digital-nomad
(14)
The Company That Made a Stand Out of Nothing
MOFT folded a laptop stand down to 3mm, raised a million dollars proving people wanted it, and then kept folding - into wallets, desk mats, and iPad studios. Here is how a neck ache became a product category.
Vinay Patankar
Vinay Patankar is the co-founder and CEO of Process Street, an AI-powered workflow and compliance operations platform used by thousands of companies to run recurring checklists, onboarding, and standard operating procedures. A three-time founder and Y Combinator alum (W15), he was the youngest Cisco engineer in Australia at 16, left Sydney at 24 with a copy of The 4-Hour Workweek, and spent roughly a decade as a digital nomad building remote-first businesses before Process Street. The company has raised about $15M from Accel, Salesforce Ventures, and Atlassian and has been remote since day one.
Dan Thomson
Dan Thomson is the founder and CEO of Sensay, an AI platform that builds digital replicas - interactive clones trained on a person's voice, knowledge, and personality. A philosophy graduate turned restaurateur turned Web3 marketer, he started Sensay in 2023 after a head injury wiped out his memory and dementia took hold of people he loved. His pitch is blunt: capture what a human knows before it is gone, and let that knowledge keep working - for families, for companies, and for anyone who wants a version of themselves that never logs off.
Steve Satoru Naito
Steve Satoru Naito is the Co-founder and CEO of Anyplace, the San Francisco-based platform redefining long-term rentals for remote workers and digital nomads. Armed with a one-way ticket from Tokyo and $5,000, he arrived in Silicon Valley in 2015 speaking minimal English, turned a failed first startup into a learning opportunity, and built Anyplace into a $35M+ funded company offering fully-equipped, work-ready furnished apartments across major US cities and Tokyo. Named to Forbes Japan's 30 Under 30 in 2018, Naito is on a mission to give professionals the freedom to live and work anywhere without sacrificing productivity.
Tim Ferriss
Tim Ferriss is a five-time #1 New York Times bestselling author, host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast (1 billion+ downloads), early-stage investor in Uber, Facebook, Shopify, Duolingo, and 50+ companies, and founder of the Saisei Foundation funding psychedelic research. Known for popularizing 'lifestyle design' with The 4-Hour Workweek, he is also a Guinness World Record holder in tango, a national kickboxing champion, and a polyglot who speaks five languages.
Pebble
Pebble Mobility is a Fremont, California startup building the Pebble Flow, an all-electric, self-propelling travel trailer designed to make RVing as easy as using an iPhone. Founded by ex-Apple, Tesla, Zoox, Rivian and SpaceX engineers, the company is rethinking the 50-year-old RV playbook around electrification, automation, and off-grid living.
Bingrui Yang
Bingrui Yang is the Founder and CEO of Pebble, a Fremont-based startup building the Pebble Flow - an all-electric, semi-autonomous travel trailer that raised $13.6M in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. A veteran hardware engineer with roughly nine years at Apple leading iPhone development, followed by stints at Zoox (Director of Advanced Hardware Engineering) and Cruise (Head of AV Hardware Systems), Yang founded Pebble in 2022 after a pandemic-era RV trip convinced him the category needed a complete reinvention. His mission: make RVing as intuitive as using an iPhone. The Pebble Flow - a 25-foot, 45 kWh battery-powered trailer with Magic Hitch autonomous attachment, NVIDIA DRIVE Orin-powered automation, and Scandinavian-minimal interiors - earned a spot on TIME Magazine's Best Inventions of 2024 list and began delivering to its first customers in early 2025.
Sondre Rasch
Sondre Rasch is the Norwegian co-founder and CEO of SafetyWing, a Y Combinator-backed insurtech building a global social safety net for remote workers and digital nomads. Starting from a teenage web hosting business run through an online video game community, he studied economics at NHH Bergen, served as a sniper in the Norwegian Army, advised the Norwegian government on social policy, and co-founded Superside before launching SafetyWing in 2018. SafetyWing has raised $46.6M (including a $35M Series B in 2022) and generates over $34M in annual revenue serving tens of thousands of customers across 180+ countries. His ultimate ambition is to build 'a country on the internet' - a software-based welfare system and digital nation called Plumia.
Brian Dean
Brian Dean is the founder of Backlinko and co-founder of Exploding Topics, two companies he built and sold to Semrush. He invented the Skyscraper Technique, one of SEO's most widely replicated link-building frameworks, and turned a nutrition PhD dropout's basement hustle into a $4M+ exit running a 7-person contractor team. Now based in Berlin, he's a sought-after voice on building media businesses that don't depend on algorithmic luck.
Navid Moazzez
Navid Moazzez is a Swedish-Iranian lifestyle entrepreneur, creator, and AI educator best known as the 'Godfather of Virtual Summits' — a title coined by HuffPost. After dropping out of Stockholm University law school in 2013 following his brother's sudden death, he built a multi-million dollar online business empire around virtual summits, helping students collectively generate $70M+ in revenue. He sold his flagship course Virtual Summit Mastery in 2021 and pivoted to AI education, founding Creator School and hosting the AI Creator Summit, which drew 100,000+ attendees in 2024. A true global citizen who has lived in 10+ countries and visited 50+, Navid operates at the intersection of AI, creator economy, and disciplined self-development.
Pieter Levels
Pieter Levels (levelsio) is a Dutch solo founder, serial indie hacker, and bootstrapping legend who built a $3M/year portfolio of AI and remote-work tools — NomadList, Remote OK, PhotoAI, InteriorAI, and a viral flight simulator — entirely alone, with no investors, no employees, and a stubborn preference for vanilla PHP. He pioneered the digital nomad community, co-launched the EU/acc movement, and turned a 2014 Google Spreadsheet tweet into a global platform. His build-in-public style and radical transparency reshaped how a generation of founders think about success.
Steph Smith
Steph Smith is a Canadian writer, podcaster, and growth operator who went from chemical engineering to becoming one of tech's most respected content voices. She grew The Hustle's Trends newsletter to 15,000+ paying subscribers (contributing to an 8-figure acquisition), hosted the flagship a16z Podcast at Andreessen Horowitz, sold $250K+ worth of her book 'Doing Content Right', and launched Internet Pipes - a community of 2,700+ people learning to extract business insights from internet data. She's currently at NVIDIA after transitioning from Groq following Nvidia's $20B deal.
David Kadavy
David Kadavy is a bestselling author, designer, and creative productivity expert who reverse-engineered design principles for developers, advised a startup that Google acquired, and built a location-independent career from a Nebraska cubicle. His books - including Design for Hackers, Mind Management Not Time Management, and Digital Zettelkasten - have sold 100,000+ copies in 13 languages. He lives in a cabin outside Medellín, Colombia, publishes his income reports publicly, and argues that creativity is about managing your mind, not your calendar.
Luna House
Luna House is Cascais' most-loved coliving and coworking hub — a boutique B&B with nine private rooms in summer, a digital nomad village with community programming in winter. Founded in 2022 by Olena (Lena) Matveieva, it offers coworking for 25 people with 120mb/sec fibre, an event studio, team workation packages, and a resident dog named Luna who consistently out-reviews the human staff.