I went on the Building Remotely podcast with Sondre Rasch to discuss Rebase, my immigration service that helps people move to new places that are trying to attract remote workers.

Topics we discussed:
- The process and difficulty of building Rebase
- Major trends in the nomad community
- Working on a big vs small company (indie projects vs VC funded startups)
- The rejection of creativity in modern society.

Pieter (00:01):
In society in education, like the industrial society kicks creativity and kicks individual crazy, weird ideas out of you because you're being laughed at, in a group like, ah, what a dumb idea. When, if you don't laugh at it, if you let it kind of like evolve, it might become, you know, art, or it might become a company society's very scared of different thoughts, ideas, and you need to take the risk to be embarrassed and laughed at by people. To be honest with yourself.

Sondre (00:28):
Welcome to building remotely. Our goal is to create the world's first guide to building a remote company inspired by founders and leaders at remote startups. I'm Sondre the founder and CEO of SafetyWing the company, offering global health insurance for remote teams. Let's begin. In this episode, we are joined for the second time by Peter Levels. Peter is the founder of several projects for nomads and the remote work community such as nomad list RemoteOk And most recently, and the topic of this episode Rebase. Welcome back to the podcast. Pieter.

Pieter (01:01):
Thank you for having me again. It's really good to be back

Sondre (01:04):
Together with Pieter. We are going to talk about the migration of the new remote workforce Rebase why it's so hard to build and scale, and what's so great about it. And also we will cover inflation and what's happening with the great designation. With that, Pieter, last time we touched on, you know, remote towns, nomad visas, I feel like every time I talk to you, it's like a little peak into the future. You really have a good sense. I feel like of where things are going. Like the things you're interested in has this like caring way to it. I wasn't planning on starting with this, but I'm very curious. Like, do you have a self-reflection on like, why that is like why the things you're interested in tend to be real and not kind of fads?

Pieter (01:49):
Obviously, I don't know if I'm right every time. Right. But I do feel like, I think I'm honest with myself and I think I'm some kind of like proto user or adopter, you know, like they have these these personas, when you build a startup, they have personas in marketing, right? Like what's kind of user, I'm like my own persona for my own businesses. So what I feel, what I'm annoyed with or what I struggle with in my own life, because I do all this stuff with remote work and nomad stuff in my life too. I see as problems that might become a problem for more people after a while, cuz I'm kind of like an early adopter. And then like if you listen to yourself, like honestly like, okay, everything that's in your brain in your mind that comes up, you don't need to be embarrassed about it.

Pieter (02:30):
You need to think about it. Like, do you have problems with dating? For example, all this traveling around, for example long term, okay. Maybe slow down, go to less places. Maybe you can make a dating feature for remote works or whatever. Or there's like a recent problem with matching regular people who still have office jobs. And now a lot of people have remote work and they cannot hang out together because they're remote working people. They kind of work ay. And they can meet up on Tuesday and they can go for a walk. But the office people have to be in the office at Tuesday afternoon. Mm. So these people, there's a mismatch. That's another thing, for example. So there's always something in my life when a person life going on, where I'm like, ah, this seems to become a problem for more people in the next six months or the next few years. And it often happens because this is like a new movement still, and now it's going mainstream, but you can really quickly see these problems if you're honest with yourself, I think.

Sondre (03:20):
Hmm. I think that's perfect. You're you're an early adapter and you're honest with yourself, by the way. Why do you think, think a lot of builders, founders, you know, when they make these kind of products that are kind of solving problems for nobody. And I often find a sense that they're not honest with themselves, like why do you think it's so hard for people? Some people like to be honest with themselves,

Pieter (03:42):
I think it comes down to education where like, when you're kids, like this is quite common phrase. But like when you're a kid you're really creative and you draw and you play and everything's fun. And once you get older, well, no people start saying like, no, you made the wrong drawing. That's not how you should draw. Like people start telling you what to do. Right. And you're embarrassed by your true feelings or your ideas, your creative ideas, even your drawings, you're embarrassed. Like, oh this is not like my friend was colorblind demo. And he would always draw the sky purple. And the art, the teacher was like, you're doing wrong. The sky's not purple. And he didn't even know it, but that kind of makes him interesting person cuz he's color blind. And he thinks the sky's actually purple mm-hmm I think in, in society, in education, like the industrial society kicks creativity and kicks individual crazy weird ideas out of you because you're being left at it for, in a group.

