5 ms·

I registered geekbeach.org (no site there) a few years back with the hope of one day doing this same thing in some random tropical setting. I wonder how many p

I registered geekbeach.org (no site there) a few years back with the hope of one day doing this same thing in some random tropical setting. I wonder how many people (aside from me of course) would be happy to know about a spot on Nusa Lembongan with guaranteed fast internet, reliable power, a nice slice of white sand and a really nice reef break just outside the lagoon. Would anybody here take the effort to weasel a working holiday to such a place? Any SV startups that would pick up the whole shop and set up on the beach for a month or so? It's been raining here in the North of England for six months straight. If I get enough love for the idea here, I might just have to book a flight and start scouting locations.

eneveu 16y ago
Wow, this is an awesome idea! While I wonder about the price (could bootstrapped startups afford it, especially counting the air fares?), I can see this being very successful.
- jasonkester 16y ago
  I actually took a team to an off-season ski chalet in Chamonix one summer, and it was surprisingly affordable. Airfare included, it came out to less than we'd pay for cubes in LA. Possibly even less than $200/desk/month, considering the place rented for $800 euro per month and slept 10 comfortably in 6 bedrooms. Details here: http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2006/12/chamonix-branch-office.html http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2006/12/chamonix-branch-of... In SE Asia, I guess you could go 2 ways with pricing. You could look at what the backpackers pay (~$10/night or $200/month for a room), and go with something comparable so that you'd get some overlap (and thus end up with Swedish girls hanging out at the pool). Or you could go for the "Surf Camp" model, where you charge $4k/week to people who have too much money. Personally I'd probably lean towards the first model if it were up to me. Mostly I'd be looking for something that paid for itself, kept me on the beach, and kept a bunch of interesting people around.
tomjen3 16y ago
While I would not want to ruin your chance of some sun, how are you getting over the visa issue?
- jasonkester 16y ago
  If you visit any backpacker beach in the world, you'll find people who've been there for ten years. Some of them own bars and bungalow complexes. Nearly all of them are living on tourist visas.
citricsquid 16y ago
I'm genuinely interested in this, I work from home so this would be perfect for me (I'm also in rainy old England, although I like England!) my only problem would be I'm terribly unsocial so wouldn't fit in well, but I'd love to attend something like this.
udp 16y ago
Whereabouts in the north of England? What are you doing here? ;-) I thought most of the north was a relatively hacker-free zone.
- petercooper 16y ago
  There are quite a few! ;-) There's a thriving tech community across the north, e.g.: http://geekup.org/ http://geekup.org/ We even have a nice (but still small) group over here in Lincs, the true tech deadzone..
  - mike-cardwell 16y ago
    I grew up in Lincolnshire (Grimsby to be precise), but I'm over in Nottingham now. I know a few geeks in the Midlands, but never met any in Lincs.
JonnieCache 16y ago
Yes. Please drop me a line when you sort this out. We can recreate this video but with macbooks instead of drums and EFF-style rhetoric instead of rastafarian preaching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuFv-Eb_0pE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuFv-Eb_0pE
toumhi 16y ago
Sounds awesome. I'm actually going to be in SE Asia for 5 months starting in 10 days (to start working on my own software product) so I'm already converted and can definitely see the value in this :-) Being surrounded with like-minded people in a coworking space on the beach in Indonesia to hack your next big thing? What else? Also, for the visa thing, it's not really a problem unless people want to stay there very long. Speaking about Indonesia, they are now granting tourist visas for 2 months. Should be plenty enough!
- pault 16y ago
  I've been doing contract work from abroad for the last 2 years (first Brazil and now SE Asia), but right now I'm rotting in a hotel room in Chiang Mai going out of my mind with boredom. I sent you an email at the address listed in your profile, let's chat.
- pault 16y ago
  Whoops, email bounced (update your profile), so I'll just post here for anyone else that gives a shit: I've spent the last 2 years doing contract work for a few different startups while I've traveled, first in southern Brazil and now here in Thailand. I've spent a few weeks each in Saigon, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vientiane, and Phnom Penh, but I keep coming back to Chiang Mai as I think it has the best combination of low cost of living (it's absurdly cheap here), access to infrastructure, and tolerance of resident foreigners (notice I said "tolerance" and not "acceptance"; more on that later). Singapore and Hong Kong are far easier for a European or North American, but the cost of living is about 2-3 times what it is in Bangkok, which itself is easily twice as much as a smaller place like Chiang Mai. My first few months here I kept wondering why nobody has set up startup incubators here. The cost of living is so low it's almost a joke, and the environment can be amazing if you know the right places to stay (and which places to avoid). Of course it would be beneficial to be in San Francisco and have coffee with 5 different VCs in the same day, if that's the route you are taking, but