Building a company while living abroad with my family

The ordinary truth of running lean companies while living abroad with the people who matter most.

I build my companies while living abroad with my family, moving slowly rather than chasing a new city every week. Slow travel, not a stamp collection.

People romanticize this and people warn against it, and both miss the ordinary truth of it. It is mostly just work, done from a different window. The wifi has to hold. The mornings still belong to whatever is hardest that day. The difference is that the life around the work is one we actually chose, in a place we actually wanted to be, near the people who matter most.

That proximity is the whole point. The reason to build the kind of business I build, one that runs lean and does not need me in an office someone else picked, is so that the default is being present. Not present someday, after the exit. Present now, on a Tuesday, for the small things that turn out to be the big things.

It is not frictionless. Timezones, paperwork, the logistics of a moving base: all real, all a tax you pay for the freedom. I pay it gladly. I would rather solve those problems than the problem of having built a life I have to escape from.

Freedom and peace are not the reward at the end of the work. They are the conditions I want to do the work inside of.