ENTREPRENEUR · BUSINESS ADVISOR · BOOKS · COWORKING INSTITUTE
Entrepreneur and advisor to founder CEOs.
Jonathan O’Byrne
Introduction
For more than fifteen years I’ve built, scaled and restructured businesses across Asia-Pacific. From founding one of Singapore’s first premium coworking brands, to scaling platforms regionally at IWG, to writing two books on the future of work. Today I work with founder CEOs on the part most strategy work misses: who they need to become to lead the company they’re building. Because the ceiling on what a company can become is almost always tied to the founder - not the market.
Current work
Advisory for founder CEOs
My advisory practice for founders scaling through complexity. We start with the person at the centre of the company - the patterns, the armor, and the ceiling they keep hitting - because that’s what actually moves the business. Strategy tailored to founders.
Operator training for the coworking industry
The Coworking Institute takes decades of best practice in building, scaling and turning around flexible-workspace businesses into a practical training program for operators - the model, the operations, and the community work that actually makes spaces thrive. The playbook I wish I’d had when I started.
Two books on coworking & the future of work
2020
The origins, economics and rise of the movement that upended commercial real estate - written from inside one of the industry's early success stories.
Buy on Amazon→
2025
Coworking won - now what? The lasting impact of flexible work on the built environment, and where it goes next.
Buy on Amazon→Jonathan founded Collective Works at the age of 26, building one of Singapore’s first premium coworking brands from a $100,000 concept into a multi-million-dollar business - including a landmark joint venture with CapitaLand Singapore at the age of 30. His business was acquired in 2018, one of the industry’s first acquisitions of its kind. He went on to scale partnership and franchise operations across Asia-Pacific for IWG, the world’s largest flexible-workspace operator, and has since led restructurings and advised founder-led businesses across the region in the wake of the pandemic. Along the way, he also founded other successful ventures in marketing, accounting & corporate services, software and hospitality. To date he has written two books that map the social trends behind coworking - and where the evolution goes next.
About
I’m Irish, but I’ve spent almost my whole life away from home - abroad my whole childhood, schooled alongside children of sixty nationalities, and based across Asia-Pacific for more than three decades. Being foreign more or less everywhere taught me to watch closely and assume little; it’s where my instinct for systems, communities, and the human side of business comes from. The same question has run through everything I’ve built: how do you create environments - physical, organisational, psychological - where people actually thrive? That thread runs from the coworking spaces I built to the founders I sit with now.