Jaelle Ang - 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. Mavis Teo finds out more.

- Jaelle Ang

It is 10 am 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 ambiance, 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.