Stijn Beauprez

🌎 Over a decade ago now, around 2014, digital nomadism exploded with Nomad List hitting this weird little cultural moment where the technology was suddenly good enough to allow people to fly to the other side of the world, bring their laptop and work almost anywhere remotely Over the next few years then millions of people packed up their home lives and became digital nomads, roaming around the world but most after awhile just settling down in new places for long (like me too) A lot of startups came out of that digital nomad boom, but a decade later, it looks like graveyard. And it's interesting to analyze this because it kinda represents a full socio-cultural and business life cycle, especially for me because I was in the middle of it DEAD: ☠️ Selina - A coliving for digital nomads. The idea was that location independent people would roam the world and use coliving spaces to live. They raised over $400M on that idea and went public in 2021. Then it lost 100% of its value, went bankrupt, now worth $0.00010 with a total market cap of $54,000, a company called Collective Hospitality acquired it and what's so funny is where Selina tried to turn party hostels into coliving hotels (and failed), they're just turning the coliving hotels back into party hostels! ☠️ Remote Year - Group travel for digital nomads. Acquired in 2020 by Selina, which then went bankrupt (see above), Collective Hospitality is not continuing it so it's now dead 🥴 WeWork, coworking for remote workers - Lost 100% of its value, bankrupt in 2023, then bought by Anant Yardi who makes property management software and seems to be exiting coworking and entering commercial office rent "it leased 304,000 square feet in Manhattan to Amazon". Again similar to above: where WeWork tried to turn commercial office rent into coworking desks (and failed), it's now trying to turn the coworking desks back into commercial office rent. ☠️ WeLive, coliving for remote workers - By WeWork, bankrupt and dead PIVOTED: ♻️ WorkFrom A directory of coworking spaces. Pivoted smartly to virtual coworking sessions online where people work together ALIVE: 🏡 Outsite (by @manuthan) - Network of coliving spaces. Raised $325 million 2 years ago to buy more coliving spaces and seems to be doing great 🏥 SafetyWing (by @SRasch) - Health insurance for digital nomads and remote workers, still seems to be doing well too raising $35 a few years ago 🎒 Hacker Paradise (by @alexeymk + @CaseyRosengren) - One of the first digital nomad travel groups (like Remote Year) but self-funded and didn't raise money, and they seem to be alive and kicking 💻 Coworker .com - Directory of coworking spaces. Acquired by Regus in 2022 and was dead for awhile but their API started working again recently so seems alive again 🌎 Nomads .com - My site (formerly Nomad List) started 2014, still 100% owned and bootstrapped with an active community of almost 40,000 paid members 👩‍💻 Remote OK - Also mine and also 100% owned, started in 2015, now has 2 million remote workers on it So what is my analysis on this: Most of the companies in the digital nomad boom that did not raise money and kept 100% control are still alive now. Most of the companies that did are dead now. With a few exceptions: SafetyWing and Outsite Logically the bigger the bet financially the more financial engineering there is when it goes wrong and the higher odds you end up with the entire thing just disappearing into a black hole after a decade Which is sad because it's cooler to see companies (and projects) still alive after 10 years! There is also the understandable thing of how long is your breath to keep a project running? Personally I think because projects like Nomad List and Remote OK kept making money for so long and still do, it's been a good incentive to keep the site alive. Even when life got difficult, or I wasn't happy and got bored with the projects sometimes, there was tens of thousands of dollars coming into my bank account every month, so I wanted to keep it going. Then later I'd start enjoy the projects again intrinsically. It's really cool to see a market get born and explode and hype in 2014 and then large parts of it just disappear and die by 2025. Cool as in, to be able to observe that full "business life cycle" that I learnt about in business school When a market starts and there's so much hype you wouldn't be able to tell people "10 years later most of this is gone and few people care about it anymore", people wouldn't believe it. I'm most interested now to see where the digital nomad and remote work market is going next. I believe in cycles and I feel we're in some down cycle now. Many companies aren't fully remote anymore, most of it is hybrid now, and there's a strong anti-remote work pro-in-office sentiment Also, the rootless traveling of digital nomads was VERY cool a decade ago (because everyone was so sick of corporate 9-to-5 and normie life). It represented freedom, openness, accepting people for who they were, diversity, global migration etc. After 2016 we started seeing the extremes of that with the SJW wave etc. And then culture flipped in 2023 against that. So in a way digital nomads are culturally now a bit anti-zeitgeist. There's a cultural zeitgeist now I'd say of more traditional values, commitment, roots and definitely anti-immigration (not that I agree with those I just observe). So everything works together like a big spiderweb. Technical possibilities (suddenly we could work remotely and travel with our laptop). Businesses springing up to make these things easier/possible. Cultural zeitgeist that makes it "cool" to do these things. And then after a decade the whole thing flips reverse. But the cycle doesn't stop here. If 2007 was the first digital nomad wave with @tferriss, and 2014 was the second one with Nomad List, then 2021 was the third one with COVID making remote work popular, and then possibly the next wave is 2028. How that will look I honestly have no idea, it was much more clear in 2014. I will try figure it out and steer my businesses towards that so I can hopefully be early But whatever happens, I'm grateful to have been able to be part of this wave and being one of the few that still has their business alive and kicking It's 2025 now and the wave is obviously AI, and now that you're in it you might think this will just go on forever and AGI will come and it will be huge, and it might, but in a decade from now most of the companies you know will be gone in a startup graveyard as the bets didn't work out Which is of course exactly the idea of startups, these high growth rampant bets that you're surfing onto a wave towards billion dollar markets, but for most, of course, that doesn't work out!