Pieter (04:31):
Like, ah, what a dumb idea. When, if you don't laugh at it, if you let it kind of like evolve, it might become, you know, art or it might become a, a company it might become like I wanna go to Mars. Like Elon Musk probably said as a kid, people laugh at him, but I think society's very scared of different thoughts, ideas, and you need to take the risk to be embarrassed and laughed at, by people. To be honest with yourself on Twitter, social media, Instagram, or in real life even. And I try to do radical honesty where I try to be as open and honest as possible in my business and in my personal life too. And it has helped me a lot. I think you waste no time with lying or I'm not perfect. I also have lied. Of course, I've also done that, but you pursue a life of honesty and you hear a lot of philosophers or like internet philosopher. People also talk about like, don't lie, be honest and it's not easy, but yeah.

Sondre (05:31):
Mm. I think you're totally right. So people lie to themselves so that they won't get left at or rejected by society.

Pieter (05:39):
Yeah. Fear of rejection is huge.

Sondre (05:40):
Right? Yeah. It's terrifying.

Pieter (05:43):
The most interesting part of humanity is that every brain is different and you have these different experience and different ideas and that makes you beautiful. That makes you cool and interesting. That makes conversations so fun. When you go to the bar or something with your friends, some person will say something outrageous and you're like, wow, that's interesting why you think that? You know, and we're too scared to do that in general. I think it trifles stifles, is that the word? Innovation.

Sondre (06:09):
So I wanted to get into rebates, but first I wanted to just touch briefly on a topic that everyone is very interested in today. As headline inflation was announced 8.5% and you made a fun project by called inflation chart. So I was very curious to just hear your take, like what's happening and what will happen with inflation. You think like what's the facts.

Pieter (06:30):
Yeah. So I was noticing inflation about two years ago, I think, or maybe a year ago. And I was like, okay, what if we track prices ourselves? Cuz the government has these price indexes called consumer price index. And they're the ones telling you what inflation is. And it's always something like 4% or something. And you're like, Hmm, interesting. Cuz the rent is getting outrageous. The housing price is getting outrageous. Why is it only 4%? This was like a year ago. So I'm like, okay, I'll just start collecting all these prices like price oil, price of the S and P 500 prices of stock markets. I started tracking the money supply, like how many dollars are being printed. I started tracking food price index, worldwide. All these data sets are public. You just need to find them. And then you need to put 'em in a spreadsheet.

Pieter (07:10):
And then in a database I make a website and I made this site called inflation charts.com and you can kind of use two metrics. So for example, you can see the it's quite difficult, but you can see the price, the real price of a us home, for example, in the money supply, essentially it means you can track inflation. You can check the real value of the stock market and the real value of the prices. And what it shows is that the real inflation based on my data is much higher than even the today reported inflation, which is 8.5%. My inflation is around 17 to 18% per year. And that is based on that. I include housing rent and I also include real estate prices based on the average spending on those and the governments in general, European governments, the British government, us government. They generally don't include housing in the consumer price index, which is insane because that's usually the thing that goes up most like only recently it's food.

Pieter (08:04):
So I think inflation is a very hot topic. And I think that people forget that inflation literally just means if it's, you know, 10% or something or 8.5%, it means you get 10% poorer every year. And even if your bank balance stays the same, you have less money because you can buy 10% less than the year before. And your bank balance stays the same, but prices change. So it's hard to see that you're getting poorer, but you're getting poorer. And I think what's scary about it politically, where I just read the white house, made a statement that they call it the Putin price hike, which makes it a political thing. And of course it has to do with it. And let's not go too far in politics, but let's not forget that the us printed, I think 40% of the entire us dollar supply in the last two years.

