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Despite billions in losses, New York's billion-dollar startups are poised to go public

WeWork Chief Executive Adam Neumann was on a date many years ago when his companion, Rebekah Paltrow, called him out only seconds into the evening. "You, my friend, are full of [crap]," Neumann recalled her saying during a 2017 speech he gave at Baruch College. "Every single word that comes out of your mouth is fake." But Neumann quickly won over his critic. He proposed within a month of meeting her, and they're now married with five children.

Paltrow's far from the only skeptic Neumann has wooed successfully. Since launching his office-sharing company in 2010, the firm officially known as The We Co. has raised more than $12 billion in funding. Last year it pulled in $4 billion, putting it firmly atop Crain's second-annual ranking of the city's best funded tech startups. Last week the Chelsea-based company announced it's preparing to go public, giving a whole new group of investors the chance to decide, as his wife did years ago, whether or not to buy Neumann's story.

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