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hello and welcome to another episode of Wannabe Entrepreneur the podcast about what's really like to bootstrap a
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company and today i have a new person in the business kind of a newbie in
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bootstrapping his name is peter levels what's up with everything good what's up man thank you for having me yeah thank
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you for for taking the time i think obviously everyone that is listening to to this knows peter
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is kind of the person that started bootstrapping was just chatting about it off the record and he just said that now
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bootstrapping is kind of mainstream and everyone speaks about it when when he first started everyone was more into vc
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and startups and shark tank and not a lot of people were actually speaking about the bootstrapping so is
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the creator of nomad list remote okay rebase.co and i guess another thousand
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cool projects and yeah super excited to have a chat with you and i guess we can speak a
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little bit about rebates about portugal about bootstrapping i have a lot of questions
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so super excited yeah me too i always ask this to to the people i'm
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interviewing to to introduce themselves in their own words if you don't mind would you would you do
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that yeah sure yeah so uh my name is peter levels uh i'm originally from holland
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um amsterdam kind of i wasn't born there but i lived there a lot and everybody knows amsterdam so it's easy place to
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stay you know yeah um i love the city and it's such a cool city yeah it's it's beautiful especially in the summer it's
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amazing and uh and so i make kind of like startups but like not like really like billion dollar
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startups but i mean million dollar startups is kind of good and they're uh kind of indie so i don't
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really raise funding for them i just make it kind of myself i i write code i
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design i make the logo i do the marketing i do pretty much everything i make the
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database i make the code and um and i made like a lot of projects like
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over like 70 projects and a few became successful like nomad list
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uh and remote okay um and recently like you said rebase and most of my products now are about kind
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of like remote work and it's kind of like my mission is to
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promote the freedom of global movement uh that's enabled by remote work and uh
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yeah that's kind of like what i what i you know what i live for like that's what i want to do and that's what
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i did for the last i guess almost like eight years now i think so why this motto why why having this
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mission of allowing everyone to travel freely i think it's it's something that uh
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like like when i grew up i i didn't actually i didn't travel like around the whole world it was like the first time i
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i really went outside like europe was uh in 2009
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i studied business administration in amsterdam and they had a program like
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exchange program like many people do it these days and and i went to korea and i studied in
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seoul at korea university that's the name of the university and um and it was like life changing i was like wow i'm on
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the other side of the world and you know like everybody i think i was like i was like scared of the of you
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know outside europe and traveling and stuff and moving abroad it was really scary i was
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like what was going to happen is it safe and stuff especially to a different continent right so i'll do 100 yeah and
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and it was so strange it was such a culture shock like arriving we we flew there with two dutch uh
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classmates who haasa and some and uh you know still best friends and
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we arrived there uh at the airport you know and flying is already kind of interesting but then like arriving in a
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place yeah in the middle of the night taking the bus and we we had no idea about how to get to our hotel or our
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hostel i think it was even with at a shared like six people dorm
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and we were just in a random neighborhood in seoul and uh with neon lights everywhere you know like asia all these neon lights
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just like in japan and we were so hungry and there was only like the street food so we eat these
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like rice cakes in red sauce and it was like super spicy and we almost
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drew up because it was just burning our throat so much you know and and then we ended up in
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some bar called the sandbar because sam means tree and we we started drinking
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and asking them if they could help us find our way to our home you know and they did and uh
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you know so we we drank a lot there and then we ended up in our hostel that night and i don't know that first night
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was already like this is so crazy other side of the world you know so much adventures and stuff
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and and and that kind of expanded my whole view on like the world and everybody was
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really nice like everybody was so nice to us outside and
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europe is interesting because it's it's somehow like its own country like a big country because the culture is kind of
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similar right yeah for sure the moment you go for insta-asian and my my only experience in india was actually in
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india and uh because when i when i moved to to germany i was i'm from portugal working
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in germany for six years i met a lot of people from india and i met people from all over the world so this was really really nice to get to know you know
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other cultures but asia and india it's such a different way of living you know it's so so
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different that you either love it or you hate it you know and yeah and it's yeah i was super addictive and i just
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want to go back because this was so interesting yeah totally man yeah it's also relative right like if you if
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you grow up in asia then you have the same vibe that like that we have about asia as with
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europe like a lot of people here are like dreaming about europe and and they're like obsessed about europe
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and i think it's kind of a similar thing it's just like it you grew up in a culture and then you go to another culture and it's just like
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it's so exhilarating because everything is different yeah and and it's it's you learn so much and
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you're kind of also like you're forced to you know like go outside and and
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talk to people and just to survive because you need to eat right yeah somehow order food and
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or buy food and and it it but it forced you out of your comfort zone are you the kind of person
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that likes to fit in or or to kind of bring your culture you
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know i feel that when you're traveling there's two kinds of people you know people that love to be tourists and they
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say like yeah we are we have this a lot in portugal by the way and sometimes with my family this happened i'm traveling with my family and we are in a
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beautiful beach and it's like yeah we also have this in portugal you know try to bring the culture there and then there's other people like me they're
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like i don't want anyone to know that i'm a tourist and i want to just fit in and and to learn from them which kind of
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person are you well it's difficult to not look like tourists because i'm blonde and white yeah yeah and that's
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not people in asia but uh no i think it's important that you that you try to
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uh you know match the culture the local culture a little bit like for example in asia you need to be much more polite
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and you need to be uh friendly and and to be talk talk softer
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because you know it's like the closer you get to the united states of america the the
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higher the decibel of voice you know everywhere you go you're americans always like
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it's just so loud and and then europe is somewhere in the middle you know and then asia just speaks often you know so
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you need to match the culture and you you need to be respectful and and then i mean of course you you bring your own
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culture because that's that's you you know and um and it's always kind of like a mix of you know with covet is very different
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because it's hard to now meet people but before covert it's it's like a mix of generally you hang with locals and you
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hang with you know other uh foreigners in a place and um there's
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exceptions to that but there's also like like places like korea are don't have a lot of foreigners uh living there so you