Pieter (08:47):
And how can you not include that in your statement about inflation because of COVID we've printed our way into this problem. I think, and, and the scariest thing about inflation is that it hits poor people most. So if you're rich or if you're middle class, upper middle class, you can invest in the stock markets. The stock market goes up with inflation. Usually a lot of middle class lower don't have the means or even information to know how to invest. And they are not exposed to the stock market. They didn't even have the amount of money to invest. And all they see is that the prices go up and their salary usually stays the same. Yeah. Inflation is theft from poor people to, you know, upper middle class and rich people and to the government. And I think that's really, really not a good thing. Like it's not nice.

Sondre (09:33):
No, it's not like many things becomes really hard to do as well. We have a person in the company, April wonderful designer. We have, so she's from Argentina and there's like 40 50%. And she said the exact same thing. It's like, okay, here's why it's so hard. Your rent goes up, all food goes up, salary stays the same and you can't like make investments. Like she said, her dad ran this like machine rent thing and it's like, you have to change prices almost daily. And it just becomes so unpredictable. So you just end up not doing it.

Pieter (10:07):
Yeah. It's really bad for business, really bad for people. And it's very interesting. A year ago I was tweeting about this website and there was a lot of replies, like, nah, inflation is not a problem. Like a lot of people believe this, it was unpopular to talk about inflation. It was like not done. It was like, you know, it's not bad. Inflation is, inflation is healthy and now you don't hear those people anymore. And it's a little bit like vengeance again, like, look, we could have seen this coming and now it's here. And now inflation is for sure a problem. But yeah, I hope this website helps with giving people information about it. And hopefully it helps them also to learn to invest like in the stock market, in ECFS or something, because at least it keeps your money the same. Usually the stock markets go up with inflation and it protects you a little bit, but there's this quote about, yeah, I'll find there's a really scary quote about inflation.

Pieter (10:58):
I put it up, but it was too scary. So I removed it. The end game of rampant inflation is always war or revolution. Mm-Hmm show me a regime change and I will show you inflation when you work your ass off to only stand still or get poorer any isn't that promises affordable food and shelter for the unwashed. Masses will rain Supreme. If you're starving to death, nothing else matters except feeding your family. And it goes on, but it's it's about like, if inflation goes on too long, you get revolutions, you get unstable societies. It's in history. It's happened so many times. It's a real problem.

Sondre (11:30):
I do still think that the us will reign itself in, I mean they had like 10 to 20% inflation, like in the seventies. Right. And they were able to turn that around.

Pieter (11:38):
Well, it's about like, you need to raise the interest rates. Right. And they're scared to raise interest rates because if you raise them then the market crashes. Yeah. They're starting to raise it now. So that's good.

Sondre (11:46):
I think we're just gonna have to take a market crash now.

Pieter (11:49):
Yeah, I think so too. And it's well at least that makes the rich poorer doesn't make the poor poorer so much. Well maybe, also cuz you get fired, but yeah. Economics is so complicated. It's hard to see what does, what, and what's the consequence of what and yeah,

Sondre (12:03):
One last curiosity question before I get into to DVA, sorry, which is that if you were to kind of examine your own interest, whatever you're interested in, that seems like niche and weird now and you don't have to like expect that it becomes big, but it's like, what's something that you're like kind of interested in lately. That's niche.

Pieter (12:22):
I think a new thing and I've experienced it here in Asia where I'm renting instead of renting like a, an empty apartment, like in Amsterdam where you furnish it yourself and stuff. I rent now from hotels, which have switched to remote workers kind of. So you're talking about like big hotels, like Intercontinental, whatever they have these sub brands and they're starting to sell long term deals and they're also starting to install kitchens. So they're starting to compete with Airbnbs now for long term, staying people that want furnished and service apartments also for families like it's like two bedroom, three bedroom places they're changing the hotel format from tourists to more long term stay people actively because of remote work even for the local market in Thailand, in Asia actively for that. And I think that's very interesting and the prices you're talking about are like 1.5 to two times more than regular rent.

