In the past 14 years, the number of Internet users around the world have leapt from 394 million to almost 3 billion. With an increasingly connected world, emerges a new breed of nomadic worker – one that leverages co-working spaces, Airbnb and the Internet to make money and travel the world.
Enter Teleport, a startup with a distributed team (split between the US, Estonia, Germany and Switzerland), that wants to create software to help ‘digital nomads’ and/or your average worker optimize their standard of living while making more money. According to co-founder Silver Keskkula, this can be done by minimizing your commute or working remotely – and he shared his own digital nomad story at yesterday’s Garage Society meetup.
“I had been working remotely for nine to ten years, then realized that with the rent I paid in Palo Alto, I could have been in a new city every weekend. I could have travelled the world and continued working like I did,” he said. Keskkula lamented his late start into the digital nomadic lifestyle – but he’s well caught up now, having lived in six countries and counting.
Keskkula, like most of the Teleport team, was a part of the early core team at Skype so they’re certainly no strangers to bridging telecommunications around the globe with software. Other solutions, such as Google Hangouts, Viber and Tango, have since arrived on the scene and have made cross-border collaboration that much easier.
“We have this mobile technology, and it’s making people more mobile,” said Keskkula. “If you think about kids right now that are playing Minecraft that are building stuff with other kids across the globe – how natural do you think remote work and collaborating with people around the world will be?”
Startups, such as Hong Kong’s Divide, are exemplary of this and have managed to build a successful company worthy of a hundred million Google dollars with the co-founding team scattered across the globe. While CTO David Zhu was in Hong Kong, his co-founders Andrew Toy and Alex Trewby were in NYC and London, respectively.
While collaborating remotely may not work for every startup team, allowing your hires to go the digital nomadic route is guaranteed to raise morale. Plus, when you’re ready to scale – you already have someone familiar with that particular market.
Teleport is still testing in San Francisco, but based on the geographies interest comes from – they’ll launch in that city next. Visit Teleport.org, scroll down and hit ‘Sign Up!’
