That is especially so with the news that the company has only $3 billion in cash on hand, billions in debt, tens of billions in future lease payment obligations and no clear road to profitability. Also worrisome: Despite revenues of $1.8 billion last year, its net loss was more than $1.6 billion. Revenues are growing strong so far in 2019 — but so are losses.

Another key question is whether it is a “tech” play or not. It’s clear that the company is trying mightily to make the case that it is indeed a tech company by calling its analog renting of workstations “space-as-a-service.” (Get the geek pun? SaaS actually stands for the largely lucrative “software-as-a-service” sector, which We Co. is not.)

And the hits — and I mean the kind that can cause pain — kept on coming in the I.P.O. documents, including an outline of a corporate structure that screams lack of accountability. How? Mr. Neumann controls the company in an exceedingly complex manner that includes three classes of stock and a couple of limited liability companies (you don’t want to know, and, really, it’s hard to understand).

Which is why Rett Wallace of Triton Research, which has a good record of calling this kind of thing, gave that tough assessment of the situation in the interview with Bloomberg, calling it an “obfuscation.” He added: “If the underlying facts were positive, why would a company go to so much trouble to prevent you from understanding them?”

But not everyone thinks this deal needs to be fully understood now. In that scenario, We is playing the kind of long game that Amazon did with its once-derided effort to make a business in cloud services. That morphed into A.W.S., a behemoth of profit for the retail giant.

And like Amazon, perfecting the core business by investing heavily, and also using tech before others do, is the real point. In a much-read piece, the tech strategist Ben Thompson laid out this case for WeWork in his Stratechery blog:

WeWork has also developed an expertise in utilizing office space efficiently, and while some of this is simply a willingness to cram more people into less space, opening triple-digit locations a year means that the company is by definition learning and iterating on what works for office space far faster than anyone else, and that is before the promised application of sensors and machine learning to the challenge. And then there is the question as to whether WeWork is, or can become, more than a real estate play at scale: what might be the equivalent of ‘server-less’ when it comes to office space — a unique capability that is uniquely unlocked by one company providing all of the real estate needs for, well, everyone?

Everyone? That’s a lot of people. But it’s true that there is a giant market out there — up to a trillion-dollar opportunity in just the 111 cities that WeWork is already in — to potentially use tech tools to find office space more efficiently. And the company has also been buying up adjacent startups to fill out its portfolio of services, like the workplace management platform SpaceIQ, the meeting-room wrangler Teem, and the coding academy Flatiron School.

The selling point among those who think the company is visionary is that having a great brand, consumer awareness and first-mover advantage makes the deal attractive.