Pieter (13:12):
Like it's a little bit of skill, but I think you can get a washing machine, but you can also get the laundry done. For example, it's, it's more service where you can focus on your work and it's kind of like a living solution. They call it, I think. And that's getting really big here in Southeast Asia. And I think it might also be able to get big in, in America or in the rest of the world where what you see is hospitality moving into the Airbnb space and into the rental space, even. So you have regular housing buying a house or renting house. Then you have Airbnb, which is in those houses, you get your guest, a hotels and hosts and they're all merging into each other and competing with each other soon. Yeah, because it saves me so much effort because always in AMAM apartments, the water pipe breaks and you need to get the water mechanic guy to come and needs to fix this s**t. And it's and always the heating breaks and this breaks and that breaks. And if something breaks here, like you get a new room, you get a new apartment or, you know, they switch you up. So I think that's also for families. I think that that could be definitely future.

Sondre (14:16):
Yeah, no, that, that sort of for term model is great. Like, you know, run the maintenance of your building in this like very customer service oriented way, as opposed to a lot of landlords who are just awful at customer service

Pieter (14:30):
Like European landlords are well probably American too. They're horrible. They're like they don't care and they never wanna fix stuff. I think the flip side is you cannot customize a furnace service apartments. It all looks the same. It's very uniform. Uniform is very accepted in Asia. Uniform is not accepted in the west. Everybody wants their own individual apartments here. Everybody has the same looking apartments, but it's a really good looking apartment. So it's kind of like less individualistic, but less struggle and less errands. And also like around here, for example, there's a really good supermarket, five minutes away. I can just walk. It's all kind of part of the same project and there's a really good cafe near here. Really good restaurants. And it's all in walking distance kind of a little bit like Chango valley also like Chango did it organically. Mm-Hmm here. They did it more artificially. It has its flip sides, but it's an interesting way to live. I think it could be, it could become a thing, especially with remote work

Sondre (15:24):
For sure. And you saw the, the Bryan ske put out that Airbnb data that now the majority of their revenue was 30 plus days stays. I mean, that's remarkable.

Pieter (15:34):
Yeah. It's gonna, I think flip the whole hospitality industry on its head. Like a year ago I started like investing in stocks or ETFs. And I also did like a mini ETF build myself about hotels. Cause I thought this was gonna happen a little bit. So I Googled all the big hotel change and I Googled remote work and see if remote work is on their website and how much, and I found it on the Marriot website, the hyats and the IHG into continental. So I bought those stocks. Yeah, just cuz I was like, they might get big with remote work.

Sondre (16:04):
So let's get into Rebase. Let's start with the beginning. Like why did you build it? What was the building process like

Pieter (16:12):
Rebase is the first immigration as a service company where it sounds really cool, but it means that before you had to go to lots of dodgy, weird agencies to, to immigrate to a country and I want to try and get it all online, where you just sign up, you pay money, you enter your details and you can move to a country. And a lot of people have predicted this was gonna happen. Like con companies are kind of starting to compete, just like the prediction of this book, sovereign individual from the nineties, like government countries are gonna compete for talent and stuff. So I thought, okay, I'll just build this. And during COVID I ended up in Portugal kind of randomly when COVID started, I flew back to Europe cuz I asked Twitter on a poll like, should I stay in Asia? Or should I go to Europe back then?

