A digital-media startup founded by an enemy of WeWork villain Adam Neumann and led by the journalist who fell in love with “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli seems to be in some trouble.
Workers at The Business of Business have mysteriously stopped receiving their paychecks. Employees, and some executives, appear unsure how the publication seems to have run out of funds—or whether it can survive for much longer.
For the moment, staffers have been told to stop doing their jobs because their managers aren’t sure if they’ll be paid. Joel Lindenfeld, who as of last week was a creative content producer at The Business of Business, told The Daily Beast he hasn’t received a paycheck for more than a month.
Adding fuel to speculation about the missed paychecks, The Business of Business abruptly placed co-founder Justin Zhen on leave last week, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
Zhen did not respond to requests for comment, nor did his co-founder Gregory Ugwi. Another person listed as a co-founder on the masthead, Marta Lopata, told The Daily Beast that she resigned in early March and was never a co-founder of Thinknum (as of press time, her LinkedIn still listed her as a publisher of the site). A message to the company’s media relations email went unanswered, while the press team’s listed phone number simply went to Zhen’s cell phone. He did not pick up or respond to a voicemail.
Zhen is best known as one of the earliest antagonists of WeWork and its founder Adam Neumann. In 2016 he posted a blog on behalf of his tech startup, Thinknum, which claimed—using data harvested from WeWork’s internal social network and other sources—that the co-working business faced major problems belying its mammoth valuation.
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“Our bots found something astonishing,” Zhen said in a 2021 WeWork documentary, a clip of which features prominently on Thinknum’s website. “WeWork painted themselves as this company that was growing extremely fast.” In fact, he said, the company’s turnover rate among tenants “had increased and… was accelerating.” (WeWork, which at the time disputed some of the findings, evicted Thinknum for allegedly violating its rules, Zhen later said.)
That kind of analysis became Thinknum’s bread and butter. By aggregating huge volumes of data from the web, a practice known as “scraping,” the startup claimed it could derive novel insights, like how Amazon’s hiring practices had morphed over time, or which crypto platforms were slated for growth.
In 2019 Thinknum reportedly raised $11.6 million in funding, though it refused to divulge all of its investors. To burnish its reputation, Thinknum launched a media arm in 2018, which eventually became The Business of Business.
By design, the outlet had a cozy relationship with its parent company. “Our job wasn't as marketers, it was as journalists. But one of the justifications for funding The Business of Business was [to] showcase the different uses for Thinknum’s alternative data,” said a person who has worked for the publication.
Editor-in-chief Christie Smythe first joined the outlet as a senior writer last spring. By that time she was notorious for—but not shy about—her relationship with Martin Shrekli, the hedge fund exec who in 2018 received a seven-year prison sentence for fraud. She had covered the case for Bloomberg while she was married, then fell in love with her subject, only for him to reportedly break things off while still locked up in prison. (The pair remain friends, she told The Daily Beast.)
Distracting stuff. But by the time Smythe rose to become The Business of Business’ editor, she was well-liked in the newsroom, according to two people who’ve worked for her. The outlet has published a wide range of content, from an explainer on how crypto is impacting the war in Ukraine to a look at Poshmark’s growth over time (featuring data from Thinknum).
In an email, Smythe defended the outlet’s independence and said she was “really proud” of its work. “The Business of Business is owned by Thinknum as a business media publication, and we were encouraged to pursue whatever stories we wished. We did also write stories using the company’s data (but we most certainly didn’t have to). But often the data was interesting, and exclusive to us, so it seemed completely fair game.” She declined to comment on the controversy involving Zhen’s abrupt leave.
Even with the Thinknum tie-ins, to some workers the business model has been confusing. “It’s an attempt at a media company by a software person that doesn’t understand how media works,” one employee said. Writers were recruited at high salaries, the person noted, yet it wasn’t clear whether the publication was actually generating significant revenue.
Another red flag: payments to some workers had been delayed for unexplained reasons, according to two people familiar with the matter. “It was just like, you’re on your computer all day, I can see the green [active] dot on Slack,” one recent employee remarked of a slowness to fix the missed payments, particularly zeroing in on Zhen. “Why are you not taking care of this?”
Those rumblings boiled over when staffers failed to receive their scheduled paychecks last month. “People started asking questions,” recalled one employee, “and one thing led to the other and we just got a message saying that Justin was on leave.”
The outlet’s managers “were initially very cryptic,” said another person familiar with the situation. Zhen’s Slack account was deactivated, multiple staffers told The Daily Beast, and both he and the outlet’s staffers were advised not to contact each other.
Employees still have no idea if the outlet is liquid or whether they’ll receive the money owed to them. Executives had said they hoped to clear things up last Friday, but they punted such conversations to early this week.
One person close to the company wondered what other lies may have been told. “It's like, were the sales really there? Where is this money?”
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