth.
- Whether they disappear when things go wrong.
- Whether you can still work together after a bad decision.
We understand instinctively that the difficult moments tell you a lot about a business partnership.
I think the same is true personally.
Adam Neumann's sentence stayed with me because it is simple and slightly uncomfortable.
Choose your partner for the worst day of your life.
I think I would add one more thing.
Try to become the person somebody would want next to them on their worst days.