Pieter (16:56):
COVID wasn't in Europe yet. So it wasn't China. And they were like, well of course go to Europe because it's no COVID and you know, it's not gonna come to Europe. And of course was really bad in Europe, much worse than in Asia. So I ended up in Europe and I was with mark and we did kind of like a road trip with a lot of masks to see where we could kind of live long term a little bit for during COVID cuz we didn't wanna stay in Holland, both for our countries. And mark is my best friend and we we know met together. So I ended up in Portugal cuz it was really high on noit list suddenly. And a lot of people were, were there suddenly. So I organized a meet up and 40 people were gonna come and I had to cancel it cuz it was COVID.

Pieter (17:34):
It was like, I think December, 2020 and I had to cancel it cuz it was really dangerous with COVID. So we couldn't even do the meet, but it showed me like, okay you organize the meet up 40 people show up. This is quite exceptional. There's a lot of people for my website. So I was like, okay, Portugal's really popular. And then I spoke to people there and a lot of them said that they moved to Portugal. They became a resident and Portugal is very foreign friendly. They also had very beneficial like tax discounts for foreigners. If you come there and I was like, okay maybe I should try. So I got a lawyer, I got an immigration advisor and I did it myself. Cause I also was looking for a place to live legally and actually live, you know, at least half the year because I was still kind of roaming around the world and I had the problem that I couldn't even take out money from my company because I wasn't living anywhere.

Pieter (18:19):
And I left Holland officially. And if you leave a country like Holland or you know, Sweden too, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the tax authorities are really strict. So if you leave, you need to kind of find a new place to live and start paying tax there. And if you don't, it kind of falls back to Holland again. So I didn't take out any money for two years. And I lived all my savings and my savings ran out and I had to borrow money for my friends. Meanwhile, my companies were making lots of money. I would be tweeting about, look this new revenue milestone like $400,000. I couldn't even spend it. I was borrowing money for my friends. It was hilarious because I wasn't a resident anywhere. And then finally I came to Portugal and I became a resident and I pay tax and I can get money now for my company.

Pieter (19:02):
And, and I lived there and Portugal is, it's amazing. It's good air quality. It's on the coast. There are so many beautiful places. The beautiful nature. It's very calm. It's very affordable. It's getting higher. But the cost of living is about, I'd say Bangkok and Thailand in terms of like food and stuff. And it's really quite cheap. It's, it's one of the cheapest places in Europe and the people are the nicest people you've met. I think Thai people are really nice. Portuguese people are really, really nice. They're so friendly and hospitable and yeah. So anyway, so I ended up in Portugal and I found out about all these people moving there, all these nomads moving there, cuz nobody could go to Asia cuz of COVID cuz the borders were closed. So everybody ended up in Portugal and people started becoming residents there and I kept getting people asking me like, who's your lawyer?

Pieter (19:49):
Who's your lawyer. And I was like, okay, this and it like 20 times. And I was like, okay, let's make a little type form. So I made a type form, a moment list. Like if you wanna move to Portugal, I become a resident. You can do this. And it was like a few people signing up. Like I would say 50 people. Then I made a real website about it, like a real beautiful landing page with video and stuff. And I accidentally launched it cause I made a photo of my badge over my laptop, like with the landing page on it, which I was still working on. And I, I tweeted like just, I didn't meant it to go viral. I just tweeted like a POV working on my immigration as a service startup. And I went like really viral, like I think a thousand retweets.

Pieter (20:26):
And then people started going to the websites cuz I saw it in the screenshots and I started going there and website was of course already live cuz that's how I kind of worked. And they started screenshoting the website with all the benefits, nice country tax benefits that went viral by other people also. And hundreds of people started signing up and I think we had like 500 signups in one month of people wanting to move to Portugal and it was outrageous. And then I looked up the statistics of how many people moved to Portugal and it was like 60,000 a year by month. That's like, like what like 5,000 per month. So I was doing 10% of the entire Portuguese immigration markets within a month. So I was like, this is insane. Yeah. And my lawyer said, you need to close the applications or my immigration advisor because he said, you can't do this. This is too many, too many. He was getting calls, doing calls all day. These onboarding calls, he was going burn out. So we closed applications a little bit for now, but it's soon gonna open up again and I'm trying to automate all the steps to make it more smooth, kinda like Stripe Atlas, which is like a way to start a company. Yeah. Yeah.

