8. Casey Fenton - Founder of Couchsurfing

Life Done Different

It’s 1999. You decide you want to travel the world, but you’re from a small town, you don’t have a lot of connections and you don’t have a ton of cash. What do you do?

This was the question that inspired Casey Fenton (@caseyfenton) to create Couchsurfing.com. If you haven’t heard of Couchsurfing before, it’s pretty much how the name sounds. You go onto the site, create a profile and this allows you to meet other members that you can host in your home, or that you can stay with as a guest in theirs. And the unique thing about it is that it’s all free.

I’ve known people who have traveled all the way around the world on the platform so I was really looking forward to sitting down with Casey to hear the origins of the company. It turns out that it ties in heavily with his own story.

Casey comes from a small town and had limited options growing up. From an early age, he knew he wanted to change that and we talk about how he was able to use experiences as a way to create more possibilities and better choices. It’s become somewhat of a life philosophy and a driving principle around why Couchsurfing exists.

We also bounce around a lot and end up traveling to unexpected places, like discussing whether or not we’re living in a simulation, but that’s what made this interview really fun. I hope you think so too. Please enjoy this talk with Casey Fenton.