How Barbara Ex Stepped into the Global Lifestyle and Moved into China’s Market

WhiteSpace is shaping the future of work through an innovative and cost-effective sharing-space-across-time business model. Their flexible meeting spaces are proven to increase productivity, collaboration, and innovation.

WhiteSpace works with landlords worldwide to utilize underutilized office spaces to provide an amenity to tenants and a new revenue stream. How China’s Business Equation can Be Advantageous to Startups

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How Barbara Ex Stepped Into The Global Lifestyle And Moved Into China’s Market

We’re here with Barbara Ex, the Founder and CEO of WhiteSpace, a sharing economy business that offers flexible, affordable short-term meeting and training room space in China. Barbara, it is awesome to have you on the show. I’m excited to start by giving us a bit of your background and how you ended up in China.

Thanks for having me. It all happened by accident, including founding this business, being in China, and everything. It followed circumstances, and here I am. Years ago, I was living in London and my Australian fiancé came to me and said, “I’ve been offered this two-year contract in China. What do I do?” I said, “We should definitely move to China.”

I was working for a small niche consulting company at that time. I went to my boss and I said, “Do you know how you were talking about an Asian strategy in 2006? How about 2005 because I’m going to China. I’m either resigning or I’m opening the Asia branch. It’s your choice.” He was like, “You’re definitely opening the Asia branch.” We got married, and in January 2005, we moved to Dalian, China. I spoke no Chinese. I’d never lived in China before. It was the start of our “two-year contract.” Years later, I’m still here.

How did people react around you when you said to them, “I’m going to China?” Did anyone try to dissuade you and talk you out of the craziness?

No. Oddly enough, my family seemed to have this attraction to China. Part of the reason it was so easy for me to say yes was that my older sister had been going back and forth to China since the early ‘90s. She was a professor at Beijing University. She’d gone to China on a Fulbright scholarship. She’d been doing research, and so, by the time I’d gone, it was quite normal in my family. It’s like, “Rachel goes to China. Barbara is going to China. That’s okay.” My husband is Australian and I’m American. We met in London, so we were used to a global lifestyle. People shrugged and went, “They’re doing that now.”

This is much more common, but back in 2005, you were certainly one of the first, especially female founders. You’re probably the first group of entrepreneurs who are a lot more global in how they think. I remember when I came to the US, my board begged me not to go to China and stay focused on the US market. It’s like, “Hell no. The world is global. How can we neglect all these people?” Like you, I said, “We’re going to China.” The way I went to China was crazy, too. I didn’t move to China like how you moved to China. That’s a real commitment.

We certainly committed resources and we made a lot of mistakes. Those were barriers to entry because by the time you’re in China and you’ve made mistakes, then the market is ready, and you’re ready to go. Your competitors come in and make the same mistakes. How were the first few years? You went up to set up the Asian office. Was the intention ever to start your own company or was it to see where the wall takes you?

You can't possibly know what founding a business is going to be like, but you just take that leap of faith and go for it.

It was much more at that point to see where the world takes me. I would not have called myself a founder at that time. I was working in a consulting company and starting a branch. In retrospect, I can look back at my career, and there were always steps along the way to becoming a founder. It was like, “Let’s have this adventure now and see where the path goes.”

What advice do you have for people who are in a corporate setting right now? It’s an interesting time as we’re emerging from a pandemic. You made a pretty critical life decision there and there was a lot of fear, I’m sure. If not for you, a lot of people are going to have a fear about making big decisions. Any advice to people who are going through a lot of change right now, looking to switch careers, and also thinking about starting a company?

Thinking of starting a company is a big step. You can’t minimize that. Having done it years in, I’d say if I’d known it was going to be this hard, I might not have done it. I always compare it to having a child. Before you’ve done it, you can’t possibly know what it’s going to be like, but you take that leap of faith, and you go for it. You’re in it, you’re growing together, and you wouldn’t trade that path for anything else.

Advice for people thinking about taking this step, if you can, I said, “We’re moving to China.” If you’re thinking about leaving a job and starting your own company, the trick is always to break it into small steps. You don’t have to quit tomorrow and go full-time. You can make it your side hustle or do things to test the market. It’s all about those. You know this better than anybody. It’s the minimum viable product. It’s incremental steps, testing the market, doing something small, and then seeing how you like it until you get to that point where you quit full-time and commit yourself to it.

You’re quitting full-time to work three full-time jobs, basically. That’s 24 hours a day. It’s funny when you talk about your baby too. I remember people asking me, “You’re a father. How many kids do you have?” I’d be like, “Probably 250.” Every single employee and the whole company feels like it’s your identity. It’s also hard for founders because your identity is tied to the success of your company, and it’s important to break that because you will have ups and downs.

If I could go back to the previous me, who blew his twenties working nonstop on my company and be like, “There’ll be plenty of downs, so chill out and relax. This is a long-term game,” but like you, I had the same advice. Don’t jump into it. At times, I’ve said to people to jump into it. On average, not knowing who the reader is of the segment. Be thoughtful. It’s a big commitment. Just get moving and moving doesn’t mean big dramatic action. It means having a conversation. Talk to somebody, get out there, and think about what an MVP looks like.