Sondre (21:35):
Now I saw you commented. Actually I recall to that thread that you wanted to digitize the physical process of doing immigration, similar to how Atlas did it for starting a company hundred percent yet. I think that's such a great thing because so many processes when interact with government are so bad, but you can, you know, with a lot of patients automate some of that, certainly, you know, it's possible to fill out PDFs.

Pieter (21:58):
That's literally what I'm working on this week. I have a PHP module to pre-fill PDFs. Mm-Hmm you're a hundred percent right? The good thing about these forms, cuz a lot it's all forms, right? Like let's get to the practical government is all writing down forms and signing them. The good thing is these forms don't change. That much. Government is very slow mm-hmm so it might take five years for form to change. And in that case you do need to change the code and stuff, but generally it just keeps working. So once it's automated, it kind of runs and then you can submit it. You can even probably ship it via API to the government. You can even do signature, right? You just make a canvas and people draw their signature and then you put it in the PDF. That's what I'm gonna do.

Pieter (22:39):
The only limitations are like, for example lawyers say stuff like Peter, I don't think we can get the signature from a HTML canvas into a PDF. It's not really legal or something. And then you need to like figure out the legality, how can we make this legally defensible? There must be a law article that allows for this. So you need to find that it's a really different industry than just making a little SaaS app. It's really interesting. It's really different. And people are really grateful. It's so different than my other websites because you have people like go through this whole process and then they end up in Portugal and they live there and they live there with their family and you help do that for like a few hundred dollars or something. And you're like, wow, this is so cool. Like the other websites are also cool, but this is so physical. Like we have Venezuelan families now getting out of Venezuela to Portugal, like that's like Venezuela is, is a very country not doing so well, like Argentina. So it's a really cool business. It's really so different and yeah, you must have the same of insurance. It's a, it's a very different business than just a normal, you know, iOS app or something or website it's, it's much more it's about people's lives in your case is, you know, medical.

Sondre (23:48):
Yeah, no. And insurance is similar in both of the ways you mentioned there. So one is that you're dealing with people who have real personal catastrophe and it's also similar in the first way you said, which is that you interact with infrastructure that is pre-digital regularly. And you know, thankfully our co-founder and CTO, Sarah, one of her first jobs was that she built this automation for government agency in Norway. And so she built this like PDF generator that you're building this week, several things you know, it's like will come up pieces where we're interact with some entity that can only receive a form in this particular way. And the API project that's gonna take years. So instead we automate it by filling in the PDF and sending it off as the email, just like they received it normally

Pieter (24:38):
exactly. I think startup people think that it's easy to change regulation. They're like, ah, let's just, or they think it's easy to not follow it, but that's not at all. You can't, you can't really do that. You have to follow the law and it's much easier to just do what they want you to do, but in a very robotic way where like, okay, we're not gonna hand write these forms. We're just gonna put letters. And they'll say this form is not the handwritten. It's like, yeah, but it wasn't. Where does that say? It should be handwritten. It's really fun business because you know these other business, other websites, they get boring after a while a little bit. And it's fun to have something new. It's almost infinite because you also can go to different countries. So for example, we kind of wanna go to Spain now with the immigration advisors, Spain is extremely bureaucratic. It's like 10 times more bureaucratic than Portugal apparently. So it's kind of like scary, but I don't know. Maybe that's a nice challenge. You know, there's a lot of different countries and Andreas clinger keeps DMing me. He's always DMing me, Peter. This it's gonna be billion dollar company. It's so good. Maybe that's maybe I should give that secret, but, but he's really supportive. He's like you need to expand as fast as possible.

Sondre (25:44):
It's a hundred percent correct for people listening. I'm sure there are people listening who want to apply. If you could just give a quick walk through like how easy is it? What are the steps people go through?

