“Traveling gives you a chance to be lost bored and lonely” read the slide behind my back while I was standing on the stage of the BMW World Arena in Munich. The spotlight blending my eyes I could only see the silhouettes of the 800 smart dressed businessmen and women attending the conference.

Eight hours ago I had women up in a cave in by the Adriatic Sea to the sound of waves. “I’ll be back tonight”, I whispered into my girlfriends ears, kissing her good bye while she kept sleeping in the cave, that same cave where we had stayed the last three days, making tin foil potatoes in the camp fire, and jumping into the sea after making love in our our little late September hideaway in Montenegro – a country we had just discovered in the good old Land Rover. I couldn’t help but mischievously smile when I ran up the stairs to the stage, thinking about how I had created the slides that were now projected against the giant screen from a cave in the past two days. Somehow the contrast between waking up in a cave in the Balkans and now stating on a world stage in Germany in front of business people made me happy.

“How on earth did I end up here”, I thought while facing the crowd and reading the words of the slide behind me – “Traveling gives you a chance to be lost, bored and lonely”, I spoke out loud and realized how I had just answered my own question.

“Lost, bored, and lonely.” Three words todays world spend its live avoiding. Yet when I look back it seems that all the good things in my life, all major turning points had begun with exactly that.

In Berlin I sat bored in a university lecture when a friend send me an SMS saying he snug into a Ruby on Rails conference at the Hyatt hotel, “the buffet looks amazing”, he added. Growing up in a low-income household I only heard “free food” and when shuffling heaps of salmon onto my plate a headhunter asked me if I had experience with Ruby on Rails. “Yeah, getting into it” I faked it till I made it and he offered me a job. I started working 2 days a week and because of that work experience I landed another job at an NGO called betterplace.

When one day leaving the NGO’s office I saw a long haired Spanish guy playing the guitar on the opposite side of the road. I walked up to him and and asked if I could try playing his guitar as it was the same that I wanted to buy. He told me how he’d just been driving through Africa in cars be bought in Spain and sold in Gambia. It sounded amazing, I wanted to do the same. Problem was: I had no money. The next day I walked home from the office and saw a huge billboard saying “Win 10.000 USD and test drive the new Ford Focus”. Potential winners were supposed to send in an email, I sent a video and won.

I bought an old Mercedes and started driving. 10 months and 15 countries later I ended up having Malaria in Congo. To escape the horrendous state of high fever delirium I randomly googled “The coolest job of the world”.

One months later I was wearing smart living in London being among the first employees of Zendesk, happily doing 80 hour weeks for a startup with the best culture I ever witnessed. A year later I took all my year’s vacation to guide an ayahuasca expedition for burnouts to the amazon rainforest. Sitting in a jungle hut listening to the sound of the heavy rain hitting the bamboo roof I looked at the people for whom I was translating between the shaman and realized that I might just end up like them if I continued working as much as I did at Zendesk. “We knew you were a little weird, that’s why we hired you”, said the boss of the London office when we said good bye and randomly added that I could do data migrations for Zendesk customers on my own. Said and done, a month later I founded helpando.it, 10x’ed my earnings and moved back to Berlin. During a shared car trip In Romania I met a guy at a petrol station, we had a chat, he seemed obsessed with all things internet biz, I hired him, he moved into my living room, his Romanian friends helped coding.

Two month later I sat into my office and thought: “I already know where this is going: more employees, bigger office, more money”. It seemed like a movie I already knew the outcome of. Why would I watch it? I was used to unpredictability and surprises happening during travels. Intuitively I thought of someone I had added as a Facebook friend when I crossed Ghana in the old Mercedes. I had never talked to David. I wrote him a message: “Hi David, what should I do with my life?”. He replied immediately, he didn’t even say ‘hi’, he just wrote “Buy this:” and pasted a link to a Land Rover Defender which was for sale in Argentina.

Two months later Dominic from the petrol station, Vinh who I had met in a hostel in Spain and I were driving the Land Rover from Uruguay to Colombia while filming StartupDiaries.org. Wired Magazine called us the “first nomad company” and I was invited to give multiple TEDx talks. One thing led to another and I gave keynotes all around the world in four different languages about how to run a million dollar business from a clunky car while driving through beaches, jungles and