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you hang more with locals um places like bali changu i mean that's definitely like kind of like a resort
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town so it's yeah it's mostly foreigners living there and the restaurants are ran by locals and it's good the money flows
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the locals it just it's probably harder to hang with locals there because it's uh
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it's more of a resort time but yeah yeah i mean there's always a mix and um yeah i mean everybody should do what
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they want to do and uh you know if you want to be a tourist that's fine too
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when when you go back to and visit your friends uh back home
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people that didn't travel do you feel like that there is a difference in perspectives can you still identify with
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with your friends uh back home yeah i mean 100 i mean honestly
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the friends i had when i graduated are very different than the friends i have now like when i graduated university and
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then you know started traveling uh and living abroad are
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very different and and i still love those old friends i don't talk to them a lot i talked to the friends that kind of
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went the same way as me like you know also went kind of like traveling and remote work and um
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i mean i'd love to have a more diverse friend group but it's it
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is difficult because um you change
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when you go abroad and and and people that stay in their own country also change right
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and right people become more set in their ways and it's funny to see that normally
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this is my experience as an expat the first like one or two years it seems that every time you go back home
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nothing changed and you changed so much yeah but then after like three four
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years i started noticing this it means that it seems that like they moved on
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they have their life and and then i feel it it's an interesting thing now that i that i returned because
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i have a lot of friends that i met as an expat and i really identify myself with them and now i'm
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back and my friends here it's hard to reconnect um even though i i like them but no it
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really sucks because you had you had a lot of shared history and and there's nothing negative about them there's also
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nothing negative about us and and i think it's natural that the people in your life change throughout your life
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and it's not a bad thing it's just it's it's a real challenge to have a very
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diverse friend group and like honestly i think the people that go abroad the first time and orgonoman and
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stuff like the first two three years they're like insufferable that's the word like they cannot stop talking about
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oh my god yeah everything's amazing abroad and you know oh my god i went to asia and i went to latin america and
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so that's really annoying for people to stay at home but then it's also annoying because the
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you know i do think nomads and people abroad they get over it they're like okay it's just it's not better or worse
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just like different it's a different lifestyle yeah and that but i do feel like maybe the people that stay at home
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they do get threatened by if you make a different life choice than
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them because they want to have a cognitive kind of
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confirmation that they made the right choice because if they made the wrong choice
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for them you know like if things work out for you abroad
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and they think they also could have done it then maybe they made the wrong choice so definitely missing out
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yeah so then the easy way is to attack it and that's what i do see like people are like like especially like
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um you know i would say 2014 2015 i had that a lot
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where i would talk to people in amsterdam at home when i was you know flying back and
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they were like peter this doesn't work you cannot do this like yeah you know people need community you need roots you
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need to be in one place um and you know remote work doesn't work you need you need a an office you need
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people colleagues and stuff and all this stuff and i was like yeah i mean kinda but
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also i mean all my friends were doing it differently and you know it's going well we're
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we're working remotely or we're building companies and it's you know it wasn't going extremely well but it
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was we were making our own money from it you know and it was going okay you know and then now of course
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everything changed because remote workers mainstream you know airbnb ceo brian chesky just tweeted like uh we're
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all gonna become digital nomads and suddenly it's mainstream and and there's a certain vengeance aspect to that like
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look i was right but also there's the the the realization i think that you
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should be open for different ideas but you shouldn't think that your lifestyle or you know is better or their lifestyles
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worse i think it's good to respect everybody's lifestyle and and and i guess learn about it and
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what did your family say when you started this life of living the digital nomad like they first of all did they
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want you to be an entrepreneur full-time an entrepreneur or were they worried that like okay why don't you just get a job
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and and get on with it yeah uh i mean dude my parents are amazing like my mom and dad are
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like now i i realize more and more they're really amazing because the only thing they always said was like you know
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beat as long as you're happy you know and i guess also don't hurt other people then we're happy for you
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you know just do whatever makes you happy and they never told me what to do are they also entrepreneurs
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no no my dad's a doctor and my mom is a lawyer but she didn't really work she just raised kids my dad always wanted to
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become a filmer uh they grew up really poor and this was after the war in world
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war ii so he was born just after that like uh in 1948
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and you know the city he was in rotterdam was completely flat bombed by the germans was gone and
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it was the whole country was in ruins after the war and everybody was poor so my grandmother told my dad like you know
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my dad was like i'm going to go to film school i want to become a film director and my grandmother was like no you're
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not going to become filtered you're going to become a doctor so this was i think you see this a lot with
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uh families in asia also where the parents tell you what you need to become doctor lawyer or something so i
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mean everywhere no in portugal is the same everyone wants you to become a lawyer or a doctor because they make money
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exactly yeah yeah it's a way out you know and uh
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so it was really it was kind of sucked because he wanted to be and he did he did a lot of film and now he's retired and he studies film history and stuff
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and he's doing a phd in film history amazing like uh do you think you are an inspiration for
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him no i think he's an inspiration for me and my parents are because um he
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i know what you mean he he always told us to do whatever we wanted to do because he was forced to
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become doctor right and right that was a big lesson for me like
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you know don't do i mean this is also a point of luxury because
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if you grow up uh middle class or upper middle class then uh and holland doesn't
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really have poverty i mean honestly like the country has a lot of social welfare systems so most of the country is middle
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class which is really good um but my point is like uh i had the opportunity because i was like if i was
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his generation my mom would have my dad would have told me like you need to become a doctor lawyer so i was the second generation of that
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cycle and then you have the opportunity to become you know whatever you want you can also become very lazy i guess
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but so where where did the inspiration come from to become an entrepreneur where were your idols man so i come from music
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like i was i was first i was doing like graphic design when i was like 12 years old on the computer like photoshop stuff and art
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visual art and i was in all these online communities like one one was called now go create the
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other one was called yeah ray i think yeah ray still exists this was like early early internet like
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2003 or something yeah way back and and we'd always like download like illegal software we've done it like
