Meet the Anti-Adam Neumann

Believe it or not, before WeWork, Adam Neumann was an officer in the Israeli Navy.

After moving to the US to study business in NYC, he left Baruch College before completing his degree to found a children’s clothing company, Krawlers. (He’d finally graduate in 2017, 15 years after he enrolled.)

Then, he met future WeWork cofounder Miguel McKelvey, and together they started their first co-working company Green Desk in 2008.

Hodari’s first gig was as a reporter for the Times of India after he learned Hindi and Urdu at college. (Times of India is the largest selling English-language daily paper in the world and the second-oldest Indian newspaper in circulation!)

He’d originally gone to college to study Public Policy, getting his Masters from Harvard following a BA at Columbia.

And according to at least one source, he even worked on the Obama presidential campaign.

Alongside WeWork, Neumann invested in a number of industries. Incredibly, he even partered with a former Israeli Prime Minister on cannabis startup InterCure.

Other ventures included EquityBee, a stock option marketplace, Selina, a hospitality company, and shared mobility company GOTO Global.

Through WeWork, Neumann also invested in co-working space The Wing and Wavegarden, which designs artificial wave devices.

More controversially, Neumann also purchased many properties only to then lease them back to WeWork.

Before Industrious, Hodari studied law at Yale and went on to work as an attorney at the multinational law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, advising companies in the finance and energy sectors. (Fun fact: that’s the same firm Peter Thiel worked at before founding PayPal!)

Then Hodari moved on to an analyst position at investment fund Birch Run Capital, but became “disillusioned with the culture.” The tipping point? He said a colleague made a joke about the Fukushima reactor melting down so that Japanese stock prices would fall — which he says clarified that he didn’t belong there.

Neumann and his wife Rebekah announced the launch of their private school, WeGrow, in 2018 — and closed its doors for good at the end of the 2019 school year. The $42,000/year school was a “Montessori inspired learning environment for ages three to nine” located within WeWork’s New York headquarters.

Rebekah bought back the curriculum of WeGrow from WeWork in 2020 and relaunched it under a new name, The School of Life For Life, “a hyper-localized, Earth-based, holistic approach to teaching and learning.”

After Birch Run, Hodari went to Rwanda to lead Kepler, an education nonprofit, where he transformed a scholarship program into an accredited “experimental, hybrid university”. To date, they’ve enrolled over a thousand students, 25% of whom are refugees and many more orphans of the Rwandan genocide.

Partially, this endeavour came from Hodari’s personal love of education — he did attend three Ivy League colleges, after all. He says he “hasn’t ruled out going back to it [academia] one day.”

Neumann has a plethora of interesting habits, but one of the lesser-known ones is the way he managed his employees. He and his wife would often send WeWork employees to their home to fix things for them; they even once made employees spend “three full days” downloading movies to keep Neumann’s kids occupied on an upcoming family holiday. And Rebekah once tasked WeWork’s CFO with getting a 5G cellular antenna moved away from her home.

Hodari is less ‘quirky’, but no less interesting. He’s a night owl, often working from his bed until 2 am and then sleeping until 10. He goes bass fishing in Prospect Park and runs his own bar trivia with friends at a shuffleboard club.

In terms of business habits, Hodari is more conventional. He says “the most powerful tool you can have as an entrepreneur is a keen, curious appetite for listening.” He’s had a list of startup ideas since his early 20s.