WeWork Cofounder Describes ‘Wallowing’ in Guilt After Leaving

WeWork cofounder Miguel McKelvey might have left the company in 2020, but the guilt stayed with him.

As chief culture officer, McKelvey promoted employee wellbeing at the embattled workspace company. Former employees told Business Insider that he welcomed them personally during their new-hire orientations.

Many of those employees were laid off after WeWork’s failed IPO and SoftBank bailout, which also led to McKelvey’s cofounder Adam Neumann’s resignation. Recently, on the “Scale with Soul” podcast, McKelvey described the guilt he felt — and how he learned to let it go.

“I achieved some degree of wealth from WeWork and a lot of other people didn’t,” McKelvey said. “A lot of other people who I cared about lost their job. A lot of other people’s dreams were wrapped up in WeWork and then they fell apart or they were crushed.”

McKelvey said that he felt he had to “correct a lot of those wrongs for people.”

At its late-2010s peak, WeWork had several culture problems. One Business Insider investigation found that bosses were known to sleep with their subordinates. In 2019, 20 current and former WeWork employees told Business Insider that meetings with Neumann were fueled by tequila, and that company retreats included open drug use and sex. WeWork did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment for this story.

On the podcast, McKelvey remembered a more positive culture at WeWork, where employees were allowed to talk about their cultural backgrounds and struggles with code-switching. He recounted one story of a woman who told him that she had never met her boss before at other jobs she had worked.

“I failed that woman,” McKelvey said. “Where is she going? Back to one of those other companies where people could care less about her. That’s really hard to accept.”

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Pointing to his heart, McKelvey said that the pain of accepting her fate was “deep in here.”

Months after WeWork’s 2019 IPO filing, the company laid off 2,400 employees, about 20% of the company’s staff. The company then laid off more employees after the COVID-19 pandemic began. In 2023, WeWork filed for bankruptcy, which it was cleared to exit a year later.

After leaving WeWork, McKelvey went on to serve as cofounder of both the preventative-health company Unbound and youth basketball program UK50.

On the podcast, McKelvey described how he couldn’t use just “intellectual reasoning” to “escape” from the pain. After taking a deep breath, McKelvey described how he processed the guilt: “Go in here. Find it. Feel it. Feel it fully. Accept it. Try to let it go.”

McKelvey worried about what he would do without that ability to process the emotions. He said he would be “wallowing still in a bad place, probably.”

“My heart is like beating so fast right now because it’s clearly not let go completely,” he said.