[Image: BIG]
Like so many entrepreneurs, Rebekah Neumann’s impetus for her new venture was solving a problem for herself.
As her oldest daughter’s kindergarten class progressed, “it just wasn’t the right environment,” recalls Neumann, a mother of five young children and the founding partner and chief brand officer of WeWork, the world’s most successful coworking community.
When she and her husband Adam Neumann, WeWork’s founder and CEO, evaluated first-grade options for their daughter—”looking at schools both here [in New York City] and on the West Coast, by the way”—their dissatisfaction grew.
“We couldn’t find the school that we felt would nurture growth, her spirit as well as her mind,” Neumann says. “These children come into the world, they are very evolved, they are very special. They’re spiritual. They’re all natural entrepreneurs, natural humanitarians, and then it seems like we squash it all out of them in the education system. Then we ask them to be disruptive and find it again after college.”
In a matter of months, “we came up with this concept for the pilot class, gathered friends and families, and we launched,” she says of her new school for children in kindergarten through fifth grade.