Revealed: WeWork co-founder and ex-CEO Adam Neumann surfed the Maldives while company burned!

Better than Nero!

Maybe the best person to purchase professional surfing, after we bring the World Surf League low, is WeWork’s co-founder and ex-CEO Adam Neumann and I know what you’re thinking. I know you you scratching your head and mumbling, “Adam Neumann? Nothing but bad press surrounding that man. A horrible choice for anything at all…”

…Except maybe professional surfing and we must head straight to Business Insider for the reason why. Shall we?

While executives were preparing paperwork for a public offering that would enrich the WeWork cofounder and CEO Adam Neumann, he was on a surfing trip in the Maldives.

And much of the preparation and drafting of WeWork’s IPO paperwork, or S-1, took place at Neumann’s Hamptons home, The Wall Street Journal’s Maureen Farrell, Liz Hoffman, Eliot Brown, and David Benoit reported on Thursday.

It was there that Neumann invited the heads of the two stock exchanges competing for the WeWork listing — the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq — and asked them to pledge their support to environmental causes, such as eliminating meat and banning single-use plastics in their offices, The Journal reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

But at one point in the drawn-out S-1 preparation process, Neumann was thousands of miles from the Hamptons, surfing in the small Indian Ocean island republic of the Maldives. To avoid cutting the trip short and missing out on the swell, Neumann had a WeWork employee fly out to brief him, according to the report.

The surf trip came as WeWork seemed to be barreling toward a giant public offering that would value the company at as much as $100 billion and make its thousands of employees rich. But the S-1 prospectus that was eventually released revealed a company that was losing billions of dollars and let Neumann run things in questionable ways.

Tell me you aren’t won over.

Tell me you don’t love the man’s Hardened Purist spirit.

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Just opened: The Wave, Bristol, releases first official footage of pool being ridden!

It's a miniature paradise of green lawns and flower beds and safari tents and user-friendly tubes!

A short time ago, official footage of opening day at the world’s first full-scale Wavegarden Cove was released by its spin doctors.

You would’ve seen, if you were quick yesterday, a couple of waves shot from the side of the pool, which is in south-west England, and that had been published on LinkedIn without approval etc. It was unremarkable enough to contaminate the opinion of many readers. A lovely little thing, as pleasing as a slice of watermelon on a hot day and a piece of chocolate but certainly nothing that would transport you to great extremes of ecstasy.

Today, it’s better, although the footage released by the company is more an advertisement for the pool’s therapeutic effects (a man in a wheelchair does a 360 on the beach, a little boy without hands rides what one imagines in his first wave) than its performance capabilities.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4DWR1phg9u/

To examine the wave in detail you’ll watch the cut Wavelength magazine released a few hours ago.

It really will make the hinges of your door squeak.

The surfers include Reubyn Ash, Jayce Robinson, Gearoid McDaid, Vincent Duvignac, Ben and Lucas Skinner, and Kai and Hans Odriozola

In Melbourne, Australia, meanwhile, the southern hemisphere’s first public wave pool readies itself for a late January release.

Early reports extremely positive. 

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Watch: The revolution will not be televised… It’ll be on YouTube!

It is time to scale the Wall of Positive Noise.

And the World Surf League’s President of Content, Media, Studios and Poppin’ Fresh dinner rolls Erik “ELo” Logan really upended my week. Really just threw my next year completely off too. There I was, a few days ago, putting the finishing touches on BeachGrit‘s job announcement for a gender fluid pan-Asian senior editor when I stumbled across his interview in the industry journal SportsPro.

As I read ELo’s words, passions, his grand plan for our Pastime of Kings I realized that the time has officially come to go to war against the Santa Monica.

There is simply no other way.

If we refuse to act, surfing will cease to exist in any recognizable form. It’ll become a PG-rated romantic comedy or worse. It’ll become Transformed.

And while BeachGrit has been waging a low-level insurgency for a while now there’s just no other choice except to move into a fully declared rebellion.

But we’re going to need more people if we hope to scale the Wall of Positive Noise. We’re going to have to recruit and every recruitment drive must begin with a barely coherent, way too long, rambling call to arms. I like to think mine is Jim Jones meets ISIS.

Oh don’t worry, you’re in here too. Skip to the 10:30 mark, sit back and smile.

Then do some stretches.

The revolution will require flexibility.

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Girl wanted!

Jen See to Stab: “We are not here to be your mascots; We are not here to be your fucking video dolls!”

"This is a slap in the face to all of my female friends and colleagues in media. We have worked our asses off to carve out space for ourselves in publishing."

Dear Stab,

We’ve never met, but I’ve seen you around. You like surfing and so do I. That seems like the basis for a beautiful friendship.

There’s just one problem. You seem to be living in an entirely different decade than I am. There you are, a bunch of dudes, talking about surfing and ogling the girls. There’s nothing wrong necessarily with being a bunch of dudes, ogling girls. It’s just that, these days, it isn’t really recommended on company time. Time has moved on, and maybe you should, too.

I was pleasantly surprised when a commenter here on BeachGrit tipped me off that you were looking to hire a female editor. And a senior editor, at that. They told me to apply, suggesting that the rivalry between our two publications might offer me leverage in negotiating salary. I do like leverage, and getting paid for my work is generally very appealing.

I went to your site to see what you had in mind. I saw no job announcement, so I dismissed the whole thing from my mind and went back to dreaming of surf and writing a pitch email for a story idea. This, in a nutshell, is how I spend my days. I am not what you call cool.

Then, someone sent me your Instagram post. This stopped me dead. The pleasant daydream of low-tide Rincon I was enjoying dissolved, rudely.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4Aeep2lNC9/

With all due respect, what in the actual fuck were you thinking?