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photoshop you know like the where's websites and we don't photoshop we download like you know other premiere to
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make video like after effects i made a lot of graphics like that video graphics i wanted to become really good at this art
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stuff and and then i went to a festival in my hometown like annual festival the fidasha faces for this big event we have
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and there was a guy with a laptop in this little like really small show there was really big shows music shows all
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these really small shows this guy was doing like glitch music like [Music]
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like his idm intelligent dash music like very pretentious anyway he had a laptop and he was making
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music i was like wow i have a computer so i went back around the stage kind of and i looked at his laptop
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like which was the software and then my brother was like oh that's reason so i downloaded this program reason of course i downloaded it
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illegally they have money and i started making music and then first i made idm and then i made
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drama-based music and then i started you know djing and my own songs in holland and i started doing
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uh my own like my own shows and stuff and i even played in in uk i went on the
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radio and in uk on the bbc i was playlisted with my music and it was going really well and uh but mostly i
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learned from the making my own cd because everybody's making your own music right like you didn't do remixes
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no i made my own music yeah that was the special thing because most people just dj i made my own songs
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so that's what i find really interesting already because you know i really love music as well i'm not a musician but you
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know i play the guitar and i i actually did making an album but just for fun you know but i i find it as the ultimate
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um creative art like i don't know i feel that the same with coding i started coding
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because i i found a way to transform my ideas into reality with just a laptop
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and it's kind of the same with the guitar i mean you can get your thoughts into a song that makes
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sense and touch people and you know it's really a great way to to explore your
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creativity is that why you like music so much too well well i mean my dad my dad
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was also very creative and he always supported us to to make all this stuff on the like all the computer stuff was new but
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he was he was smart enough to think like okay this is the future so let these kids play in the computer a lot
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make whatever they want like my brother uh made 3d models 3d animation with 3d studio max
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back then you know when he was like a teenager and my other brother was doing more like hardware stuff like
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electronics and stuff but we were always like creating and my dad and my mom always supported us to
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not go like we couldn't ask for like playstation or something
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but we could ask for like painting tools or you know a guitar or something like they
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really i think purposely pushed us towards creative tools to use and
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i mean i would do the same thing and um but yeah of course music and but every
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expression of creativity is is just pure and magical and
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you know if it's visual art graphic design music or writing even or websites
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i think they're like entrepreneurship i think this is the big thing people not in entrepreneurship but not in business
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they really misunderstand like entrepreneurship is way closer to creativity in arts yeah then to
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corporate big business like i started business and i so i started corporate stuff you did an mba
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right so so my bachelor's was like business administration and uh my master's with entrepreneurship so
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i learned kind of both things and i think entrepreneurship is way closer to creativity and expression
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uh than to big corporate business because business is about like you know wearing suits and it's like management
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and it's like yeah you know it's it's also interesting in its own way but it's more like
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like mba theory comes from the military actually comes from 1950 us military
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management and theory and and and entrepreneurship comes from creativity
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from arts you know it's it's completely different and yeah and you know i've been trying to find with all the
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interviews i've done i'm trying to kind of find what is an entrepreneur you know what is the
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core of being an entrepreneur and one thing that i've noticed is that most of people are interviewed is
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they want to create their own thing and and they might be really happy with the company that they are working for
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but the only problem that people normally find and i say this all the time is that
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it's not their company it's no and and if you if you compare it with let's say
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an artist a painter uh i mean there's you can clearly distinguish the difference between
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painting someone else's painting right someone tells you to paint something you just do it or painting your own art
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yeah and it's exactly the same for entrepreneur i mean you can have some fun working for others in the project
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that you believe in but it's completely different than making your own company right
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yeah i understand and i think part of it has to do with autonomy like autonomy is a it's a word we don't use or not enough
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i think um autonomy my friend elmer de boer he's a dutch writer also kind of makes startups now
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but he writes a lot about autonomy and the concept is that having the power over your own decisions
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it doesn't necessarily mean that that you're like egoistic or something it means that you have your own authority over your own
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decisions and you choose yeah and if you choose to to
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do things for other people that's that's also autonomy you know what i mean it's like it's not egoistic it's more like
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you said yeah and of course this is you know this
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all comes down to philosophy like this is a choice that probably has a lot to do with uh individualism
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hyper individualism you know and psychology too though because i feel that people there are people that are
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not comfortable with taking their own decisions so much and they prefer you know
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being guided and then there's people that like the of responsibility of taking their own
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lives in their own hands or or even like being a leader well i i think it's
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i mean this is a controversial opinion but if you look at kids like when they grow up how they're playing like creatively with
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with like their toys and they're drawing like every kid's drawing always right they're really creative and
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they're really autonomous and they are very excited about a lot of stuff and i feel that
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the education system doesn't give you the they they they i mean many people say
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this but they remove this autonomy and this creativity out of kids right at a very early age like no you did it wrong
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you know no that's not how you draw a tree yeah what if you draw a tree in a more interesting way i mean it's it's
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it's like you have to follow by the rules and rules are of course they decimate creativity because
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you know the best creativity is unbound it's like you know i mean it's
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yeah i mean i i think yeah we're definitely getting very philosophical here but i i would also argue that
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to live in a community you need the leaders and the creators and then you you need the people that
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also kind of fall in line so i don't know if this is not just a survival thing you know when they say no this is
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not how we do it we do it like this and then i think this is i think i think you make an assumption
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that i don't know if it's true necessarily because you make an assumption based on this this
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industrialist capitalist hierarchy of like a percentage of top leaders
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and then some followers and stuff i i don't think this is necessarily um
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it's just how we run things now but if you look at the future this is not necessarily how we run things in the
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future like look at the rise of crypto and decentralization and stuff where
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and again autonomy over your own you know accounts your money stuff
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accounts that cannot get frozen i think the trend is not towards hierarchy the trend is towards
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um that more people have a voice look at look at like youtubers now that get more
