How WeWork
Turochas Fuad, WeWork’s Managing Director for Southeast Asia, talks to us about expansion in the region and the ways real-time and aggregated data are leveraged by this quickly growing, multibillion-dollar company.
What sent WeWork on that rocket ship to be a leading player in the coworking and real estate space? Building information and occupancy data that inform design and building processes are part of the equation. The multibillion-dollar company has been acquiring software and analytics firms such as Teem (specialising in spacemanagement technology), Fieldlens (specialising in construction and project management), Case (a building information and technology consultancy), and most recently San Francisco-based Euclid.
The latter developed a proprietary analytic platform that uses
WiFi signals to understand how space is being used, without the installation of additional hardware.
“We are not just bringing in specific technologies,” says Turochas Fuad, WeWork's Managing Director for Southeast Asia. He is referring to the acquisition of Case, a company with previous experience in managing Building Information Modelling (BIM) projects and creating custom software for facilities management and energy benchmarking. “It has informed how we build and manage our spaces, how we track our real estate, how we track our project development. That product has been evolved so much [at WeWork] and has been deployed to be part of our processes in every single building that we build. We’ve leveraged that to the core.”
Pointing to a sensor in the ceiling of his office at WeWork City House in Singapore, Fuad says, “We have sensors in every single building and in every single room. They perform basic functions such as shutting off lights when rooms are empty so they help us be more efficient in our business and save costs in terms of electricity usage. They double up to detect big data – how often a room is being used or booked, for example. We can also tell, if the room is booked, if people really showed up or the other way around – the room was not booked but there are people there.”
Together with other metrics, such information constitutes big data that powerfully informs decisions for planning, programming and design – an efficiency that is valuable especially for a company that is not only doing everything from location scouting to building and operations in-house, but also scaling up very quickly.
Singapore is WeWork’s regional headquarters. It employs over 150 staff, close to half of which work in design, architecture, engineering and product teams that support WeWork’s fast expansion in the region. The latest opening is WeWork in Kuala Lumpur. Offering more than 1,900 desks and occupying five floors within the fiftystorey Equatorial Plaza (a new hotel and office development in the central business district), this is by far the largest WeWork space in Southeast Asia. There are a few more regional openings in the pipeline, including in Bangkok and Singapore.
“Eight years ago WeWork started to serve that unserved market of startups and freelancers. Then we started to see a lot of large enterprises and multinational companies coming to us. We call companies with over 1,000 employees ‘enterprises’,” Fuad explains. “Thirty per cent of the Fortune 500 companies are working out of a WeWork. And in Singapore we’ve seen up to 45 per cent membership from the enterprise segment. Singapore is a regional hub and a sweet spot for companies coming to Southeast Asia to start. They are not just using us as swing space, but as their real estate solution. Instead of building their own office spaces they are looking at how to flex up and flex down.”
The company has also been iterating workplace products and exploring other real-estate ventures. These include WeWork Labs, an in-house program designed to connect early-stage startups with universities, accelerators and incubators (in Southeast Asia, available in Singapore and Thailand). There is also HQ by WeWork that provides larger private offices without the WeWork branding to medium-sized businesses, as well as Powered by We that offers custom workplace design. The latter service has enabled clients to set up quickly. In Hong Kong, Powered by We completed an overhaul of a 10,000-square-foot space owned by Standard Chartered by designing, building and operating it all within an impressive timeline of three months.
Made By We, WeWork’s latest offering, is an event space, retail shop (selling merchandise made by members) and a cafe at 902 Broadway in New York’s Flatiron district that also provides ondemand workspace. It features bright, white interiors, and might be described as a casual version of WeWork, with close to 100 bookable seats and six meeting spaces for groups of four-to-ten people available on-demand or for pre-booking via its website. WeWork members as well as the public can book workspaces by the minute, hour or day.
“Thirty per cent of the Fortune 500 companies are working out of a WeWork. And in Singapore we’ve seen up to 45 per cent membership from the enterprise segment.”
Turochas Fuad