I hit the end of another one of my 10 year cycles and my iterative approach to live meant that I needed to start some new experiments. Interesting enough my live always had those decade iterations, at 10 my parents and I moved from Germany to Austria, at 20, I got a job in Germany and moved back again, at 30 I moved to New Zealand with Manu and since a couple of years I noticed it is time again. I overshot my decade and needed a new overarching experiment. I love seeing live as a big interesting experiment. I like trying out new things, living new mental models to gain first hand experience. I love to rely on things I have done and tried rather than theory and that has lead me down very interesting rabbit holes in the past.
Manu and I have arrive in New Zealand with two big backpacks in 2007, the address of a backpackers in Auckland and a rough idea of driving around a bit and staying in Wellington for a while. We did stay for a bit longer, found an awesome open source scene, made many friends in no time and started building iwantmyname with Timo and Paul.
Since 2007 we moved around the Wellington region quite a bit and finally settled a few years ago in the Southern Alps near Nelson. I truly became a Kiwi, I identify with New Zealand way more than with any other place but I had asked myself that dangerous question of “where do I want to be if no constraints apply”.
Location independence is an interesting thing, with iwantmyname we built a company that has no location policy: “work from anywhere as long as you contribute”. That was a fundamental experiment in the company but also made it possible for Manu and me to become more creative in what that actually means. Last year we lived in a converted Landrover and explored Europe a bit more and enjoyed a stunning summer while writing new core infrastructure for iwantmyname. At the end of that was the question “what next” and we came up with the latest experiment that took us a year in prep work and is now real.
I write this from an Amel Super Maramu in La Rochelle, France. An Amel SM is an ocean going sailboat that we bought about a week ago, it was built here in La Rochelle and is back here for some maintenance. We will work on this boat over the coming months to make it a floating home and experimentation station for new ideas, new mental models that we can then live and test. Location independence in the current iteration means we can go anywhere where we can float and it gives us a completely new perspective. I am super excited to see what that means for our next smaller experiments that fall out of the overarching location independent boat living one.
Speaking about smaller experiments that fall out of overarching bigger experiments. Manu and my New Zealand experiment is not done but we pause it for the moment to live on the water. The biggest experiment within the overarching NZ experiment was definitely iwantmyname. As of today we have handed over the keys to iwantmyname to their new owners. New owners that are old friends in fact and new owners that will look after our team, our values and our customers in a very trusting way. It is a bit like kids leaving home, you are glad they are all grown up and leave and you have your time and space back but you also hope they have an incredible live and call every now and then.