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views than media channels media channels where are more people that have a voice or different people that have a voice
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right i don't know because now if you're a youtuber you can get a voice and maybe before you couldn't
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but still it doesn't mean that everyone can have a voice because not everyone can become a youtuber
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no everybody can have a voice because everybody can upload a video on youtube right but it doesn't mean that people
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will listen to it true but you have to define what it means what it means having a voice like before you
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couldn't even get on the tv you know it was like it was a gatekeeper and now it's all open
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i think that's that's the potential is there right yeah i mean having people listen to what you say
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that's that's never guaranteed that shouldn't be guaranteed but you should be able to have a voice and
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but yeah i i i think we are going away from hierarchical structures not towards it
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i think that's yeah and if you look at i mean of course you're right history is full of hierarchical structures like look before uh look in this like 12th
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century something like the feudalism you know people who own the land and rent it out and
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stuff it's it's definitely it's definitely of old time i guess you're right but
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i don't think it's necessary yeah i mean it's this is very interesting topic i i totally agree with you but you know i
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tend always to question everything and understand if the reason why we are doing it in a certain way is
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it the right or wrong but in the end yeah there's no there's no right or wrong right so yeah it's an interesting topic yeah
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going back a little bit to entrepreneurship even though i would speak about this for hours you you had your masters in business but
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you also mentioned quite often that you learn most of your things by doing
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and i i'm very curious about what have you actually learned from your studies
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that it would be really hard for you to learn by just doing great question i think
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i so i did my bachelor's in business and my master's in entrepreneurship and my bachelor's i like i tweeted this whole mba thread
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some years ago with everything i learned all the theory and stuff and business theory is interesting but very
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limited because it's it's all these conceptual frameworks like porter's five forces and stuff it's
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like these these people who like okay i think we should categorize things in
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this way you know and you cannot test these things this is social studies you cannot test them scientifically like like you can test
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with biology or chemistry so it's all quite subjective but i think yeah i mean i think basic theory
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like porterford is like like i think it's like barriers to entry like being a market with high barriers to entry
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you know so it's hard for competitors to get in you need to differentiate diff differentiate as a as a company as a
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product that kind of stuff's kind of interesting so these are concepts that you learn in your studies
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and uh are crucial for for building your products i don't even think crucial i think
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honestly i don't if if i was 18 i wouldn't go to university like i wouldn't i would just
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skip it and this was this was i mean different than two years ago i think but now things are changing so fast
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like i think the only reason to go to university is to uh show that you have the discipline to sit
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through like four years of course work and write a master's thesis or something or best diseases
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and surely you have the discipline i think it's a discipline test but i just don't think the connection i
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think the world changing so fast now that there's no connection necessarily
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especially with social studies like business there's no connection with the current reality of the world and what you learn
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in school it's just all outdated within you know a month so you think you could have had the same
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success you you had with your projects without going through uh your studies
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i think yes when i talk with my dad about it he's always like no well pete you learn a lot of integral academic
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fundamentals blah and i'm like because he's really about this academic but i'm like
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i don't i don't know man i i yeah it's hard now because you you went through it right like you would need to to find
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examples of people that didn't go through it well i i know from my peers like it's always good to compare
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yourself to your peers like my classmates and stuff and most people didn't start a company and right most
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people just went to become employees and stuff so
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man the amount of stuff i learned is like in the reality and practical from doing things in the last like eight
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years um would be nothing bad against my university i
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think it's just all universities but something like a thousand times more than the stuff i learned in university yeah i
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mean i know it's a popular pain but yeah no well i totally agree and in the end a
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course is one person that decided that for you to be called an engineer you need to study these subjects
29:39
but in reality you need to learn much more right or or just different things depends also what kind of engineer you
29:45
want to become and so on 100 basis you know the basis and you get the time also to go
29:52
in depth into things that might not be super relevant but in it's also important to know right
29:58
let's say mathematics you you probably don't use mathematics in your daily business
30:04
but knowing it it it's it's also important somehow because
30:09
um it trains your mind to maybe think in a different way yeah i mean obviously like yeah like i i
30:16
had i mean i had a lot of problems with mathematics because i'm not good at it so uh i think i got kicked out of high
30:22
school for me for my mathematics grades it was too low and i had to get
30:28
back into university by doing all these tests uh for statistics and mathematics and i studied all summer
30:34
or months in the ethic of my parents house uh just learning this math stuff was so
30:40
difficult but um but then honestly pointless no it was just very difficult for me and
30:48
like dude integrals like formulas and integrals are insane you need to they're insane yeah you need to
30:54
like you need to take a formula and then expand it into what it was like wow it's
31:00
so difficult but i barely use that
31:05
like i only like in my coding i i do plus i sum format variables and i
31:11
right i mean i do sometimes like statistical tests but that's just easy stuff you just search how it works you
31:17
install a library like b test t-test and stuff significance but
31:22
yeah that's right i think again it's more about discipline it's like showing that you can go through it i think the
31:28
social part of university is very important like meeting people dating going on dates and stuff parties
31:34
it's very important it's extremely important i think yeah but if you were if you're 18 now like and i keep meeting
31:40
more and more of these people that are 18 and they just skip university and just go nomad and
31:46
i think i would do that i would go nomads start businesses and stuff try a lot of
31:53
stuff you know that's like the most exciting thing you can do now with your life and it's probably right now it's probably as
32:01
interesting and probably more interesting than university i wouldn't say this two years ago but things have changed rapidly i mean yeah i totally
32:09
understand and i see our point i also think that people shouldn't rush too much to start
32:15
their own company and i he just now someone was talking with me on twitter and asking like i'm 18. i need
32:21
to start my company right now otherwise i'm losing time i'm like what's that shield
32:27
you know there's so much to learn and uh i mean i don't think that there's a need for uh for that stress right just out of
32:35
the bat no but i think it's natural like i i had to stress like in my 20s like
32:40
and it peaked at like 27 or something where i just had
32:46
mental breakdown i mean it's also why i started traveling but like just this stress of like oh my god i'm gonna
32:52
be 30 i'm not successful blah blah blah and yeah you know
32:58
i think becoming successful and then therapy helps a lot of that
33:04
how do you deal with that how do you deal with this you know getting 30 and not being successful like how did you
33:10
overcome that it's so relative successful right because like you your life is already great but
33:17
but no but i mean when you're 27 26 and you're you know from holland and you're like middle class kid and you and your
33:24
goal your dream is to do startup and stuff and then of course your definition of success is then you know getting a
33:30
successful startup but right um but what is it successful startup it's like a million is
33:36
it exactly the definition is very vague right so so that's that's why you also go into therapy like what is what does
33:42
that mean what does mean success for you and and is it something crucial that people
33:48
should define before starting no you just go the flow but i think it's
33:54
natural that people late twenties have these these breakdowns yeah you know it's everybody has it like it's called
34:00
saturn return where the planet saturn returns to the same place it was when you were born i mean i don't believe in
34:06
astrology but that's how they call it and it usually happens after you graduate and you're like wow is this it
34:12
is this my life i have a job now is this it am i gonna i'm almost free i'm gonna die you know in 50 years this is what
34:19
i'm gonna do you know and after 30 you become much more chilled at least i had that and also with my
34:25
