SET TO SOAR
Having co-founded a multi-million-dollar company that was recently acquired, one would expect JAELLE ANG, the CEO of The Great Room, to have known only victories. Yet, she surprises by sharing that her entrepreneurial journey has been full of rejections.
It is 10am on a Monday but most of the power-enabled tables at Dolcetto by Basilico at the Regent Singapore are occupied. The bakery-café has a soothing ambience, but it is not packed with the ladies of leisure. Instead, there are executive types in earnest discussion or hunkered over their laptops. “Everyone around us is doing some form of work,” says Jaelle Ang in an excited whisper. The buzzing flexi-working scene obviously pleases Jaelle, who has suggested to meet here. After all, together with her husband Yian Huang and sister-in-law Su Anne Mi, she had founded The Great Room, a hospitality-led co-working space operator that offers flexible office set-ups.
The Great Room was born from a vision Jaelle had – to create a new version of a branded and elevated workspace. “The Great Room is coworking rethought and refined,” explains the entrepreneur, who veered away from the usual densification model of co-working spaces and took inspiration from luxury hotels and business clubs to create spaces that encourage productivity, creativity and networking through inspiring design, dynamic collaborations and thoughtful wellness activities.
In 2016, the first Great Room was born on George Street in a 15,000 sq ft space – with another 25,000 sq ft added later. Six years on, Jaelle has opened seven Great Room spaces in three cities. Besides Singapore, there are also Great Rooms in Hong Kong and Bangkok.
On May 17, a day after our chat, The Great Room made news again. Industrious, the highest-rated flexible workplace company in the industry and headquartered in the United States, has acquired The Great Room together with Welkin & Meraki, forking out roughly US$100 million (S$138.6 million) in cash and stock between the two. With the latter in Europe and The Great Room in Asia, the Cbre-backed Industrious will gain an immediate foothold in key European and Asia Pacific markets.
This means Jaelle, who will remain as CEO of The Great Room, can realise her greater ambitions for the company more quickly. “To double in size within two years,” she says when asked about her dream for The Great Room. “I have been aching to grow The Great Room as our spaces are almost full and there is more demand that we are able to meet.” Her wish has come true.
The Great Room has come a long way in a short time, especially considering what naysayers remarked when it first launched on George Street. “People were asking who was this upstart, and saying that only a big institution could pull this off as we lacked the economies of scale. After we opened George Street, they said we were a one-time wonder. When they heard about Wework venturing into Singapore, they said we were going to die,” recalls Jaelle.
The Us-based behemoth subsequently needed a bailout after its IPO bit the dust. “Then people said, Wework failed, you would too!” she adds. The Covid-19 pandemic then brought out the pessimists again as lockdowns led to work-from-home arrangements. But instead of failing, The Great Room flourished.
While Jaelle is modest about her success, even acknowledging her shortcomings she became aware of during The Great Room’s early days (“I was a first-time CEO”), she is not entirely new to real estate, design, making deals, and most of all, venturing into unchartered territory. She was trained as an architect – she obtained her degree from The Barlett School of Architecture at University College London (UCL) in the UK.