I understand your intention, I believe. You looked around your office and realized, well, fuck, we don’t have any women working for us. You realized that maybe people would think less of you for this failure. So you set out, as best as you could, to fix it.

But, you forgot to come out of your prehistoric mancaves and take a look around at what life actually looks like in 2019.

To begin with, it is illegal under U.S. employment law to discriminate on the basis of gender in a job call. You can not, no matter how good your intention, say that you wish to hire a woman. With that, you just made yourselves extremely easy to sue — and I’ll confess, I would laugh and laugh, if a man sued you for employment discrimination.

He would have ample grounds.

In your call for a senior editor, you asked for a cover letter and a one-minute, to-the-camera video spot. I have seen many, many position calls for senior editor positions in my time. (To be clear, I freelance by choice, though I always say, that I would change my mind if the right thing came along.) I have yet to see an editorial position that did not ask for clips or detail required experience. Instead of all that you said, well, just make us a video.

Surf Publication Seeks Hot Female Editor

That is how your call sounds. A conference room full of men is going to watch women on video and decide who to hire. Why not just ask us to send photos of our boobs? In fact, I considered, for a brief moment, submitting a one-minute montage of boobs.

If you want to hire a female editor, it is not, in fact, that hard. You could just write a job call, detailing the skills and experience-level you are seeking. You can even encourage women to apply without breaking the fucking law.

Here, let me help:

Stab is looking to hire a senior editor to direct its expanding coverage of women’s surfing in all its many aspects, from competition to culture. Applicants should have TK years experience in the media and a bachelor’s degree in journalism, english, or a related field. This editor will also contribute video content to Stab and should be adept at speaking on camera. A deep knowledge of surfing and excellent writing skills required. Women and other underrepresented minorities are encouraged to apply.

There. That’s it. It’s not actually that hard. And you know what? If you’d posted your job opening like professionals, you would attract talented, dedicated women who would make your publication look good due to their work.

But that doesn’t seem to be what you really want. You want credit for hiring a woman. And you want your brand rep’d at the North Shore parties by a hot girl. You want her to raise your credibility with your male peers. Hey, look who works for us, aren’t you jealous? And then you can pat yourselves on the back and return to the Jurassic, undisturbed.

We could have been friends, Stab. Surfing is awesome and I love it more than is good for me. You seem to like it, too. I have been to your events and enjoyed your beer and laughed at your dumb jokes. I’ll confess that I like dumb jokes as much as I like surfing.

But this is a slap in the face to all of my female friends and colleagues in media. We have worked our asses off to carve out space for ourselves in publishing. For too many of us, it has been a long, shitty battle.

We have sat with a pleasant smile on our faces as less qualified men were hired ahead of us, over and over. We have picked up magazines, counted bylines, and found not a single byline, not one, with a women’s name on it. No women in the photo credits. No women depicted in the editorial images. Over and over, we have done this.

Somehow we have survived all this bullshit — and managed in between it all, to make the stories that matter to us. Not every time, not every day. But enough.

So I take this one personally — not only on my own account, but on the account of all of my friends who do this job every day.

We are not here to be your mascots. We are not here to be your fucking video dolls. We are not here to dance when you say dance. We are here to do the work. You want to hire one of us? Take us seriously and make it worth our time. Otherwise, with all due respect, you can fuck straight off.

jen.

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Looks pretty dreamy considering it's at dirty ol Melbourne airport. A fine layover treat for the weary traveller.

Watch: Melbourne Wavegarden Cove’s partial reveal; cameo by Taj Burrow!

A glimpse of stocking, but no beaver, one might say…

Yesterday, and for the briefest of moments before it was yanked offline, we were gifted our first look at waves being ridden at the new full-sized Wavegarden Cove in Bristol, England.

It was pretty enough, blue wind-swell sorta things that stood up bravely for a few seconds before evaporating in a channel. A raised eyebrow, perhaps, but no dilated nostrils.

As fate would play it, another full-sized Wavegarden Cove, built on land near Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport, has just started peeling back its curtain, although so far it has avoided any embarrassing leaks thereby controlling the narrative and so on.

From the presser:

Utilising Wavegarden’s next-generation Cove technology, URBNSURF Melbourne’s MCG-sized surfing lagoon will deliver high-quality, authentic surfing waves every hour, day and night, year-round. At the push of a button, the size, shape, power and frequency of the waves can be adjusted to suit all abilities, from first-timers through to elite athletes.

As part of its commissioning process, URBNSURF has commenced testing a range of wave types, including a “Malibu” wave perfect for learners and beginners, “Giros I” and “Giros II”, two turns waves designed for intermediates to practice and hone their skills, and “Tubos”, a steep, barrelling wave to challenge and excite advanced surfers.

Over the coming weeks, URBNSURF will be adding further wave types to its “wave menu”, ahead of welcoming surfers of all abilities to sample the perfect, ocean-like conditions, just minutes from Melbourne Airport’s terminals and a short drive from the CBD.

“We’re stoked that the first, perfect waves have been pumping at URBNSURF Melbourne, and we can’t wait to welcome guests from Melbourne, Victoria and around Australia to surf and learn with us this Summer,” said Andrew Ross, URBNSURF’s Founder. “We’ve already created a range of wave types to suit surfers of all abilities, with more to add to the menu over the coming weeks.”

In addition to the surfing action, URBNSURF Melbourne will also delight visitors with delicious, healthy food and beverages by leading restauranteurs Three Blue Ducks.

URBNSURF Melbourne will also offer a fully-stocked surf shop and hire store offering boards, wetsuits and swimwear, a Surf Academy for lessons, coaching and high-performance training, and lagoonside amenities including hot tubs, day beds, bookable cabanas and landscaped spaces to relax and enjoy the view.

Watch the video here. 

 

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