business now doing well it really helps to become more chill and um yeah like i don't need to impress
34:32
people i don't need to i can be very autonomous i
34:37
i'm much more relaxed like i was very not relaxed you know i mean it's those stupid stories of
34:43
facebook and so on and people are like oh look at him he created unicorn with 22 yeah and and you only hear about this
34:50
because it's the survivor bias right so you're like oh my god what am i doing like these people are so famous
34:57
yeah and and the odds of you starting building our company are are so small yeah and but the odds of you starting
35:04
like that's a good bridge towards indy but like obviously starting a million dollar company are are very reasonable
35:09
you know absolutely reasonable absolutely possible because a million dollar company what does that mean it means you
35:15
know 5 to 10 x valuation of revenue so a million dollar what's that that's 200k
35:22
or 100k a year that's completely in in reach you know right to make a little app or startup or
35:28
product or website so i mean okay so let's get into that because you know
35:34
it seems to be in reach because you see people doing it but for me you know uh a
35:39
bootstrapper that started this seven seven months ago and i'm making like less than 100 bucks a month
35:46
you know it seems very very far and i i was a software developer before and i was making a good salary especially in
35:52
germany and now for me it seems impossible to get to this salary as as a bootstrapper even
35:59
though it's like my purpose and i totally love it what what were you making in germany before
36:04
uh 60k right yeah that's a lot yeah yeah tax hike but like that's also the problem because the longer you wait
36:11
it's called golden handcuffs right the longer you wait the the higher your salary becomes and the
36:16
harder it is to leave because make it like when you quit and you make your own money it's much harder to make
36:22
5k with your own business than to do it as employee right so right imagine you make 10k
36:29
it's it will take years to get to 10k with a startup you know so
36:35
it just gets harder and harder to work for yourself yeah so and this is actually one of the
36:40
questions i had here what should one do like should you start something as a sidekick
36:46
and still have your job or should you just like go all in
36:52
no i think 100 side gig i mean i did the same thing so i did my music stuff and then i started uploading it to youtube
36:58
and i um accidentally built a business there i became like one of the biggest electronic music channels networks on
37:05
youtube back in 2008 2009 2010 because nobody else was uploading music
37:10
on youtube and uh i was one of the first and i got all the big djs and artists on my channel uh in drama base house and a
37:17
lot of other genres and um i mean but if you're making music then you were
37:22
already an entrepreneur right like i mean well the thing was i was making money with youtube because not just my
37:28
own music but also other artists came on i was making money with you know ads so my point is like i was
37:33
making a thousand dollar two thousand dollar sometimes eight thousand dollars per month and this gave me a side gig uh this is
37:40
where this gave me a main gig so i could do side gigs so i could do right you know go travel after studying uh because
37:46
this youtube channel was during my study days and then when i graduated i was like my my friend hosted the guy from
37:51
korea the dutch guy he was like you can also do this remotely on the other side of the world why don't you go travel
37:56
with your laptop and just make these youtube videos would you make money anyway i'm like cool i'll do it
38:02
but the point was i had money flowing in already and that gave me like right you know
38:07
it i i left in april 2014 when traveling and
38:12
um the mon the first money i made was you know august 2014 or something so it took like
38:19
over a year yeah but get to any money i think you definitely need to have
38:24
some savings right like so that's what i've done i got some savings i'm actually getting unemployment money from
38:29
germany which is amazing that's nice yeah it's really nice so
38:35
but i still you know quit any job so i still adds my savings i have this money coming in but i'm doing
38:41
100 because it's so much work like it's so much things that you need
38:46
to learn so much things you need to try that i cannot imagine how people can do this and still have like an eight hours
38:52
or nine hours job on the side yeah i mean that's i mean yeah i mean that's life life is sacrifice you know and
38:59
entrepreneurship is sacrificed so if you want to do entrepreneurship you need to sacrifice a lot of things like you know um
39:08
this is again this is the barrier to entry if it would be easy to do it everybody will be doing it everybody
39:13
will be successful at it so it's i think entrepreneurship is one of the
39:18
hardest things to do in life i think it's you know this is maybe biased but i think it comes close to like definitely the
39:25
professional life i would say yeah like being a olympic professional athlete is also really hard and i think
39:31
it's very similar it's it's it takes so much of you especially in
39:37
the beginning when things don't work and it's emotionally so exhausting that nothing that you do
39:43
works nothing you know and by the way same with artists like it's the same again it's the same thing
39:50
you make all this music and nobody likes it for years
39:55
for me being an artist is being an entrepreneur it's yeah again it's the same thing right yeah so
40:01
but all the other things like a normal job it's so different because it's not well it's exhausting in a very
40:07
different way but it's not exhausting in that nobody uh pays you money like they you immediately get you know two
40:13
thousand dollars a month you get paid yeah salary from day one you know it's so different
40:18
and that's why i'd say the earlier the earlier you can get into entrepreneurship
40:24
or becoming an artist or whatever the better because you get so used to yeah google handcuffs
40:29
again you know and interesting i didn't know that concept but but i i mean not to uh
40:34
judge your personal personal choices but i would recommend other people to you know not not quit that job and go
40:40
live on savings i would because that gives you a limited runway i would
40:46
you know maybe work part-time or something and i know it's hard but you need to sacrifice so
40:53
you know uh when i did it i was single you know i didn't have a girlfriend uh
40:59
much of the time so i i didn't have kids for example so my point is like it doesn't
41:05
there was a lot of time like in university there was a lot of time to work on stuff for example university is a great time to work on stuff because
41:11
you know you barely need to be present at these classes like i would let my classmates sign for me so i didn't have to go to classes
41:18
and you have a lot of time to work on stuff so yeah you know that or having a main gig
41:24
and then working on the side i think is recommendable because you don't want to run out of money and then you have to go back and it's just
41:30
depressing yeah definitely and i'm i'm kind of in that position as well or i might be in the
41:36
future that i will have to go back but i still think it was worth it to be honest i've learned a lot and uh not having a
41:41
gig and having to rely on uh on yourself only i don't know it's a
41:48
different perspective like you know i don't know if you've ever heard this theory that the vikings would burn their
41:53
ships before indeed exactly yeah yeah and i i understand it doesn't
41:59
work for everyone but if you have some savings at least for me it worked i i also obviously agree with what you have
42:04
to say and well i mean you have you have unemployment money that's that's pretty much the main thing yeah yeah how much
42:10
is that what you get it's a lot it's a thousand seven hundred okay perfect then you don't need main gig then you made
42:16
the perfect choice you don't need to go back i mean yeah this is enough money to live on and uh
42:22
also the nomad thing ties into this like it is a really a really good trick is to to
42:27
use this uh freedom to go live in a cheap place you know like
42:33
move to somewhere where it's affordable it could be in your own country move somewhere like more rural small town because most of the day you're gonna sit
42:39
inside anyway on your computer so why do you need to live in berlin or in amsterdam you know when you can live in
42:44
somewhere small you could save a lot you can get like an amsterdam rent would be probably
42:50
1500 euros a month now absolutely two thousand thirty yeah absurd but and but then a small town could maybe be 200
42:56
right or 300 so that would that would 5 x your runway so you could
43:02
or something that kind of stuff is interesting and that's also what i did by with no manning like
43:07
like back then i went to chiang mai where i rented a hotel room with like i talked to the manager i
43:13
think i paid like 200 a month for a hotel room just really small with the bed and
43:19
and the food was like and i was like 50 cents or something for a rice and chicken you know or one
43:25
dollar and uh yeah my spending yeah spending was quite low and that gave me uh
43:31
yeah gave me a lot of runaway to work on stuff yeah yeah definitely if you get that
43:36
possibility i think it's it's totally worth it and if you are willing to do it i think some people might not be
43:42
but yeah it's all sacrifice man life is sacrificed like you want one thing you won't get the other thing
43:47
going back to to rebase because it's also a bit connected with
43:52
israel the possibility of helping people to move to different
43:58
destinations um so how how did this idea came to be
44:05
yeah so really interesting so uh be before covet started this was like december 2019 i was in chiang mai
44:12
with uh like daniel uh john from ghost daniel's my server guy like andre andrazimov the indie
44:20
maker guy um a lot of my mark from battle list and whip like a lot of these these kind of
44:26
famous indie people a lot of my friends and a lot of nomads and we were all in chiang mai and
44:32
um and then kovit hit and i think we flew to we flew to malaysia went to penang
44:39
and we were in penang and covered was in china and was starting to spread to malaysia to thailand
44:44
and we didn't really understand was this going to be big or small was this like nothing people immediately started wearing masks
44:50
in asia was really good and i asked twitter like should i fly
44:57
home like what if this thing because it went exponential what if this thing gets worse in asia maybe escape to europe right and
45:03
everyone's like yeah go to europe now so i flew home around you know
45:08
early february and um i went quarantine immediately i went to the airport hotel in amsterdam
45:13
and i went there for like 10 days and everybody was laughing at me like my
45:18
parents were laughing at me my friends were laughing me like why would you quarantine like man you volunteering you
45:24
you did it yeah this was this was quality didn't exist this was nothing we were on telegram groups with we knew
45:31
everything we were like there was so much information that wasn't a mainstream it took the delay from our telegram groups about kovit and
45:38
to the mainstream media was like four months it was insane or three months which troops are those
45:44
just like friend groups and then there was like specific like covet groups everybody already knew
45:50
what was going to happen with kovit on telegram in you know january 26th in asia
45:57
no worldwide we already knew what's gonna happen yeah because you could look at the statistics it was a
46:02
it was already scientists studying everything anyway my point is like like back then nobody knew anything so i flew back i
46:08
was in the quarantine hotel and this is an airport hotel normally voluntarily quarantining um
46:14
