🧑‍💻 Home as a digital nomad

🖐️ FIVE THOUGHTS FOR YOUR WEEKEND

🌆 Silicon Valley is trying to build a new city in California

• A mystery company backed by some of Silicon Valley’s largest investors has purchased 52,000 acres of farmland outside of San Francisco at the whopping price of over $800M

• The company was started by financial wiz-kid Jan Sramek in 2017 and has been secretly acquiring the land in order to keep short-term speculators from blowing up the price.

• The idea is to build a new sustainable city outside of San Francisco that can help alleviate the housing shortage

• Billionaires wanting to build their own city is nothing new, but I don’t know of another similar project that has been able to acquire this much land. The big problem won’t be the cost, but convincing people to change the zoning from agricultural to residential/commercial.

🏡 Over-the-counter tiny homes

• You can now purchase tiny homes from your favorite everyday stores including Amazon, Home Depot, and Costco

• While some of the options are large enough to be used as a main residence, many are being used by remote workers as dedicated WFH spaces

• Importantly many of these kits only include the framing and not all the materials you will need to actually finish the build.

🎓 Lessons from Airbnb’s WFA experiments

• It’s been a year since Airbnb announced it’s WFA initiative and the results are in - “higher diversity among new hires, lower attrition, and increased revenue“

• “We're learning that we don't need a sea of desks. We don't need people to come into the office just to do email. Instead, we need collaborative workspaces.“ - Dave Stephenson, Airbnb CFO

• Airbnb seems to be one of the few large companies doing this right and not falling into pro/con remote work ideaologies. If there’s freedom for people to be location-independent they’re giving it, if they need to come into an office for something important, they’re asking them to do so for some amount of time. In the long run I think this will pay off well!

🏢 The spaces we call home

• My friend Lauren Razavi, Head of Plumia and Director of Special Projects at Safety Wing dropped another personal essay about life as a digital nomad. Here are a few quotes I perticularly enjoyed:

  • “Maybe that’s all home is, in a physical sense—somewhere you know where you left things and how the marks and imperfections got there.“

  • “What do nomads miss out on by not having a consistent home? Maybe us humans need a degree of monotony, predictability, patterns in the physical world, in order to see a steady reflection of ourselves. Not the constant stimulation of novelty and change.“

  • “Do I even want a homebase? Is this a decision that actually needs to be made, or do I just need to design my unconventional lifestyle more intentionally—to stop framing things in terms of one homebase and instead think in terms of multiple homeports?“

• I like the idea of homeports vs homebases…. what do you think?

🐣 Tweet-sized landing pages

• Recently I’ve been really enjoying Greg Isenberg’s substack every since reading his ideas around Multipreneurship

• His recent post discussed the idea of Tweet-Sized Landing Pages - conversion focused landing pages with 280 characters of max copy.

• Interestingly, when he shared the idea on Twitter he received only 100ish retweets, but 4000 people saved the tweet… people want to keep it a secret!

• The idea is simple, use short, punchy, and mystery inducing landing pages to give away high quality digital products (for free) to build massive trust.

📆 UPCOMING EVENTS:

Sept 28 - Oct 1: Nomadness Fest [📍Louisville, Kentucky, US] - A festival for travelers of color and their allies. 30+ speakers covering topics such as branding, business, domestic travel, effects of over-tourism, and much more. (👋 I’ll be there)

Sept 30: DNCH [📍Bern, Switzerland + Virtual] - Learn about location-independent life and meet like-minded people interested in the digital nomad lifestyle.

Oct 9-15: The Nomad World [📍Albufeira, Portugal] - Transformative experience for digital nomads and remote workers from across the globe. A mix of expert talks, hands-on workshops, and beach-side fun, aimed at celebrating freedom, connection, and personal growth.

Oct 16-20: Try Out Tulsa [📍 Tulsa, Oklahoma] - Check out the famous Tulsa Remote program for a week! Join industry leaders like Ali Greene, Darcy Mayfield, and Tyler Selhorn for a week of coworking, events, and fun. Tickets are only $30 and close Sept 25th.

Dec 7-13: Nomad Island Fest [📍 Madeira, Portugal] - Learn from world-class industry experts on topics like mindset, marketing, tech, wealth & health.