We Company, the company behind the WeWork real-estate empire, is reportedly starting a "future cities" initiative and has even hired Di-Ann Eisnor, who's a former Waze and Google executive, to help jumpstart the project. Per the We Company, Eisnor, along with her team of engineers, data scientists, architects, economists, and biologists will create products as well as partner with companies and establishments from all over the world. These products and partnerships will then be used to help address global problems churned out by globalization, urbanization, and even climate change.
And if the concept of the project sounds very ambitious and ambiguous at the same time, that's because the source itself is focused on such areas. In fact, We Company CEO Adam Neumann revealed the company's new brand back in January, citing that its mission is to "elevate the world's consciousness." WeLive, the company's co-living arm, on the other hand, wants to "build a world where no one feels alone." Its education group, WeGrow, has a stated mission that focuses on "unleashing every human's superpowers."
However, the company's recent move to launch a smart cities program is one that's in line with its more non-spiritual mission: which is to collect and compile the world's largest data set on how people are working and living. The company does this by having 425 co-working spaces in 100-plus cities, effectively giving the company data that economic development agencies could benefit a lot from. Furthermore, the company also has a very robust sense of how it can utilize space and consume energy.
Power in data
According to Arun Sundarajan, who's a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business and the author of The Sharing Economy, "WeWork has created the physical-world equivalent of a digital platform. Its global constellation of companies and entrepreneurs allows members to tap into and realize value from these economic spillovers, within their local communities, and across cities."
In fact, Eisnor herself knows a lot about the power of aggregated information, having helped start the US office of Waze back in 2012, an app acquired by Google a year later for just under $1 billion.
Presently, the mandate for Eisnor's new team at the company is tasked with tying all of the firm's disparate data sources together. As WeWork's latest Chief We Office, Eisnor's goal is to build on what's already existing inside the company, take it outside, and try to tie it up with 21st-century cities.