then i went to my parents house and i stayed there i started buying food i bought like a thousand euros of food
46:20
at the big uh supermarket because we didn't know if this was gonna be a crazy
46:25
endemic killing everybody or it was like well it turned out to be pretty bad but still
46:31
um yeah it's nice i did the same did you also buy toilet paper no no toilet paper i stocked up a food
46:37
like like something like february 2 or something and my friends also did and and i was wearing a mask
46:43
there was a guy who coughed at me because i was wearing a mask you know february 5 in the supermarket
46:50
because this was all before everything dude in netherlands people real it was really
46:56
hard to convince people to wear a mask i've been there uh yes and and no one was wearing a mask
47:01
even in horrible inspirations like what i mean dutch people dutch people are are a very interesting group of people like
47:08
but it took nine months before the dutch cdc to director who's an idiot to admit
47:14
like okay masks work like he said don't wear masks yeah anyway let's skip to the stuff so i was in holland for like six
47:21
months um you know close to my parents it was also i wanted to be near my
47:26
parents because this covet was especially more vulnerable to older people right i wanted to be close in
47:32
case something happened and and i was also just paranoid like i was scared that it would get to me as well uh
47:39
and then after six months um mark and me left holland mark was also
47:44
back home mark from whip battleless inimaker and we went traveling we went to berlin and prague because i was
47:51
getting really depressed i was feeling really anxious i had a long-term relationship uh and
47:56
she was in korea and i was in holland and it was kind of like not going well because we were far apart and we ended
48:04
up breaking up after but uh it was all very depressing and uh psychologically
48:09
exhausting and for everybody right it was like the whole coffee look now yeah definitely
48:14
so i started traveling with mark started feeling better again um and then on normal at least lisbon was
48:20
starting to rank really high and so mark and we're like okay let's fight let's fight portugal and we ended
48:26
up living there for like i think eight months or something from like september to april and uh in lisbon you lived in
48:33
lisbon city i lived in a coastal town in irisera and i yeah but i was in lisbon like many
48:40
times because there was like like lisbon was bustling a lot of cool people and uracil was really chill
48:46
because of kovit because you know it was outside air uh you could go for walks like markham
48:52
he would go for walks a lot um it was it was kind of covered safe and stuff and it was in nature it is super
48:59
nice i really like it too yeah it's magical place it was absolutely changed my life that place and
49:05
um yeah the the sunlight and the air like
49:10
we we started looking so good in the mirror like like our skin was glowing and
49:16
it's there's something about it's so healthy to live there i don't know what it is but the sea salt maybe but we felt
49:23
so good yeah we invited friends over and they they were the same they came from this psychologically stressed depressed vibe
49:30
from coffee and then being in nearest era and going for walks and you know eating nice food and
49:37
seeing the ocean and surfing as well and uh so we're not there and i kept talking to
49:42
people like uh foreigners there also like nomads and they kept saying like yeah i'm now resident in portugal and i'm
49:48
like what does that mean they're like well uh i moved here and there's a lot of benefits for
49:54
foreigners to move here and i was like okay interesting but it wasn't really like that instant but it kept coming up
49:59
and then i was looking for a place to live like as a base like
50:07
also for texas because uh i have a company but i also need to be like if you're nomad you you cannot just
50:12
you need like a legal place to have a bank account you know and to yeah yeah spend money and stuff and uh
50:19
so i was like okay this kind of makes sense for me so this actually a lot of people ask me this so
50:26
what is the best legal setup for a nomad so you need to have a base and then you pay taxes in that country is that it
50:33
yeah so it's really i think you need to talk to a lawyer it's really personal your own situation but the point is you
50:39
if you live somewhere over six months you need to pay tax there that's the concept that's the most important concept so
50:45
um and if you don't live anywhere over six months then there's an international law that usually falls back to your
50:52
citizenship country right so if you are you know german and you
50:57
german citizen which is different than residents so citizen is where you're born kind of where your passport is
51:03
residence is where you're registered okay so if you're german citizen and you
51:09
fly around the world and you live nowhere and everywhere then uh generally you're still taxable
51:15
in germany because it's a kind of fallback rule got it okay but if you move to portugal and
51:21
you're there you know you register as a resident you're still german citizen but you register in portugal and generally
51:27
if you're there six months in a year now you are a portuguese resident and a portuguese taxpayer and
51:33
germany doesn't care anymore as long as you don't have doing you're not making money in germany so this is very
51:39
like a minefield you need to really do it properly and portugal is very beneficial because it gives you a lot of benefits
51:44
tax benefits but also they're very pro-foreigner the government wants to attract foreigners so they're they're
51:50
like waiting with open arms to attract foreigners uh right there's no tax on crypto right now that's for example
51:56
interesting yeah and and one thing that i also didn't know there's no tax on foreign income
52:02
really like you can make money from uh outside portugal and then there's no tax on it so there are specific cases so
52:08
again i'm not a lawyer and that's why i cannot disclose any legal information right about the stuff but yeah but
52:14
there's uh you need to check your own personal situation but there's specific cases where portugal
52:20
wants to attract foreigners that have for example retirement money or death savings or they have
52:27
foreign dividends for example which are then not taxed for 10 years and the reason portugal does this is because
52:33
they want to attract foreigners to spend money in their country so imagine your portugal which has a brain drain which
52:40
is losing population every year now yeah yeah they just had the largest decrease in population in 50 years true last year so
52:48
everybody's leaving portugal a lot of people live in portugal because there's not a lot of opportunities for portuguese and portuguese companies they
52:55
don't pay a lot paychecks in portugal i mean the minimum wage or something or the the average wage is
53:00
something like 700 euros a month yeah mm-hmm if you look at the comparison with the rest of europe this is a easy european country level dude i know i
53:08
lived in germany and coming back to portugal it's that's the biggest you know pain for sure it's really it's
53:13
really bad and and there's a lot of reasons to go into why this is the case but it comes down to
53:18
um that portugal kind of needs foreigners and the government has stated that repeatedly and
53:25
um so you realize that the the the government was one one of foreigners there were people
53:32
setting up their base in portugal and then uh what what did you decided to do you try to like see okay i want to do the same
53:39
yeah so i set it up too and i was really scared because this is going to be like a legal minefield i got a lot of lawyers
53:44
uh immigration advisors tax advisers to all go through the through my setup and
53:49
they were all like yeah this is legal this is good um and and then i kept getting people asking me
53:56
like hey i also want to do this i also want i also want to register in portugal i want to move to portugal and i was like ah interesting like this
54:03
is like has a little bit to do with kovit because it was hard to go to bali it was hard to go to asia to all those
54:09
places in where nomads normally go like thailand and bali it's hard to go there because kovit was you know all the
54:15
borders were closed kinda so a lot of people that usually go to bali asia thailand they would end up in portugal
54:21
it's like a new kind of scene of nomads um it was like okay maybe i can make like a
54:27
type form and like try resell these services or like refer my immigration advisors to these people
54:33
they wanted for like some money admit this type form got some customers
54:38
um and then like in november i made a whole landing page for it
54:44
uh and i launched it like accidentally launched it on twitter i just made a photo of my laptop on my bed working on
54:49
it i wrote like pov uh building an immigration as a service startup oh yes
54:55
went viral and everybody suddenly signed up and there was you know 500 signups in a month
55:01
and um all right so this is something that i really need to ask because for me it's amazing
55:06
so i understand that the idea phase so you identify a problem
55:11
and a problem that you own you have yourself so it's much easier for you to understand the problem and how to fix
55:17
and so on and that's definitely a great way to to bootstrap a project but then
55:22
the launching part is something that i don't fully understand because you had the same for instance with digital nomad right with the
55:28
nomination with the normal list you just decided to oh my website then was up uh because of
55:35
some nginx config yes and suddenly i had thousands of people it's like no that's not how it happens to me you know like
55:42
for me i will share it with thousands or like in reddit everywhere and i don't get enough people so and i was reading
55:48
your book and i can see that you have you focus a lot on launching and you say that launching is overlooked
55:55
so what is that like what is the difference between your launch and and my launch why does it yours work so much better
56:02
than mine well so people people say like oh look he he already has followers and i think
56:08
it's true yeah okay but it wasn't true in the beginning and normally this also went viral
56:13
so i think it might have to do with the topic like remote work and digital nomad stuff is
56:19
kind of has been hot since 2014 it's been it's like an exciting
56:24
topic and so there's this thing with like you have reality you have things that are
56:29
happening and companies that are being made now and then you have people's brain and their secrets and their insight of their
56:35
brain what they're actually thinking right and you want to be in the time where
56:41
a lot of people are are secretly thinking the same thing yeah but they're not saying or doing it
56:48
yet but how do you know well exactly i have a lot of times where i'm in a
56:54
group setting and i will be like for example you're you're you're
57:00
meeting all these people you're having dinner and stuff but you're really tired for example you're like tired of walking all day but nobody says that everybody's
57:07
like kind of like and then i say like you know i think i'm really tired like maybe we should just like chill
57:13
somewhere or i should go sleep and i was like yeah actually me too like many times i
57:18
this is really bad example actually like many times i i feel like i think things and because i try to do radical honesty
57:24
i try to say what i think yeah it comes out and then suddenly people are like ah yeah i wanted to say the same thing but
57:30
i was like scared it was like you know too crazy or something right i think it's
57:36
like moving to portugal i mean that's it it's kind of crazy in a way like let's move to portugal and
57:43
register in portugal and pay tax there and with no medleys was same like let's be
57:49
you know let's move to all these cities in the world and just go live there for a while it
