WeWork Cofounder Miguel McKelvey: Blind Spots in Leadership
WeWork grew from a scrappy co-working startup to a tech darling with more than 800 locations around the world, before their well-documented undoing in late 2019. Cofounder Miguel McKelvey helped build the first WeWork in New York City with his bare hands, and later became the company’s Chief Culture Officer. McKelvey left WeWork in June 2020, a few months before taping this episode. When he looks back on his decade-long tenure there, he acknowledges that the blind spots he had, as a white male executive, affected WeWork’s diversity and inclusion right from the beginning. He joins host Porter Braswell to talk about using his position as a business leader to speak up in support of Black Lives Matter, why so many start-ups struggle with diversity and inclusion, and what senior leaders can learn from what went wrong with WeWork’s culture.