WeWork will replace Adam Neumann with two interim CEOs. Here's everything we know about Sebastian Gunningham and Artie Minson.
Artie Minson, WeWork's President and Co-Chief Operating Officer, boasts a long resume of former executive roles.
Minson, 48, joined WeWork in 2015 as a President and Chief Operating Officer. In June 2016, he moved roles to Chief Financial Officer.
Before arriving at the company, Minson was Executive Vice President and CFO of Time Warner Cable from 2013 to 2015. He was also a top executive at AOL from 2009 to April 2013, where he oversaw the company's three planned business operating units, according to Pitchbook.
Minson attended Georgetown University as an undergrad, and got his MBA from Columbia Business School in 1997.
Minson spoke with Business Insider in the spring about one of WeWork's fastest-growing businesses: Working with companies that have over 500 employees.
"From an employer standpoint, WeWork is a better experience for their employees and meaningfully cheaper on a per-employee basis" than traditional office space, Artie Minson, WeWork's co-president and chief financial officer, told Business Insider in April. "The CEOs like us and the CFOs like us."
Minson also signaled that he expected to grow the company's client roster of Fortune 500 groups.
"We're really just getting started on enterprise," he said. "We're now opening buildings at a much higher percentage filled than we used to, and that's because you're not building on spec[ulation]; you're building on you know what people want and when they want it."
Minson has explained how WeWork avoids the problems with local governments and regulators faced by other "sharing economy" startups like Uber and Airbnb.
WeWork hasn't had problems with consumer protests and government regulation, unlike similar starups in other industries.
"We're certainly one of the few sharing-economy companies that were welcomed with open arms in all markets," Minson told Business Insider in April. "Mayors like us, neighborhoods like us, frankly employees like us, employers like us, the environment likes us. Those are all qualities that certainly some of the other sharing-economy companies are challenged with at times."
Minson has voiced confidence in WeWork's fast rate of growth, saying it's not the same as other startups that expand rapidly despite losing money.
"When we talk about companies who are losing money versus investing money, people are clearly getting we're investing money. If you look at the 82k desks we opened this quarter, those desks will generate $9bn of revenue over their life and $2bn of profit," Minson told Business Insider in May.
"We feel really good given the unit economics we're seeing in the business that it makes sense for us to continue to accelerate our growth given the returns on capital… as opposed to other companies that lose money and it's unclear at the end of the quarter what you've got for it," he added.
Former employees saw Minson as a level-headed executive whose experience provided a counterweight to Neumann's unorthodox management style.
In interviews with Business Insider, WeWork staffers and executives said Minson's experience has been an asset.
"Artie was always the adult in the room," a former top executive said on Monday.
Another former employee who worked closely with WeWork's C-Suite said Minson has "a lot of business acumen" and joked that Minson "seems a little too level-headed to be involved" with the company.
Sebastian Gunningham was previously WeWork's Vice Chair and Chief Automation Officer.
Before joining WeWork, Gunningham served as Senior Vice President of Amazon Marketplace from 2007 to 2018.
He has also served as Senior Vice President at Oracle, Vice President of Enterprise at Apple, and CEO at Peace Software, Inc., according to WeWork's S-1 filing.
Gunningham's arrival at WeWork was seen as a relief by employees concerned about the company's direction
"There was a sigh of relief when Sebastian joined from Amazon because he comparatively exuded so much professionalism and people really trusted him and were like, 'Finally, someone's coming in who knows what's going on," an ex-employee who worked closely with WeWork's C-Suite told Business Insider.
"He was the first person to approach any process from the top down with logic instead of some crazy plan. He stuck out like a sore thumb," the former employee added.
Many inside the company speculated that Gunningham would be selected to replace Neumann.
"We always kind of assumed what would happen was pre-IPO, Adam would step down and Sebastian would step up as CEO," the former employee who worked with the C-Suite said.
A different former employee who served as a top executive at WeWork told Business Insider on Monday that they believed Gunningham would succeed Neumann.
"I think it's Artie [Minson] or Sebastian [Gunningham]," the former executive said Monday. "Sebastian probably makes the most sense because he's less affiliated with Adam."
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