Who Sends the Bill

More money should mean better choices. More options, more time, fewer forced decisions.

But being able to fund every yes doesn't tell you which ones deserve to survive.

On August 24, 2017, SoftBank and the Vision Fund announced $4.4 billion for WeWork and its regional businesses. In January 2019, WeWork's valuation reached $47 billion.

That much backing can look like an answer. Someone has seen the plan, checked the business, and decided to keep paying. Another check makes it easier to trust the last one.

But funding a choice doesn't settle what it costs. It can let the company postpone choosing what to give up.

Nobody had to settle the question that a limit would force: which yes mattered enough to turn something else down?

The price

What you turn down is part of the price.

In 2018, WeWork brought in $1.82 billion in revenue and lost $1.9 billion. The year before, revenue was $886 million and the net loss was $933 million. Revenue roughly doubled. So did the loss.

The numbers were available. More funding could keep them from forcing a decision.

WeWork's S-1 became public on August 14, 2019. The company withdrew the IPO on September 30. By the October takeover, its valuation had fallen to between $7.5 billion and $8 billion, about 83% below January's figure.

The order

Once the cost could no longer wait, something had to go first.

WeWork put Neumann's private jet up for sale in late September 2019. It had paid $60 million for it. On November 21, 2019, it confirmed 2,400 layoffs, about 19% of its roughly 12,500 staff.

The proof

What goes also tells people whether a stated value changes anything.

In his 1997 essay "Pulling the Plug," Jim Collins wrote that after taking over Granite Rock in 1987, Bruce and Steve Woolpert stopped performance evaluations. He argued that leaving the reviews in place would breed cynicism about the company's stated vision.

Collins's point is that removing them gives employees a reason to say, "they really mean it."

Why the bill arrives late

The price tells you what a commitment costs. The order tells you what survives a limit. The proof tells you whether a value can change a decision.

Each needs something to give. Abundance lets the company put that moment off.

I think of a commitment kept alive this way as the unpriced yes.

At WeWork, the numbers hadn't suddenly appeared. The freedom to postpone their consequences had narrowed.

What the money kept funding became the version that ran. A stated priority could wait while the funded one carried on.

But wasn't WeWork a governance failure? CNBC reported that the S-1 drew worries about its corporate governance practices. I read it this way: a founder keeps his latitude longer when the money behind him never asks a hard question.

Sending the bill yourself

You don't need to wait for that test to come from outside. In Good to Great, Collins reported that the companies he studied used stop-doing lists as much as to-do lists. In a 2003 USA Today column, he wrote of "the discipline to discard what does not fit."

I started my values page over with a harder rule: nothing goes on the page unless I've actually had to live by it. That cut the list by more than half.

You can ask the same of your priorities. What have they made you stop?

The bill comes either way. The choice is who sends it.

A question for the week: which yes are you still funding without asking what it costs?