WeWork Data Credibility

A story about how Sam Parr suggests Tarush (5x founder) should use his WeWork experience to better pitch his data company.

"I would use the WeWork story. When I worked at WeWork - because you were the head of data or something like that - I would use the story of: I led data at WeWork when we were this size and grew the company to this size. A problem we consistently had was [blank blank blank] and we solved it by hiring tons of people, and it was still riddled with errors.

Talking to other people in this data world, I noticed they all had the same problem. So to bootstrap this company and get it off the ground, I hired a couple friends and we actually have been doing this by hand. We convinced x, y, and z to give us some money, and slowly or quickly we've actually automated a lot of it.

Now all these companies who want to get this thing done can actually use us, and instead of hiring 30 people, they just have one person use this bit of software and it saves them x amount of money and x amount of time."

Sam then notes: "By the way, I'm just totally riffing. I don't know if any of this is true, but you know what I mean."

The story illustrates how to effectively use past experience to establish credibility and demonstrate understanding of an industry problem when pitching a startup.