Industrious President shares her unconventional path and why creating joyful work environments is the ultimate competitive advantage.
Anna Squires Levine took the stage at this morning’s GWA event with a mission: to prove that building exceptional businesses and creating workplaces people genuinely love aren’t mutually exclusive goals—they’re interdependent.
As the President of Industrious, Levine’s journey to leading the largest premium flexible workspace provider in the U.S. is anything but linear. From studying organic chemistry at Brown University to consulting with McKinsey on Southern African health systems, founding a nonprofit that contributed to a 60% global decline in pediatric HIV, attempting (and failing at) a bipartisan political consulting startup, to ultimately finding her calling in the coworking industry—Levine’s career trajectory embodies her core belief: that individual leaders can make profound differences.
From Startup to Scale: A Decade of Growth
Levine joined Industrious nearly 10 years ago when it was “a teeny tiny team in a heatless room in Brooklyn with just a couple of locations and a dream.” What attracted her wasn’t real estate expertise—she freely admits she knew nothing about the industry. Instead, it was the people: “smart, kind, really low-ego, very groovy people” with qualities she hadn’t found elsewhere.
That early cultural foundation has shaped everything since. Following CBRE’s $800 million acquisition of Industrious in January 2025, Levine has taken on an even more central role in running day-to-day operations as co-founder Jamie Hodari assumes dual responsibilities at CBRE.
The Power of Connection: An Unexpected Exercise
Rather than delivering a traditional keynote, Levine did something different. She introduced the audience to a team-building exercise Industrious uses at their annual offsite—a three-day gathering that brings nearly 400 team members together for what she describes as “wholesome, fun adventure,” not corporate strategy sessions.
The exercise? Adapted from the New York Times’ famous “36 Questions That Lead to Love,” Levine divided the room into groups of four and asked attendees to spend 20 minutes in deep conversation with colleagues they didn’t know well.
When the room reconvened, participants shared what surprised, inspired, or moved them. The responses were striking:
- The willingness to be vulnerable with near-strangers
- How quickly sentimental connections emerged over material discussions
- The realization that “there isn’t a person you couldn’t love once you hear their story”
- The common thread of love as a transforming human experience across diverse backgrounds
As one attendee noted: “This should be an exercise every company does.”
Defining Success Beyond Survival
In the Q&A that followed, Levine reflected on how CBRE’s acquisition has prompted more profound questions about Industrious’s identity. “Since CBRE has acquired Industrious, I’ve had to [think about identity],” she explained. “I couldn’t quite grasp before the acquisition just how much of our identity was about being a startup.”
With the constant undercurrent of startup survival now gone, Levine and her team have had to define who they are independently. Her answer is clear: “The legacy I can attempt to leave at Industrious is proving to the world that we can have a team that just loves being on this team, that gets more than they give, that enjoys their colleagues, that laughs…at the same time as we’re going to be a really outperforming team, producing excellent business results, and growing quickly all over the world.”
This philosophy stems partly from personal experience. Levine watched her mother spend years in a job that “sucked the energy out of her”—not terrible, but giving far more than it returned. “For any of us who have the privilege of getting to choose what we do…it’s our job to endeavor to create an environment that can be a really positive source in our lives.”
Operationalizing Culture at Scale
When asked how to create operational processes that support meaningful work relationships while scaling rapidly, Levine shared Industrious’s approach: defining a small number of core qualities—welcome, empowered, and delighted—and working backwards from there.
“We use those three qualities in everything we do,” she explained, from hiring and performance reviews to spending decisions and development priorities. Even seemingly mundane decisions, like creating a dress code for a growing team, become exercises in balancing brand identity with individual expression and the value of being “seen.”
Looking Ahead: Economics and Experience
On the business front, Levine emphasized two priorities for operators:
Unit economics matter more than ever. “Locations that aren’t making money have to make money,” she stated plainly. With pressure to meet market rent increasing, Industrious is working to quantify the value they deliver back to landlords beyond traditional metrics.
Measuring workplace experience. With large companies increasingly asking Industrious to help design experience in their own offices, Levine sees an opportunity for the industry to codify what works. “How do you measure the experience of the workplace?” she asked. “For all of us collectively to be able to craft that code and basically bottle up all of these good things that we’re doing…would be transformational.”
Lessons from Mistakes
True to form, Levine was candid about failures: don’t sign agreements with landlords you don’t trust (“it’s always worse than anything”), don’t compromise on hiring decisions, and conduct thorough due diligence on technology partners—even major companies that might seem to have “their act together.”
As the industry continues to mature post-pandemic, Levine’s message is both practical and aspirational: success requires getting the numbers right while never losing sight of what makes workplaces truly valuable—the human connections that happen within them.
Anna Squires Levine is President of Industrious, which operates over 200 flexible workspace locations across more than 65 cities globally.
This session was summarized by Mike LaRosa at ThisWeekInCoworking.com for the GWA, and the wider global coworking community.
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