Jamie Hodari is looking for his replacement after selling Industrious, the coworking company he cofounded in 2012, to CBRE for $800 million last year.
Hodari, 44, became a senior executive at at CBRE after the acquisition in charge of its building operations and experience division. He oversees the management and operations of more than 8 billion square feet of space worldwide and about 95,000 employees.
For the past year, he has also remained the CEO of Industrious, but is now seeking a successor to run the platform, which has grown to 200 locations around the world. The role will report to him.
Hodari discussed with Business Insider what it was like to transition from leading a startup to becoming a top executive at the world’s largest real estate services company, how he uses AI, and the advice he gives young professionals. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What is it like stepping away from the company that has defined your career?
I know that the overwhelming likelihood is a stranger who I never met until this process started is going to be running my baby. There’s something daunting about that and a little complicated, but also super exciting.
What are you looking for in a successor?
I’ve seen people with a big ego or who don’t treat their colleagues with not just respect, but real warmth, end up flaming out. So we have to find a CEO who’s a badass and ultra ambitious, but also wants to be part of a culture that operates that way.
You get scared that you hire someone and they’re an amazing CEO, but they turn it into an unbelievably serious company where people might be not trusting each other or something like that.
You now manage 95,000 workers. How did you adapt to that?
Industrious was always an underdog. Industrious is very personal. Every person in that company has a pretty clear sense of who I am, what I care about, and what kind of behaviors I would reward.
I post on LinkedIn a lot more than I did. I do videos. I haven’t totally cracked the code of that yet.
What is your management style?
There’s a different breed of senior leader that can do hard things, but ultimately is good at walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. I’m reading “Project Hail Mary” right now that the Ryan Gosling movie is based on. There’s a throwaway line about how easy it is to engineer things that don’t have to keep humans alive. That’s a lot easier than trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B and make sure that the people inside the space station are thriving.
Do you now look at yourself now as a small fish in a big pond?
I’ve loved having a mentor and have found it freeing in a way to have a boss, which is Bob Selentic (the CEO of CBRE). There’s elements that are pretty lonely about being a founder, CEO. You show up at the bar after work for the work drinks and people want to talk to you, but they’re kind of nervous.
At Harvard for grad school, there was this class called followership, and it was about how to be a good follower. Part of thriving in the world is being able to be a good follower.
How much time do you spend with Bob, CBRE’s CEO, and what have you learned from him?
Bob is so obsessed with the truth of the matter. The most plain English, clearly communicated way to get to the heart of the matter in a situation and has zero patience for promotion, for spin, for anything like that. Sometimes with startups, there’s this fake it ’till you make it sort of element. In a big public company you just have to be unbelievably good at saying what you’re going to do, then actually doing it and building this almost limitless track record of doing that with no fluff.
How do you use AI?
I definitely use AI daily and I’m actually starting to run up against how to use it in a way that doesn’t bleed into being phony. I’ll make voice notes after I meet with someone. That voice note knows that their kid plays travel soccer. With AI, you can get alerted “I just saw that your kid’s team won the state championship. That’s incredible.” Do you have a duty to say: “Hey, AI flagged for me that your kid’s team just won?”
No one has defined culturally, what does it mean to be authentic about your use of AI?
What career advice do you give young people?
I went to Yale Law School. You could roughly divide the class in half. The people who said, “What do I want to be doing?” and the half that said, “What’s going to look best on my resume?” The first group are doing so much better in their careers. The ones who started from the outside in; it’s like they chased every brass ring until they’re now in their mid 40s and there’s no brass rings left.
The other is to be easy to work with. If you’re the kind of person where, when someone finds out they’ve been put on a project with you, they’re like, “oh shit,” that, to me, is fatal.
Adam Neumann, when he was the head of WeWork, famously offered to buy Industrious and suggested that, if you didn’t agree to sell it, his business would crush yours. Do you ever feel like you won?
I got cut from the ninth-grade no-cut soccer. I never really got the competitive bone. I find it super demotivating to have conflict. He’s not the style of business person I am, and he definitely made different decisions at WeWork than I would’ve. But he seems pretty serious about this idea of bringing people together and that people can’t spend their whole lives sitting isolated and alone. Honestly, we need as many people out there advocating for that in as many fields as possible right now.