57:54
was like so i think the trick is to because with nomad list i was observing
58:00
that this was happening already i was in chiang mai and i saw like 20 to 30 40 people 40 nomas there living there right
58:06
but it was very small now it's like thousands but i was observing that people were already doing something
58:12
and i was working for them but they were not normal people they were like a little bit weird people you know like they were
58:19
strange like i'm strange i think and then you need to observe like
58:25
you need to try like is this a is this a like fringe is the word f-i-f-r-i-n-g-e
58:30
like a fringe thing like a new thing that's like kind of frowned upon you know and then many times where
58:37
intuition comes in right and and i know that you kind of believe in intuition and yeah god intuition but
58:43
because many times when you think something everybody else is thinking the same thing because we're on the internet and we're all reading the same and
58:49
we're all everybody watches porn everybody does things we don't talk about or read
58:54
reach articles you know like actually we have a collective brain and
59:00
but people are limited by constraints of acceptable society right
59:07
like you cannot just move to portugal it's outrageous you shouldn't do that right uh yeah most people will will
59:13
think about it but say okay this is impossible you know yeah like like uh man i i would love to
59:19
move to portugal but you know it would be unacceptable because i have my friends here and i have my job here how would my
59:26
boss react my boss doesn't accept that i work remotely all these things right so
59:32
thinking what like this is quote like what people do on the weekends or what nerds or
59:38
something do on the weekends everybody else will be doing in the week 10 years later or something yeah that's a quote
59:44
so like if you are um doing something special new like
59:49
there's a lot of examples of this like indie games like people that were making indie games like in 2010 or something or two and then blew
59:57
up and but but if you're doing this this is the problem with also i see in every scene
1:00:02
like music startups everything people are always doing the same everybody else is doing and it's gonna not it's
1:00:08
gonna give you horrible results because you need to be on the edge of something new you know so you think that your edge when you're
1:00:15
launching something is not really your technique or of launching it's more the product and the the
1:00:22
audience uh no i think it's the market i think it's the market you need to be you need to be tapped into the vein of of
1:00:28
people's brain of being in exactly this right time as well right yeah and obviously that
1:00:34
goes wrong because i've launched over 70 products projects and they you know only three or four or something worked out so
1:00:42
most of the times you're wrong some but you need to try and sometimes you're like because i didn't expect this rebase to
1:00:48
blow up like this like now it's getting like 400 500 applicants per month and then at this rate we will have ten
1:00:55
percent of the portuguese immigration market all people moving to portugal ten percent you will have ten percent that's
1:01:00
absurd because because like fifty sixty thousand or fifty thousand people moved to portugal a year so this is crazy so my point is
1:01:07
prime minister already reached out to you no they everybody asked me but these governments are so hard to reach but uh
1:01:13
it's okay i don't care there's elections now it could help i don't know yeah yeah yeah i hope they don't change the the
1:01:19
rules that would ruin my business but um
1:01:25
most people are probably interesting and unique but they are they again the same thing with kids that that in education
1:01:31
system it removes their you know creativity same thing with people like if you say something crazy in your
1:01:38
friend group i had the same in holland i would say crazy stuff that i fought and they're like peter don't say that what the are
1:01:44
you thomas that's not that's not uh you know normal or something yeah acceptable and and you
1:01:51
know you need to let your brain think things yeah because they are interesting and
1:01:58
they might be making great arts they might make great businesses
1:02:03
think you know think differently is the whole concept right yeah don't don't be afraid of uh of think differently and
1:02:09
you know if you take also another example um which which is the elon musk right and the same yeah i know a lot of
1:02:16
people might not like it but you know i love elon musk and i don't understand why people don't like this guy because he's going to to mars
1:02:23
that's exactly it so it's a very very very strange child side guys now that people don't like elements it's very
1:02:29
strange yeah it's it disturbs me i mean i think when you reach a certain point you always say haters but
1:02:35
my point is that he thinks okay how cool would it be to have a really nice electric car you know
1:02:42
and everyone's like yeah that's impossible but he thinks no i mean how cool would this be yeah it's cool let's make it you know how cool would it be to
1:02:48
click in a button move to portugal you know yeah and everyone like oh this is impossible no like it's super cool right
1:02:55
like yes then let's build it i mean i didn't even know this was possible so you need to man how you explain this
1:03:03
so you have this whole you have all these immigration advisors and they're doing everything like really like with emails and invoices and bank wires and
1:03:10
stuff and it's all really slow and you need to have some assumption like i think let's just do this through
1:03:15
stripe let's just do uh all the forms digital let's uh like you need to you need to have some
1:03:22
naive perception like that this is gonna work out and that these immigration advisors or something
1:03:28
the people you work with are to accept that you're doing all this stuff because they live in a completely different reality and
1:03:34
it's just it's just you need to jump in the pool and try and it will probably not work out and sometimes it does work
1:03:39
out but and that's also the thing with like people trying this any startup stuff is
1:03:45
like they try once they will like work on a project for a year and then of course it doesn't work out
1:03:50
because the odds are like three percent or four percent if you're doing really good you need to try multiple things you need
1:03:56
to try man i think you need to try like 20 30 times and
1:04:02
and and also one thing that and from your book we can really see this you really know how to launch in each
1:04:08
platform and how it how it works how each platform works you know reddit is different than hacker news and and
1:04:14
prototype and so on so i think it's also really crucial for people to study the platform before
1:04:20
launching understanding the the people they are launching to this is also you know about it but it's really crucial as
1:04:26
well right like the my biggest annoyance is people that are like thinking you can just
1:04:33
like you can write a tweet and then you can post on instagram and you can post it on tik tok and you can post it on
1:04:39
reddit this is they're so different like something that works on instagram
1:04:44
doesn't work on twitter it doesn't work on tiktok doesn't work you know yeah and reddit reddit is completely anti-spam so
1:04:50
the only thing the only way to leverage reddit is to be to give value like to be a beneficial
1:04:57
community member yeah and and then you might be able to
1:05:02
get them to use your thing and like ask them for feedback for example or right but you cannot just come in with luke i
1:05:09
launched your startup nobody cares you launched a startup average launch you start nobody cares it's not interesting
1:05:15
it's it's annoying it looks like spam and um yeah it's funny because we live too much inside of our brain and we are
1:05:21
selfish by design right so we think that we are we kind of all think that we are the center of the world somehow yeah and we
1:05:27
all think like everyone will care that i launched a startup but then now put yourself in the other person's shoes
1:05:33
like if someone says i just launched a startup whatever would you actually care would you click you know i try to always do this
1:05:38
exercise but it's very hard this is this great exercise the the the best thing you learn is like that like people who
1:05:44
say like i meet a lot of those people like i'm gonna build a billion dollar company and uh yeah they're they're so confident
1:05:50
their own thing and what is the idea i'm not telling you the idea yeah that's that's stuff yeah and then
1:05:56
they launch and completely nobody cares and it barely goes but this is good this is a reality check
1:06:03
because everybody thinks their is special and it's not you need to get stuff out of the door so your first product will fill probably
1:06:10
and your second also you freed also but this gives you a reality check that
1:06:15
yeah what you make should actually be somewhat interesting better or cheaper
1:06:21
right it's a better product or it needs to be cheaper products yeah
1:06:27
and and the can you now this better distinguish if a product will or not succeed before starting it with your
1:06:34
experience i focus a little bit more on like not necessarily but i i like rebase i
1:06:39
know it's a it's a money opportunity like it could make a lot of money right so you start thinking about monetization
1:06:46
immediately also no because i make enough money like now it's something like two to three million a year
1:06:52
so i i don't it's a crazy amount of money but wait for for you almost right like there's no
1:06:57
you don't have a lot of expenses right no yeah exactly so it's it's insane money and
1:07:03
uh and i barely strengthened it it's all invested dude you should not say this
1:07:08
well it's on the twitter right it's on it's on my open so it's more like a challenge to
1:07:13
make a cool uh new startup that's yeah uh that works and but i also still make projects
1:07:19
that that don't have any monetization you know like uh i made airline lists like comparing airlines route maps also but in real
1:07:27
life this is fun because are you afraid of flying or not uh no but well i say a little bit i i i'm
1:07:34
not really super comfortable i i'm i'm more comfortable like i know the
1:07:40
the odds of uh chris flying is really low but i'm more comfortable for my own like irrational
1:07:46
fear if i'm in like the safest airline with the safest plane yeah and i was super afraid actually now i'm much
1:07:52
better i kind of overcame it but when i was super afraid having this filter you know that you have in your website like
1:07:58
safe airlines no crashes would you know just interactionally make me so much more
1:08:03
comfortable yeah but it's so irrational because like i drive a motorbike here in thailand and it's like 180 or something
1:08:09
you die so and then flying the worst airline i think is nepal airlines and it's like 100 000. so yeah exactly and
1:08:17
if i go on a motorbike i'm not scared at all you know so it's completely irrational but but it's nice to fly with like i don't know like singapore
1:08:23
airlines emirates qatar uh with you know airbus a350
1:08:28
yeah uh airbus a380 is great um yeah 727 max i
1:08:34
mean honestly it's not great and it's still the one with the crashes the
1:08:39
yeah and it's still like it's not it the plane doesn't fly without without software like it
1:08:45
like i mean airbus plays also not but this whole plane is wrongly designed for eco purposes it's just not a good plane and
1:08:53
yeah i don't think anybody should fly on it so allegedly i don't want to get sued [Laughter]
1:08:59
so you build a website to kind of show this but like this website is not monetized so i mean like
1:09:05
the monetization aspect is more like i do think more about it um in the concept of like serious companies
1:09:11
like rebates for example but i also think about the impact right like like now with rebates we have