Pieter (25:54):
The website is rebase.co. You fill out a form of your personal details. Stuff. Like I think like your income cuz there's income requirements, but it's not supervised like $15,000 a year by a Portuguese government. There's a few requirements. Depending if you're European union citizen or a non-European union citizen, or even American cuz American government is quite crazy with stuff. They still want you to pay tax. Anyway. Even if you're out there outside us, you apply, you do an onboarding call with the immigration advisors, which is one hour where they guide you through the steps of like actually doing it. And I'm starting to automate that call. Also, I'm starting to make it, you know, straight to this forums and pre-filling depending on the situation, you need to get a visa for Portugal. If you're outside European union use, you need to get a visa, which is a, I think a D seven visa, which lets you live in Portugal to get all this stuff sorted.

Pieter (26:44):
Then you fly to Portugal. I think you go to city hall, signed documents. After a while you end up as a resident, then you apply for the special foreigner benefits because they want to attract the foreigners, which is called NR. And then you get approved and then you live in Portugal and, and the cool thing is after five or six years, you can apply for a Portuguese passport. So it's really beneficial for people like from Venezuela or outside you that want access to you know, I mean European union passport is always great. And yeah, so if you have a stable life there, if you don't have a criminal record, if you make nice money, not even a lot, but just okay. You can probably get a Portuguese passport. It's really cool. We've, we've been helping a lot of Ukrainians. Also since the war, we already had a lot of Ukrainian customers and we refunded all of them because now the European union allows Ukrainians to just come and, and we're still helping them get all the benefits too, but Portugal's been very open for Ukrainian refugees and it's a great place. Yeah. You can just apply. I think it's like a hundred dollars to apply. And then the legal costs after are like, I think somewhere like $800, but it kind of depends. I don't know exactly pricing, but yeah.

Sondre (27:54):
Could I explore that choice with you about whether to build this into, you know, a billion dollar company or not? Yeah. You know, it, it has real trade offs and you know, it's like the upside is you get a billion dollars. The downside is it's like you sacrifice big portion of your life on the way there you take on a lot of stress. Yeah. And often, you know, when, when we go through these periods of, you know, raising money yeah. Like by the time this is live, you know, we've announced there's serious B so we're going the venture route and it's great. In some ways, you know, you can advance the scaling head of the revenue and you have a real shot at building like billion dollar company pretty fast, you know, a few years. But I'm wondering, how do you think about that choice? You know, it's always bittersweet when we raise those rounds, you know, it's like I do have this part of me, which is like, gosh, it would be so romantic to just only company a hundred percent. And , you know, just bootstrap and automate everything and have this people light company. I, I do find it more. There's something more wonderful about it. What do you think about that choice for rebates?

Pieter (28:57):
Okay. This is so radical, honest, right? I talk to so many founders like VC funded founders who talk to me in the and say the same thing after 10 employees, it gets really stressful after 10 people. And they say like, if I would do it again, I would probably do it with max 10 people and I would go maybe India and stuff, but you need to understand VC founders are also in a lot of stress. So of course they complain a lot about, and they look at grasses greener, like, oh, look at Peter levels with his little PHP scripts, making money, it's always grass green. I also have grass greener about VC. I'm like, you know, it would be cool to build this giant company. And it seems so much easier if I see these other companies. Like if I look at remote.com for example, and they're really VC funded and they're doing really well.

Pieter (29:38):
And I look at like, wow, this side, this landing page looks so cool. Cuz they have these designers, the logo looks so cool. And they entering all these different markets and it's like worldwide and blah, blah. I'm like, wow, it's cool. And then I look at myself, I'm like myself is kind of simple, kind of basic, but it also is really nice, but the, the skill is different and you can reach people's hearts and minds in both ways. Like I do think my websites do reach millions of people and then they also make millions of dollars now. So it's kind of nice per year. I do think it's less stressful than VC or than getting funded because you're always with this runway and you're always looking at what's, you know, are we gonna be on time for the next raise? And are they gonna, you know, what if the market crash, is there gonna be a next round or this stuff goes in your brain and it's difficult to maybe sleep with that, for example.

