Earlier this month, Laurent Dhollande, CEO of CloudVO and of Pacific Workplaces, received the Workspace Association of New York Beacon Award For Excellence. The WANY award recognizes individuals who have exhibited exceptional leadership and influence within the Workspace-as-a-Service industry.
Tracy Wilson, CloudVO COO and long-time colleague of Laurent’s, was given the privilege of introducing her beloved business partner, who didn’t yet know that this big honor was in store. Tracy shared with the group that the Beacon Award struck her personally as completely apropos because Laurent has been a personal and professional beacon for her in her serviced office career. “It is with a true commitment and love of our industry, and the desire to push it forward that Laurent gives to anyone who asks of his services,” commented Wilson.
Laurent was presented with a bottle of French champagne in honor of his country of birth as well as an engraved award of the honor itself. Ray Lindenberg, President of WANY, described the ceremony with these words: “It was our distinct pleasure and honor to bestow upon Laurent our ‘WANY Beacon Award for Excellence’ which is in recognition of an enduring commitment and shining achievement in our beloved industry, and has been awarded annually to other well-deserving leaders.”
After a successful career in executive positions with large Silicon Valley companies, Laurent came to the shared office space industry in 2003, when he co-founded Pacific Workplaces, a flexible office space and coworking space provider. That same year he coined the term “Workplace-as-a-Service” to describe his vision of the shared office space. In 2010, he co-founded CloudVO which markets virtual offices, meeting rooms, coworking passes, and touchdown access to a global network of shared office spaces under a pay-per-use or subscription basis. The CloudVO network is now comprised of over 600 locations today and is well positioned to fulfill Laurent’s original vision of supporting mobile work and distributed workforces globally. Laurent is a frequent speaker at trade associations and corporate real estate conferences, including CoreNet Global, Global Workspace Association, GCUC, and WANY.
The criteria receiving the WANY Beacon Award is that the individual must have demonstrated an inspiring vision that all members of the industry have benefited from, plus a firm and enduring commitment to advancing the industry as a whole – which captures the essence of who Laurent is and always has been, and what he has meant to our industry, to a ‘T’. As far as WANY was concerned, the recipient of the 2017 Beacon Award was an obvious choice.
