01 / THE HUMAN SYSTEM
Years before Vanessa Hendriadi Li started a coworking company, she tried to improve a rather more demanding institution: the family meeting. Business and family overlapped in her life. Conversations could easily settle into the familiar territory of strategy and profit margins. She wanted room for something else, so she brought home a structured discussion format she had learned through Entrepreneurs’ Organization.
The experiment had rules, a moderator and an agenda. It also had the entirely predictable problem of relatives behaving like relatives. Monthly meetings became less frequent. When they happened, they drifted back toward shareholder business. Vanessa wrote about the experience in 2011, including the need to return to the original purpose rather than abandon the whole exercise.
There is something revealing about that little domestic project. She believed people would connect more honestly if someone paid attention to the setting and the process. Five years later, she would start Rework, giving that conviction a commercial address. Eventually, the harder question would be how much of the connecting, deciding and following up she should still do herself.
An engineer learns the property business
Vanessa grew up in Indonesia in an entrepreneurial family. Her education took her to the United States, where she studied chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned an MBA at the University of Southern California. A technical education and an appetite for business were already sharing the same desk.
Her early career in the family group gave her practical responsibilities. In 2004 she became a marketing director at its mineral-water subsidiary, PT Atlantic Biruraya. By 2009, she was director of operations at Mikatasa Group. She worked on expansion, which meant understanding unfamiliar markets and finding suitable locations. Real estate arrived as a business problem before it became the foundation of her own company.
In June 2013, she began Gaea, a property-management software venture. The sequence matters: operations, locations, software, then workspace. Rework emerged from experience with the pieces that an office business must fit together. Alongside those professional interests ran a longstanding habit of joining organizations, running events and introducing people. She had been doing versions of community work since her student years.
A company with one very busy founder
A visit to coworking spaces in the United States helped turn an interest into a business idea. Vanessa saw how a shared workplace could offer small companies useful relationships alongside somewhere to sit. She started Rework in early 2016, drawing on her property knowledge and the networks she had built in business and alumni organizations.
By September 2017, Rework had announced more than US$3 million in pre-Series A funding. ATM Capital and Convergence Ventures co-led the round, with other investors joining. Its ambitions included a network of locations connected by a digital application. The office was beginning to behave like a service people could access across a city.
Inside the young company, the division of labour was rather less distributed. As a solo founder, Vanessa dealt with investors, fundraising and recruitment, down to hiring office support staff. She later recalled needing to persuade prospective employees to believe in the company she hoped to build. Her preference early on was for people with experience who could help carry the work.
She was also raising two young children. Family support helped her pursue the business, but time remained a constraint. The founder could sell the dream, find the premises and assemble the team. The calendar, regrettably, declined to expand with the company.
The useful thing about an old acquaintance
In 2017, Vanessa attended the opening of another coworking company, GoWork. Its founders were Richard Lim and Donny Tandianus. Lim was an old friend. The conversation that followed created an alternative to building two separate companies toward similar goals.
Rework and GoWork announced their merger in February 2018. Vanessa became CEO of the combined Go-Rework, with Lim responsible for finance and real estate and Tandianus leading technology. At the time of the announcement, the combined business covered more than 3,500 square metres across five Jakarta locations. The GoWork name subsequently became the shared brand.
The merger put complementary responsibilities around the same table. It also made partnership a concrete answer to the limits of solo founding. Vanessa had recognized that the opportunity was larger than the organization she could build alone. Joining forces gave that recognition a structure.
Later in 2018, GoWork raised a US$10 million Series A backed by Gobi Partners, The Paradise Group and other investors. The business now had funding and a combined founding team behind its expansion. The woman who had spent years arranging introductions had made one that changed her own company.
The members grew up, too
GoWork’s choice of locations reflected Vanessa’s experience with property. Office buildings and shopping malls offered access to established business districts and everyday amenities. At the company’s sixth-anniversary event in 2022, she led a discussion about work culture and how businesses were changing their working arrangements.
The network then extended across Jakarta, Tangerang, Bali, Surabaya and Medan. Locations near MRT and Transjakarta connections made accessibility part of the proposition. A flexible office still has to be somewhere people can conveniently reach; a beautiful room cannot negotiate with a traffic jam.
The customer mix was changing as well. By March 2023, medium and large enterprises represented more than 70% of clients, according to figures published by GoWork investor Gobi Partners. That was a substantial evolution from the original emphasis on freelancers and small businesses.
In April 2025, GoWork described its direction as “Scale-as-a-Service”: helping companies increase, reduce or relocate their workspace as their needs changed. Vanessa’s stated ambition combined physical space, operational services and business community. The aspiration was practical: let a growing company spend less effort arranging its office and more effort running its business.
Medium and large enterprises’ share of GoWork clients.
A room where the founder listens first
The community part of Vanessa’s work is visible in smaller encounters. In January 2019, six Global Student Entrepreneur Awards finalists came to GoWork Menara Rajawali for a mentoring session. Before sharing her own journey, she listened to their business ideas and the effects they hoped to have.
She discussed difficult moments in building a company, including failure and recovery. The session carried the experience of a founder back to people still learning how to turn an idea into a working organization. Her network had helped her build; now she was making some of that experience available to others.
She later became a Global Innovation Alliance mentor with Plug and Play. She described mentoring as a way of returning support she had received earlier in her company’s life. Meeting early founders also gave her something in return: fresh ways of thinking about why a company exists and where it might go.
She has encouraged women founders to seek support and resist measuring their progress against someone else’s timetable. That advice draws on her own experience of comparing herself with younger founders while carrying family responsibilities. Her public account makes room for ambition and the people who help make ambition possible.
The next vacancy was in her own diary
By December 2025, Vanessa was describing another organizational change: handing day-to-day operational control to a general manager while retaining the CEO role. Having once filled so many gaps herself, she was working on a company whose decisions would depend less on her constant presence.
“If I delegate the task it will die, but if I delegate the ownership, it will grow.” The distinction appeared in her conversation with entrepreneur and podcast host Scott Pollack. Ownership asks someone to take responsibility for the result, including the decisions required to get there. A list of errands can leave every consequential choice waiting on the founder.
The change fits a longer pattern in Vanessa’s work. The family forum needed a moderator and clear expectations. The merged company needed distinct responsibilities. A larger management team needed authority it could actually use. Her interest in people has repeatedly led her back to the arrangements that help people work together.
In August 2026, the Singapore Mentorship Committee listed her as GoWork’s co-founder and chairperson for a conversation about building a career in the age of AI. The subject was human capabilities, relationships, experience and values. After years of creating places where other people could work, she was talking about what people should keep investing in themselves.
“Don’t be afraid to chase your dream.”Vanessa Hendriadi Li, 2018
Coffee, scorpions and a return ticket
Away from the organizational charts, Vanessa’s tastes are refreshingly specific. Given a choice, she has picked coffee over tea and the beach over the city. Asked about the strangest thing she had eaten, she answered scorpion. Asked where she would go without the usual limits of time and money, she chose a SpaceX rocket trip, provided a safe return to Earth was included.
Her biography also records climbing Kilimanjaro and completing a marathon. She helped establish the Jakarta chapter of the International Wine & Food Society. The pleasure of gathering people around shared interests appears well beyond the office.
When asked what she liked about being CEO, she pointed to helping team members grow beyond their own expectations. That is a fitting ambition for someone whose working life has included both arranging the room and learning when to leave others in charge of it. Rework began with her desire to connect people. The later chapters give those people more say in what happens next.