1:09:17
uh venezuelan families uh venezuela is you know
1:09:22
countries quite in ruins and in terms of like the the money and
1:09:28
society and stuff yeah and i had a friend from there and it's crazy told me it was robbed 18 times at gunpoint
1:09:36
yeah it's insane how is it possible yes absurd yeah so it feels nice to be able to move people out of there
1:09:42
help them and and like that was that's i think i'm the most proud of in the last year or
1:09:48
something like that this product is a i don't know it sounds so cliche right it's not easy but not
1:09:55
cliche i think it's i mean it's really important yeah yeah it feels really cool to it like
1:10:00
it's not about money anymore for me but it feels really cool that this is a website that i made like a hp script in
1:10:07
excel php is in excel php is saving people from venezuela like that's amazing i don't know that's the beauty
1:10:13
of thinking i would say yeah yeah i think this because you could do so many bad things with tech like look at facebook all this data stuff but you can
1:10:20
also do really good things and yeah yeah it's just and and you you don't need you know you can do it alone solo
1:10:27
on your laptop from the back that's what i do and with coffee and yeah i'm still doing it after eight years and
1:10:33
you can you can change people's lives and you can leave the world better than you found it and that's also my mission
1:10:39
is that your mission yeah is it like your purpose somehow life purpose yeah i think that yeah yeah i feel
1:10:44
it sounds again so cliche like i'm also not perfect i also make mistakes and i also like you can get rich but then you die
1:10:51
you cannot bring your money yeah into death you know so it's old make doesn't really make it's not useful
1:10:56
legacy is also not that useful but i don't know just it's a nice purpose to have to leave the world better than you
1:11:02
found it and that's no i totally i totally agree with you and it's the same i wrote something similar in india
1:11:08
hackers uh recently because that's also my purpose um
1:11:13
are you religious no i'm i guess i'm agnostic right like i mean like
1:11:19
my family is like well we're not practicing but we grew up like roman catholic weirdly i keep meeting a lot of roman
1:11:24
catholic people like even in asia like the people i um the girlfriends i had were roman
1:11:31
catholic but not on purpose and the friends i have a lot of roman catholic and when roman catholic is like a minority in
1:11:38
christianity you know most are protestants also in my country so i think something is the cultural roman
1:11:43
catholic do you know this yeah i think so i think it is right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i think uk is protestant holland's
1:11:49
protestants but we were from catholic so but i'm not i'm agnostic like i don't know uh
1:11:54
yeah what there is after death i don't i i i probably believe in like that
1:12:00
you know because i did mushrooms and and also the things you learned like that everybody's connected and
1:12:06
that maybe we're all one one person and one consciousness and right
1:12:11
you know i think that's probably true or something wait but now i don't understand you did mushrooms and that's
1:12:18
you came up with this i mean that's kind of the feelings you have when you do like uh
1:12:23
you know the feelings of connectedness but i i do feel the feelings of connectedness anyway so i really need
1:12:28
drugs to open up so much but it's um i don't know we're all probably the same person
1:12:35
you know the same consciousness this is very that sounds logical to me it's a very interesting video about uh
1:12:41
from kurzgesagt i don't know if you watch it on youtube yeah yeah they have a video just about the theory that in the end we
1:12:47
are all the same person uh it's a very interesting theory i've never yeah maybe like you think about it maybe
1:12:53
you're all one person and and that's god and yeah and then you also get to you know simulation theory or like
1:12:59
multi-dimensionalism i hate those i don't want to speak about that freaks me you know yeah where like
1:13:05
there's like infinite dimensions with different realities and man and if you start thinking about it
1:13:10
it feels kind of lonely you're like oh i'm in my own dimension stuck now and and you know ricky morty
1:13:16
on netflix it's amazing they explore exactly this that it becomes everything becomes
1:13:21
pointless because there's you know infinite exactly exactly yeah but uh so you are agnostic
1:13:27
and you think that maybe there are some things maybe there isn't the reason why i ask is um
1:13:32
again i also seem very similar like roman catholic family not not they don't practice that much yeah but
1:13:40
uh i i kind of slowly lost my connections with religion and i i think that
1:13:46
unfortunately there's nothing after uh well i'm not agnostic but i don't
1:13:52
know but you know that just gives me more purpose of actually doing something
1:13:58
that goes beyond you know having money actually doing a little contribution to the world
1:14:03
is something that really motivates me and i it's not cliche i totally i think it's a great uh mission for life
1:14:11
yeah i mean a lot of cliches are just like true i guess because they're simple and uh yeah but i mean you need to do something
1:14:18
with his life like you could sit in your room and do nothing um i mean why why do you need to
1:14:23
you can i mean it's all kind of like meaningless if you start thinking in that way but
1:14:28
i i get happy from being active doing
1:14:34
stuff like saying also i go to the gym for example that makes me happy i see friends i i like to
1:14:41
be in a flow state where i work on things that makes me happy and but everything is the same value
1:14:47
everything is like you know everything is valueless in a way and but
1:14:53
maybe in a good way it's all the same money doesn't exist you know what i mean like everything is
1:14:58
there's no better and worse it's all nothing because entropy will destroy everything yeah in
1:15:05
a million years and the sun will explode so nothing matters and everything you build up
1:15:11
is goes away every relationship you have you know is not permanent everything dies and
1:15:19
we are getting super dark no but it's it's also really not dark because that shows impermanence and
1:15:26
impermanence if you accept that it's it's quite beautiful and it's
1:15:34
you shouldn't fight it you should just embrace it and and that's that's reality
1:15:39
and you know that's also i guess why people start living in the moment because they realize impermanence you know it's just
1:15:45
like you're just just like eckhart tolle is like power of now that's it this power of now like history doesn't exist
1:15:50
future doesn't it's just now right you're here you're here now um i think ramdas the
1:15:56
buddhist uh or the yogi in india says that like uh be here now
1:16:02
that's it i'll be here and is this also do you think that this is the mentality that also helps you succeed because it
1:16:08
allows you to think outside of the box and say okay let's move to portugal because i'm doing it now or let's uh
1:16:14
yeah i'm thinking away because because if you if you cling to permanence and to you know things and to people you cling
1:16:21
to everything you try to hold everything tight so you don't lose it you're scared of lose loss right yeah fear of loss
1:16:28
and that's really unhealthy i think because it's it's it's trying to give you
1:16:34
certainty right right like clinging to people clinging to things clinging to buying a house cleaning all this and
1:16:39
it's essentially probably your fear of death i think which we all have it's normal but
1:16:45
it's fighting impermanence like i'm gonna i'm gonna collect all this stuff and hoard it
1:16:51
because i um then i can keep it permanently forever right
1:16:57
but that's so moving moving to another place or nomad you learn a lot about impermanence because you cannot carry a
1:17:02
lot of stuff you have a backpack you cannot buy a lot of stuff right so your you understand what is really
1:17:08
important right like this minimalist approach right yeah and and yeah and impermanence
1:17:14
just like that you know and so and it gives you more flexibility to change up your life i guess
1:17:19
um and i also think it gives you more healthy approach to relationships because a lot of people are stuck in relationships or marriages which don't
1:17:25
work anymore and if you believe in you know abundance and impermanence and you you're okay you're
1:17:32
accepted like okay this relationship doesn't work anymore it's fine it's healthy to end this and to
1:17:37
you know i think people are also very afraid to leave their comfort zone uh that's the whole thing because you
1:17:43
don't know what's in the other side right so okay you leave your your wife
1:17:48
and maybe you find another wife that is better your husband yeah or husband or you just uh can have be lonely forever
1:17:55
right uh yeah i i think a lot of men and women after divorce at like 60 or 70 or 50
1:18:02
even you they also go no man you meet them and they have a very you know healthy mindset about this
1:18:08
stuff like just like like we just talked about like this kind of impermanent mindset and
1:18:13
i'm not saying you like of course you should be in a relationship as long as you can of course but
1:18:18
the the fear of loss is is not a good uh thing i think yeah definitely we are
1:18:24
running out of time here and i think we could definitely speak about them for this for for a long time and i think
1:18:29
it's really interesting i love to get more philosophical next time we can do three hours yes we
1:18:35
can do this like joe rogers exactly and just you know think about everything but i think there's a lot of things we
1:18:41
we got to learn more about also your your mindset your philosophy we you gave some cool lessons for aspiring
1:18:48
entrepreneurs as well we end up not speaking that much about the effect of rebase in portugal which
1:18:53
is something that is really interesting so we could speak about this maybe in in the next another session uh as a last
1:18:59
last question what are the technologies that or markets that you are most excited about i'd say i i do think the
1:19:05
whole decentralized stuff is interesting like crypto um web3 i think most of it
1:19:11
is but i think there's definitely fundamental concepts that are really uh will be the future like
1:19:17
um decentralized right concepts seem like censorship resistance stuff like look at
1:19:24
social media posts being deleted everywhere and censored look at people's accounts being frozen
1:19:30
and look at the overreaching arm of like like countries like united states that are just they want to remove russia from
1:19:37
international banking via swift and stuff this is all not good and it shouldn't be there should be power
1:19:43
like that existing and i think it people again autonomy autonomy is really
1:19:48
big trend i think and this also has to do with decentralization so i think definitely will be interesting i
1:19:54
really think the technology is absolutely not there yet like bitcoin is great it works really well but like the
1:19:59
the smart contracts are way too slow uh too expensive and stuff yeah but that's it's it is very interesting technology
1:20:05
and it will definitely only only improve i think and there might be some bubbles and some bursts
1:20:11
but in five ten years i think a lot of stuff will be decentralized yeah definitely i'm also super excited
1:20:17
to see what is going to come up from there peter thank you so much for taking the
1:20:22
time i will uh link rebase and or i guess your twitter profile in the show notes thank you so much for for your
1:20:29
time it was really nice thanks for having me and see you next time for the three hour episode yes
1:20:35
you heard them there will be a next interview to go deeper into these philosophical and bootstrapping topics
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