I personally prefer the idea of the lean, bootstrapped startup. So why would you cram 5 guys into a tiny apartment in San Francisco and eat ramen noodles 3 meals a day while you develop your prototype, when you could be eating in restaurants and living in a nice, furnished apartment with a view for less than half the price? How many single engineers would jump at the chance to spend 6 months hacking in Thailand? I know I certainly would (and I did!). And now the downside: Asia is VERY, VERY different to any other place in the world. It sounds stupidly obvious, but the magnitude of the difference takes a few months to sink in. Thailand is full of some of the friendliest, most accommodating people in the world, but the culture just doesn't have a place for foreigners as anything other than tourists. I lived in a small village in the northeast for five months, and even though everyone there knew my name, they would only refer to me as "farang", or "foreigner". Could you imagine what kind of reaction you would get if you walked around New York saying to all the immigrants: "Hey, foreigner!" You would be labeled a bigot and ostracized, at best, and probably receive a well-deserved punch to the face. And if you ever have a girlfriend here, everyone will automatically assume she is a prostitute, which makes it really difficult to get a date with a nice girl, as you can imagine. Singapore and Hong Kong are a different story, as they have a much longer history of cultural and ethnic integration, but living there is just as expensive as any big city in the U.S., if not more so. I am making a lot of gross generalizations, and I should point out that I don't speak the language very well, but this has been my personal experience here. As always, YMMV. Sorry for the rant. If anyone wants to contact me, my email is in my profile.
drinian 16y ago
Yes, I've done this. I would add that it's also very easy to get at least unlimited 2G Internet access in Thailand or Malaysia, especially Thailand. Bali/Indonesia seem to suck for connectivity as there's a serious bandwidth shortage out of the country. There was a previous attempt on HN at doing this in an organized fashion that didn't take off a few years back. Also, there's this, in Central America: http://www.cocovivo.com/ http://www.cocovivo.com/ My best advice is that you just book a ticket to Bangkok or Singapore, and start hanging out with people in hostels. It's excellent.
- pault 16y ago
  Regarding bandwidth, I have a CDMA mifi router with a local telecom that works anywhere in Thailand except Bangkok (3G deployment in Thailand is a long and sordid tale). I get about half a megabit up and down anywhere that has a cell tower, which is just enough for voice skype and doing server administration on my linode slice over ssh. It even works in Laos as long as you are close to the Mekong. :)
  - drinian 16y ago
    Yeah, when I was in Thailand last year 3G deployment hadn't really started as the government hadn't issued licenses yet. Glad to hear that's changed. Have they instituted bandwidth caps? That was the nice thing about the 2G connections; I could run a solid 50 kilobytes per second whenever I wanted off of a DTAC Happy SIM, buy a week of service at a time, and not worry about running out.
    - pault 16y ago
      I pay 800 baht a month for unlimited bandwidth with CAT. The government still hasn't gotten the licensing issues sorted out, which is why CDMA is still the only game in town. Meanwhile the rest of the world is rolling out 4G. Amazing Thailand...
pault 16y ago
You have to be careful, as most places will have strict regulations against working while on a tourist visa. Thailand won't even let you volunteer, and they will deport you if they catch you. If you have anything that looks like an office, and you have "tourists" in there hacking, you could get in a lot of trouble. Don't know what the rules are in Indonesia, but you should definitely talk to a lawyer first. Having said that, I've been in Thailand for a while, and the same idea keeps popping into my head. If I were bootstrapping a company, I would much rather fly with my partners out here for 6 months than try to rent an office in SF. I can see one major problem with the execution though: people are going to get beach fever for the first month or so, so don't expect productivity to be very high. You might want to schedule a few weeks of partying in, just to get it out of their systems.
- drinian 16y ago
  Does it make a difference if you're 1) entering on a 30-day landing permission (for TH) or 90-day landing permission (most other places) 2) performing work for a company based in another country The tourist visas require signing a document that you're only in the country to spend, sure. But that's mostly designed to make sure that money flows into the country, not out of it.
  - elai 16y ago
    Officially any kind of work is not allowed. Thailand is very thai centric, only thais can own land, citizenship is difficult to obtain, and business is fairly similar. Malaysia is far more business friendly in that regard.
elai 16y ago
I would suggest malaysia instead. It might be %20 more expensive than indonesia/thailand, but they have very good 3G internet deployment throughout the entire country, beautiful beaches, better roads and infrastructure, better english, they're the hub for air asia and most importantly a sane visa system. For example theres things like my second home: http://www.mm2h.gov.my/ http://www.mm2h.gov.my/

eneveu 16y ago

Wow, this is an awesome idea! While I wonder about the price (could bootstrapped startups afford it, especially counting the air fares?), I can see this being very successful.

