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Even after years of money-losing startups raising millions of dollars at multi-billion valuations, The We Co. initial public offering filing was a doozy.

WeWork’s parent company said in its prospectus released Wednesday that it had doubled revenue in each of the last two years. But that growth came at a cost: $1.2 billion in sales and marketing, pre-opening office operations, and new-market development in the last year, a 316% increase. In all, the company lost $1.9 billion in 2018.

Adam Neuman, the company’s founder and CEO, will also maintain tight control of the company. We Co. will own 80% of a real estate investment fund called ARK, which will, among other things, manage 10 properties owned by Nuemann personally, four of which have WeWork as a tenant.

After two days of digesting these and numerous other items from the prospectus, Rohit Kulkarni, an analyst at research firm MKM Partners, laid out 16 key points: seven positive views, seven negatives and two neutral.

We’ll start with the pessimistic points:

• “Lack of profitability: No matter how we cut it, we believe WeWork hasn’t as yet shown any signs of a sustainable economic model.” That’s perhaps the core question WeWork faces and Kulkarni wrote that “investors would have to take a big leap of faith in order to believe that WeWork would show signs of a sustainable economic model.”

• Falling revenue per member.

• With $3 billion in cash and about $1.4 billion in debt, Kulkarni thinks “the company has about six months in execution runway ahead before facing a cash crunch.”

• Billions of dollars in off-balance sheet liabilities in the form of future lease payments.

• A CEO who controls a majority of the company’s voting rights.

• As a result of that majority control by Neumann, there will be three classes of shares.

• A complex corporate structure where shareholders in the IPO invest in a company that itself holds an interest in a limited liability company that owns another LLC that holds the WeWork operating assets.

The two neutral points are the company’s new debt facility that allows it to borrow up to $6 billion and the fact that it dropped its bespoke accounting metric, “community adjusted EBITDA,” from the document.

On the positive side, Kulkarni pointed to measures that paint a rosy picture for the future size of WeWork’s office-subleasing business:

• The company’s annual run-rate revenue on June 30 was $3.3 billion, an 86% year-over-year increase.

• Low penetration: WeWork believes it has a $945 billion revenue opportunity in the 111 cities it currently operates in, because those cities have a total population of 149 million, each of whom could pay WeWork about $500 a month.

• An increasing number of WeWork’s members are larger companies.

• A $4 billion revenue backlog.

• 70% of its locations are less than 2 years old and as such, still require investments.

• Ability to expand relationships with existing members. “Of the new memberships added in 2018, 35% were attributable to organizations that were already members at the end of 2017.”

• WeWork has space that can hold a total of 522,000 workstations at locations where it already moved in or signed leases but not yet moved in. For comparison, the company had just over 600,000 workstations active at the end of the second quarter.

Write to Ben Walsh at ben.walsh@barrons.com