The Story
From $5,000 and a Blog to Building the Future of Remote Work Living
The film was "The Social Network." The year was somewhere around 2012. And the young economics student watching it at Rikkyo University in Tokyo had a thought that reordered everything: all of it was made in Silicon Valley. Facebook, Twitter, Google - the companies bending the world to their shape - were built within a few square miles of a place Satoru Naito had never been.
So he decided to go there. Not after saving up, not after getting a job offer, not with a plan beyond showing up. In 2015, fresh out of university with a degree in economics and a stint as a reporter for TechCrunch Japan on his resume, he boarded a one-way flight to San Francisco carrying $5,000 and a working knowledge of English best described as "constructive."
His first year in SF was not building a product. It was building the conditions for one. Without connections, without fluency, without a co-founder, he did the one thing that costs nothing but time: he started interviewing people. One hundred tech founders and investors over twelve months, documented on a blog, each one a conversation he had to earn. He was showing up at events and pitching his way into rooms, learning how Silicon Valley actually worked - not the mythology, but the mechanics.
By the time he launched InstaBed in 2016, he had a network and a hypothesis. InstaBed was a last-minute deals platform for vacation rentals - "HotelTonight for Airbnb," as he put it. He raised $320,000 from Japanese investors, hired a small team, and ran the experiment for two years. The supply side never cooperated. The platform needed rental hosts to actively discount their listings on short notice, which turned out to be a habit most hosts had no interest in forming. InstaBed shut down.
"Since our inception, our goal has been to offer individuals the freedom to travel with confidence without compromising productivity."
- Steve Naito, Series B announcement, October 2023
What Naito took from that failure was specific: understand the supply side before you build the demand side. And look for problems you personally have. When he and co-founder Kouichi Tanaka started working on what would become Anyplace in 2017, the original insight was autobiographical. They were remote workers trying to move to new cities, blocked by landlords who required twelve-month leases and credit checks that assumed a permanent address. The housing market was set up for people who stay put. But the workforce was increasingly people who don't.
The early version of Anyplace was a marketplace - a layer connecting remote workers with furnished rental listings. But the pandemic changed the calculus. In 2020, with Anyplace's marketplace traffic collapsing alongside travel, Naito made a decision: stop aggregating supply and start controlling it. He approached Nima apartments in San Francisco with a proposal: let me lease one unit, furnish it for remote workers, and sublease it. If it works, we scale.
It worked. Anyplace Select was born - a premium product where the company takes on the lease risk, furnishes each unit with an ultrawide monitor, ergonomic chair, height-adjustable desk, professional webcam, key light, and gigabit internet, and re-rents it to remote professionals at a 50% markup. The model hit a $1 million annual run rate within seven months of launch. Within two years, Anyplace was operating 100+ units across San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and San Diego, with 80-85% annual occupancy and unit-level profitability.