jasonkester 16y ago
I actually took a team to an off-season ski chalet in Chamonix one summer, and it was surprisingly affordable. Airfare included, it came out to less than we'd pay for cubes in LA. Possibly even less than $200/desk/month, considering the place rented for $800 euro per month and slept 10 comfortably in 6 bedrooms. Details here: http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2006/12/chamonix-branch-office.html http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2006/12/chamonix-branch-of... In SE Asia, I guess you could go 2 ways with pricing. You could look at what the backpackers pay (~$10/night or $200/month for a room), and go with something comparable so that you'd get some overlap (and thus end up with Swedish girls hanging out at the pool). Or you could go for the "Surf Camp" model, where you charge $4k/week to people who have too much money. Personally I'd probably lean towards the first model if it were up to me. Mostly I'd be looking for something that paid for itself, kept me on the beach, and kept a bunch of interesting people around.

tomjen3 16y ago

While I would not want to ruin your chance of some sun, how are you getting over the visa issue?

jasonkester 16y ago
If you visit any backpacker beach in the world, you'll find people who've been there for ten years. Some of them own bars and bungalow complexes. Nearly all of them are living on tourist visas.

citricsquid 16y ago

I'm genuinely interested in this, I work from home so this would be perfect for me (I'm also in rainy old England, although I like England!) my only problem would be I'm terribly unsocial so wouldn't fit in well, but I'd love to attend something like this.

udp 16y ago

Whereabouts in the north of England? What are you doing here? ;-) I thought most of the north was a relatively hacker-free zone.

petercooper 16y ago
There are quite a few! ;-) There's a thriving tech community across the north, e.g.: http://geekup.org/ http://geekup.org/ We even have a nice (but still small) group over here in Lincs, the true tech deadzone..
- mike-cardwell 16y ago
  I grew up in Lincolnshire (Grimsby to be precise), but I'm over in Nottingham now. I know a few geeks in the Midlands, but never met any in Lincs.

JonnieCache 16y ago

Yes. Please drop me a line when you sort this out. We can recreate this video but with macbooks instead of drums and EFF-style rhetoric instead of rastafarian preaching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuFv-Eb_0pE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuFv-Eb_0pE

toumhi 16y ago

Sounds awesome. I'm actually going to be in SE Asia for 5 months starting in 10 days (to start working on my own software product) so I'm already converted and can definitely see the value in this :-) Being surrounded with like-minded people in a coworking space on the beach in Indonesia to hack your next big thing? What else? Also, for the visa thing, it's not really a problem unless people want to stay there very long. Speaking about Indonesia, they are now granting tourist visas for 2 months. Should be plenty enough!