Pieter (30:23):
So the question is, would I do, for example, funding for rebates, I would do it if I was 10 years younger, cause I'm 35 now. And I already spent, you know, last eight years working quite hard on all these websites, cuz it was a really momentous effort as an individual. And it was really fun and really great. But I think it might be dangerous cuz a lot of my life is my work. Just like with you, right? We are those kind of type A people where we probably don't have a lot of hobbies next to this. This is our work and we, we, we sleep and we think, and we, this whole company, it dominates our life. When we shower, we think about it and less now for me. But a few years ago, this was everything always in my head when I walk, when I talk.

Pieter (31:04):
And I think the problem is after a while, if you do that for over a decade, you become a very mono type of person, like with a very narrow minded interest. I did some great effort with this company, but you need more than just a company you need...Maybe you're into pottery or whatever painting or some other stuff. And I think for me increasingly trying to spend more time on those things as my startups are now automated, increasingly more of a like balanced life and I've I have had a balanced life. I didn't work so hard, but as people think, but you know what I mean? Like it's still always about this company. It's always about this web. It's always about Twitter, you know, your identity, your personal brand on, on all this stuff. And I think if you do it for too long, you become that and that's, you know, dangerous maybe cuz you don't live forever. You know,

Sondre (31:55):
You wanna preserve the source of the uniqueness. Like you don't wanna become your work entirely and become this like flat person. Who's like yeah, perfectly optimized to the problem at hand,

Pieter (32:11):
Like startups is about money, right? Like you make a lot of money and you get these millions of dollars in revenue and that's a momentous achievement. That's like, that's a lot of money and you get millions of customers or users and that's so high in dopamine. That's why we like it. It's so difficult to achieve that. And it's so difficult to run that. And when it runs, you're like, holy s**t, why we did this? This is amazing. Like this is miraculous. It's so difficult. It's like pro athlete stuff. And that's why it's so hard for that to compete with a normal life, like a normal personal life, like walking your dog or something or family life. A lot of entrepreneurs have difficulty, even family life, right? They're not there for their kids or something. I don't wanna do that because we live in such a capitalist society, which is fine with me.

Pieter (32:56):
But you start thinking, wow, this is so important cuz it's about millions of people and millions of dollars. But you know, what about your life? Like life is about more than money, more about success, more than about status. It's also about friends, barbecuing and not talking about work, but talking about like, you know, the sky is purple, but it's not cuz your color blind, but that kind of stuff, you know, it's it's, it's about more than that. And you need both of course, but it's really easy to get lost into entrepreneurship, into like this obsessive thing because it's so monumental. I think,

Sondre (33:25):
I think that's a great place to, end I'm gonna go for a walk now and reflect on that. Yeah, exactly. Don't worry, I'm definitely still committed to SafetyWing

Pieter (33:36):
Angry investors.

Sondre (33:37):
Thank you so much, Peter. I, I see we're coming up in time. I'll be respectful of your time and thank you so much for joining us. People of course can go to rebase.co. I believe it is. Is There any other of your projects you would recommend people check out?

Pieter (33:53):
Did I make something new? I don't think so. I think this is it. Yeah. This is all like Twitter, twitter.com/levelsio as always. That's where you can find all my stuff.

Sondre (34:02):
One of the best Twitter accounts in the world definitely check out @levelsio.Thank you so much. Peter, I always enjoyed talking with you and me too. This was definitely one of the best. Thank you very much.

Pieter (34:14):
See you next time.

Sondre (34:16):
You can also get more insights from other remote leaders on buildingremotely.com here. You'll find the first chapters of the building remotely book as well as articles and events relating to remote work. See you next time.