By the time Adam Neumann arrived in Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood in 2008, most of the creatives who'd once lived and worked on the borough's waterfront were gone. They'd been exiled years earlier, as successive mayors cracked down on code violations and landlords nursed visions of converting everything into luxury condos. The financial crisis had left a lot of empty buildings like the one where Neumann and his architect buddy Miguel McKelvey rented an office. The pair pitched their landlord on an idea for a creative commune of sorts: a “Kibbutz 2.0,” where musicians and designers would collaborate on projects and escape twenty-first–century alienation; the “world's first physical social network,” Neumann called it. His landlord, Joshua Guttman, bit, ceding a floor of an evacuated artist loft to the idea. It marked the first major outlay in what would become more than $20 billion, as rich guys plowed money into Neumann's vision over the next ten years.
Read Full Article »