pault 16y ago
I've been doing contract work from abroad for the last 2 years (first Brazil and now SE Asia), but right now I'm rotting in a hotel room in Chiang Mai going out of my mind with boredom. I sent you an email at the address listed in your profile, let's chat.
pault 16y ago
Whoops, email bounced (update your profile), so I'll just post here for anyone else that gives a shit: I've spent the last 2 years doing contract work for a few different startups while I've traveled, first in southern Brazil and now here in Thailand. I've spent a few weeks each in Saigon, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vientiane, and Phnom Penh, but I keep coming back to Chiang Mai as I think it has the best combination of low cost of living (it's absurdly cheap here), access to infrastructure, and tolerance of resident foreigners (notice I said "tolerance" and not "acceptance"; more on that later). Singapore and Hong Kong are far easier for a European or North American, but the cost of living is about 2-3 times what it is in Bangkok, which itself is easily twice as much as a smaller place like Chiang Mai. My first few months here I kept wondering why nobody has set up startup incubators here. The cost of living is so low it's almost a joke, and the environment can be amazing if you know the right places to stay (and which places to avoid). Of course it would be beneficial to be in San Francisco and have coffee with 5 different VCs in the same day, if that's the route you are taking, but I personally prefer the idea of the lean, bootstrapped startup. So why would you cram 5 guys into a tiny apartment in San Francisco and eat ramen noodles 3 meals a day while you develop your prototype, when you could be eating in restaurants and living in a nice, furnished apartment with a view for less than half the price? How many single engineers would jump at the chance to spend 6 months hacking in Thailand? I know I certainly would (and I did!). And now the downside: Asia is VERY, VERY different to any other place in the world. It sounds stupidly obvious, but the magnitude of the difference takes a few months to sink in. Thailand is full of some of the friendliest, most accommodating people in the world, but the culture just doesn't have a place for foreigners as anything other than tourists. I lived in a small village in the northeast for five months, and even though everyone there knew my name, they would only refer to me as "farang", or "foreigner". Could you imagine what kind of reaction you would get if you walked around New York saying to all the immigrants: "Hey, foreigner!" You would be labeled a bigot and ostracized, at best, and probably receive a well-deserved punch to the face. And if you ever have a girlfriend here, everyone will automatically assume she is a prostitute, which makes it really difficult to get a date with a nice girl, as you can imagine. Singapore and Hong Kong are a different story, as they have a much longer history of cultural and ethnic integration, but living there is just as expensive as any big city in the U.S., if not more so. I am making a lot of gross generalizations, and I should point out that I don't speak the language very well, but this has been my personal experience here. As always, YMMV. Sorry for the rant. If anyone wants to contact me, my email is in my profile.

drinian 16y ago

Yes, I've done this. I would add that it's also very easy to get at least unlimited 2G Internet access in Thailand or Malaysia, especially Thailand. Bali/Indonesia seem to suck for connectivity as there's a serious bandwidth shortage out of the country. There was a previous attempt on HN at doing this in an organized fashion that didn't take off a few years back. Also, there's this, in Central America: http://www.cocovivo.com/ http://www.cocovivo.com/ My best advice is that you just book a ticket to Bangkok or Singapore, and start hanging out with people in hostels. It's excellent.

pault 16y ago
Regarding bandwidth, I have a CDMA mifi router with a local telecom that works anywhere in Thailand except Bangkok (3G deployment in Thailand is a long and sordid tale). I get about half a megabit up and down anywhere that has a cell tower, which is just enough for voice skype and doing server administration on my linode slice over ssh. It even works in Laos as long as you are close to the Mekong. :)
- drinian 16y ago
  Yeah, when I was in Thailand last year 3G deployment hadn't really started as the government hadn't issued licenses yet. Glad to hear that's changed. Have they instituted bandwidth caps? That was the nice thing about the 2G connections; I could run a solid 50 kilobytes per second whenever I wanted off of a DTAC Happy SIM, buy a week of service at a time, and not worry about running out.
  - pault 16y ago
    I pay 800 baht a month for unlimited bandwidth with CAT. The government still hasn't gotten the licensing issues sorted out, which is why CDMA is still the only game in town. Meanwhile the rest of the world is rolling out 4G. Amazing Thailand...

pault 16y ago

You have to be careful, as most places will have strict regulations against working while on a tourist visa. Thailand won't even let you volunteer, and they will deport you if they catch you. If you have anything that looks like an office, and you have "tourists" in there hacking, you could get in a lot of trouble. Don't know what the rules are in Indonesia, but you should definitely talk to a lawyer first. Having said that, I've been in Thailand for a while, and the same idea keeps popping into my head. If I were bootstrapping a company, I would much rather fly with my partners out here for 6 months than try to rent an office in SF. I can see one major problem with the execution though: people are going to get beach fever for the first month or so, so don't expect productivity to be very high. You might want to schedule a few weeks of partying in, just to get it out of their systems.

drinian 16y ago
Does it make a difference if you're 1) entering on a 30-day landing permission (for TH) or 90-day landing permission (most other places) 2) performing work for a company based in another country The tourist visas require signing a document that you're only in the country to spend, sure. But that's mostly designed to make sure that money flows into the country, not out of it.
- elai 16y ago
  Officially any kind of work is not allowed. Thailand is very thai centric, only thais can own land, citizenship is difficult to obtain, and business is fairly similar. Malaysia is far more business friendly in that regard.

elai 16y ago

I would suggest malaysia instead. It might be %20 more expensive than indonesia/thailand, but they have very good 3G internet deployment throughout the entire country, beautiful beaches, better roads and infrastructure, better english, they're the hub for air asia and most importantly a sane visa system. For example theres things like my second home: http://www.mm2h.gov.my/ http://www.mm2h.gov.my/