Flow and the Network State; Adam Neumann's new startup is key infrastructure

Y’all remember Adam Neumann right? The WeWork guy?

Another guy that y’all enjoy making fun of. Well, joke is on you. I’ve been watching him very carefully the last few years, and I have some updates to report.

After his fall from grace, Adam was brought into the Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) conspiracy in 2022, where armed with a16z cash he now is seeing phenomenal early results on his new startup, Flow. I just listened to an a16z podcast on the matter and it was great to hear Marc Andreessen shut the fuck up for once.

It is hard not to get slightly hypnotized by Adam and venture capitalists are particularly entranced. He’s very…. money, you know?

They (the tech fascists) are planning to scale Flow into a massive, global real estate empire, able to squeeze 30% more money out of single family homes, apartments, condos, office space, corporate parks, etc., by bringing them under the control of venture capital and offering a management and technology layer that makes it easy to rent space more flexibly and offer services on top of it.

Flow offers a managed “community”, with plenty of the fun, touchy-feely cult vibes of the original WeWork. That is Adam’s specialty and he’s very persuasive, oh so much more effective than Balaji Srinivasan.

Here’s some of that from the Flow website:

So then on the podcast,

Adam starts talking citizens of Flow… and Ben Horowitz starts talking about citizens of Flow…

you know, like a …

Network State.

It is teased and hinted at and briefly mentioned and dropped again… after all, Flow is early… but the end direction here is unmistakable, as the podcast ends on this note:

Adam: “The future of Flow has a tremendous amount of potential, I think we need to keep taking it one step at a time, I think we need to deliver on all the different aspects of the business, so now you heard us talking about funds and raising capital to deploy… but only [from] people who understand why Flow delivers a higher value and how its going to give them a higher return; keep focusing on the resident as it grows to be a citizen, as Ben likes to call it”.

Also a little tell here that this direction is coming from the VCs, with the “as Ben [Horowitz] likes to call it” in there.

Adam discussed what Flow looks like at scale, stating: "now you're thinking of Flow not just as, we're gonna run the building, but actually how you're gonna run the entire neighborhood":

“you go to an enterprise [corporation] in the past, you’d say I’ll get you offices, I’ll build for you… but maybe office is not enough for a solution. What if I can give you the rental apartments, certain number of nights in a hotel, a school for your kids in the development or outside of the development, and the office, and the experiences all around, and the retail… and before you know it you’re creating something very unique. A lot of times when developers have tried to do it in a way that was like DisneyLand, it’s soulless. If you can then do it in a soulful way… Flow’s mission is to connect people to themselves, their neighbors and the natural world, if you can do those 3 things… and make people feel that way? I think for today’s world, it is more relevant and more important than ever before.”

Yeah. That’s a Network State. Not taking the form of a single colony or even a triad of colonies, but the Network State in the form of a global network of land and development, able to generate responsively all kinds of company towns, corporate campuses, colonies, facilities, housing…. the Network State as a monster real estate dynamo…

Flow also demonstrates how close Andreessen Horowitz is with Saudi Arabia. And in fact, that relationship, and how it has bloomed over the years, is pivotal and fundamental to the current venture capital trajectory. Meeting MBS changed their futures and fortunes forever. As Adam stated:

"MBS the leader has, not even slowly, but quite fast, changed a lot of rules that have made foreigners and foreign investors, and changed rules internally and externally, inviting a lot of people in. And I think last week a lot saw Trump there and a lot of people were talking about it... we've been going there for some time. Choosing to go to Saudi was a very big choice for us as a company. In hindsight, worked extremely well, but was also very difficult, because there were a lot of lot of challenges that were happening as we were there... we chose 5 buildings that were going to be condos, which means they were going to sell them, we bought them from the developer, we changed the condos into rentals, and we started deploying the brand, we put our design from the outside, we brought our furniture, we launched it on our tech... our team, our uniforms, our smell, our music, our art, everything that we do, but also very localized. Because of my past* I have a lot of experience entering into new countries... and the way we wanted to do it was not just use our money, but also raise a local round.”

* Because of his past…. as IDF.

Adam also mentioned that at least half of his team is interested in moving to Saudi Arabia!!!! Note the whitewashing of MBS to an American audience, something that was no doubt part of that deal.

But oh do we remember.

Flow also has buildings in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. It is primed for GROWTH they are getting ready to SCALE this will be HUGE.

Few thoughts on this:

• The growing Network State is demonstrating incredible flexibility, operating through vehicles as disparate as biotech startups and traveling cities and permanent special economic zones and international real estate funds. Like a choking weed, the Network State is growing all around us, entering new countries, new markets, wrapping itself around every part of the stack, creating a parallel world that does indeed live alongside ours…

• The move here is incredibly ambitious. Before Adam hit a little speedbump, don’t we all, he had WeWork in 29 countries and over 100 cities. We are looking at a major escalation above WeWork. Marc Andreessen is a Go Big or Go Home guy. As we go deeper into an economy where venture capital, tech and crypto are primary winners while other industries and economies suffer, tech fascists will be flush with cash and able to take advantage of any changes in the real estate market, especially any caused or influenced by them. Flow is going be a remarkable vehicle to scale the scooping up of land around the world, along with key competencies in outfitting buildings for habitants, staffing buildings, managing buildings, moving furniture, managing paperwork and negotiation with host governments, etc., all boring but important competencies that are key to growing the Network State.

• One of my recent newsletters talked about how startups keep you in a closed bubble, how this is extremely radicalizing. Marc Andreessen has talked about the tech campus as an experiment in getting people to work more; Flow proposes something even more advanced than that, constructing a tech fascist society with work at the core. The Network State will be an incredibly closed system. Everything will happen for its civilization — within it. Its citizens. Managed by a venture capitalist. Down to the smell of the home and the furniture in the office. Fertility and childbirth. School, work, recreation. All managed through their app.

The Network State is scaling. It is doing well. It is healthy and executing on its priorities and achieving its goals and making money and moving cash and people and infrastructure around the world. It is not a dream. It is not a fantasy.

The Network State already exists.