Andreessen Horowitz Writes Biggest Individual Check Ever for Adam Neumann’s New Housing Rental Startup

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It’s not how many times you fall, it’s how much money Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are willing to give you to get you back up. WeWork founder and barefoot king Adam Neumann is back in the real estate startup game, this time grabbing $350 million in financing venture capital heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) for his new housing rental company, Flow.

An early investor in companies like Facebook, Airbnb, and the orb that scans your eyeballs for crypto, a16z is seen as something of a golden ticket for tech startups. And though Neumann was forced out of his last job after WeWork’s valuation plummeted nearly $39 billion and its IPO plans fell through, he clearly thinks he has some of the magic sauce.

  • The $350 million for Flow is the largest individual check ever written by the company, according to the NYT.
  • Andreessen Horowitz also invested in Neumann’s crypto company Flowcarbon in May. Flowcarbon seems to have no connection with this new real estate company bearing half of its name.

What exactly is Neumann trying to revolutionize this time?

Rental housing. Flow will launch in 2023, but there aren’t many details on how it will differ from traditional rental or management companies. What we do know is that Neumann purchased 3,000 apartments in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta and Nashville to build living spaces with “consistent service and community features,” according to the NYT. Does this just mean that every Flow apartment in the US will have a matching pool? Maybe.

Final plot twist: Explaining the company’s investment in Flow, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of a16z, wrote that the current dynamics of the rental market make it more difficult to create a community in large cities and that limited access ownership contributes to inequality. Some critics raised their eyebrows at this statement, considering that Andreessen recently spoke out against proposed a multi-family development in its own exclusive Silicon Valley neighborhood.—MM

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