I’m sure to talk about my business later but I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to prototype the idea for about a year before I put my money on the lease and said, “We’re doing this.”

Let’s maybe talk about that and the steps you took. If someone is listening to you, the first impression that they get is, “What? Let’s go to China without speaking the language. She’s impulsive. She makes quick decisions and doesn’t think through them.” You did think through things and you’ve been quite methodical so maybe walk us through the steps and how you got to where you are.

In terms of founding WhiteSpace, I had the idea from 2012, which was basically bringing co-working to China. I had read an inflight magazine article about co-working. When it was so early, 2012, it didn’t even have that name yet. They didn’t call it co-working. It was these new hip office spaces in empty warehouses with Wi-Fi and coffee that you could enjoy. I read the article, and I was flying from Beijing to London because I was still working with the consulting company at that time. I read the article and I thought, “I could use this. This would work in China.”

I tore out the article, and I started showing it to people and saying, “We should start this. This would definitely work in Shanghai. Let’s do this.” Everyone told me it was a terrible idea and that it would never work. From 2012 until I formally started WhiteSpace in 2018, I was playing with the idea. I was doing what you said. Going out and talking to people and trying to get co-founders involved, testing this, and talking about this. It was not impulsive. It was a six-year ramp-up to finally pulling out my own seed money, putting it down, and saying, “We’re starting this company.”

What happened in the meantime, in 2012, I did not start co-working in China, but I kept monitoring the market and still working as an independent consultant at that time. I found that by the time co-working came, I had already been working remotely for a decade. I didn’t need a co-working space anymore because my home office game was tight, but I did need meeting rooms and a space to meet with my clients. None of the solutions, including co-working, were working for me.

I could meet them in a hotel, which was incredibly overpriced. I tried meeting with them in serviced offices where I could rent a meeting room by the hour, and the service was bad. It was not catered for me. They were clearly oriented towards serving their tenants, and then they had these meeting rooms that were extra that they put on the market. Still, they weren’t optimizing the service towards someone who wasn’t a tenant, so the booking process was incredibly painful.

I booked the meeting room for two hours. I showed up early. They wouldn’t let me into the room, in spite of the fact that it was an entire floor of glass wall meeting rooms. I could see they were all empty. They’re not going to sell it between 9 AM and 10 AM but their rules were, “You can’t go into the room until you booked it,” so I’m sitting in the lobby waiting. We went in, my client showed up, he’s got extra people in tow, so we need more chairs. They charge me extra for the chair. I felt so ripped off by the process. That was my moment of, “There’s got to be a better way.”

That’s often the purest reason to start a company, too, when you realize, “I don’t have a choice. I’m so frustrated with the way things are being done now. I have to go and fix this problem.” That’s usually one of the purest motivations to start a company. That’s when you genuinely don’t care what people are saying at this point like, “I’m frustrated. I suffered from this. I cannot believe someone else should suffer this. A company needs to be built and I have to do it.”

It's hard to know if you have a vision or if it is craziness until you look back and see whether it worked out or not.

It was like, “This cannot be this bad. There has to be a better way to do it.”

Did it feel to you that you were too early back then? You’re talking about the 2010s. Did it feel to you like this is a bit of a trend, but this trend is nascent, and it only applies to people like you who are jet-setting executives flying around the world? Did you feel like, “No, this is going to be massive one day?” COVID changed all of this, but back then, where did you feel the market was?

Certainly, when I started the conversation, it was with people in 2012 and 2013. It felt early, but I was used to being out in front of the pack. I come from a tech background, so I was involved in the dot-com bubble. Remember eBusiness in the 2000s. When that came along, I’d already been using the internet, which was even the ARPANET, since the mid-‘80s.

I was like, “You guys had taken a while to catch on to the fact that interconnectivity is the future.” I was used to the experience of when I tell people about a trend that’s coming and they don’t see it, they’re probably going to get it in about a decade. That sounds arrogant. I don’t actually have that much self-belief but I do know when a trend is coming. I can see that this is going to be big.

Let’s be frank. When I came up with my startup, it was when apps were growing and people were like, “Why are you pitching this mobile app thing? Build a web platform.” I’m like, “No, you’re an idiot.” To me, it’s so obvious that people are going to be using their apps and you have to dumb down your confidence and realize that where people are coming from is not like they see what you see. To you, you know your first name. You’re as confident that this is where the market is going. I feel this in my bones.

You’re going to come across as extremely arrogant, of course, if you say that to someone else. I realized at times that I had to be like, “There’s this app revolution. Here’s the compound annual growth rate. Here’s Gartner and Forrester trying to estimate the market size. We see a gradual shift.” In my mind, I’m thinking you’re an idiot. This is going to transform every aspect of technology completely, so I can appreciate how you could come across as arrogant if you have so much belief in the trend but others don’t. That’s vision or craziness. Either way, both have similar things.

It’s hard to know which one it is until you look backward and see whether it worked out or not. I still could be wrong. I laugh. It’s like, “I don’t know. The story is not over yet but I see this trend and it’s a wave coming.”