A big bet on the WeWork founder by Andreessen Horowitz shows how powerful men can fail upwards. Read More. : Adam Neumann is riding high on a unicorn, and Masayoshi Son is apologizing for vaporizing billions of dollars. It’s easy enough to understand the urge to go back in time, after the past few years of pandemic trauma and turmoil. In the world of venture capital, though, there’s a familiar pattern to the way history repeats itself. Often it involves powerful men failing upwards. Neumann, for those who may have forgotten, is the hard-partying founder of WeWork.