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    A proposal from the creator of "a company without an office": recommending a work style that allows you to live wherever you want
The staff at Lincoln Loop, a company that doesn't have any office, are free to choose wherever they want to work, in addition to wherever they want to live. No two of them live in the same place: France, Sweden, Portugal, and New Zealand, among others. The founder has tried to prove that in spite of differences in location, the staff can still come together as a company. He says that the work style of the future will "allow you to live where you want" before any other considerations.
Text by WIRED.jp_M

Photographs courtesy of Peter Baumgartner & Editory


Peter Baumgartner
Founder of Lincoln Loop. After graduating from the University of Michigan, moved to Steamboat Springs, Michigan, and founded his company in 2006. Enjoys surfing and lives with his family of four in the small surfing village of Sayulita, Mexico. His work habits haven't changed at all from when he spent his time skiing in Colorado.

After graduating from college and moving to a ski resort, Baumgartner was looking forward to enjoying a life on the slopes, with no intention of having to commute from the place he had chosen. The startup he formed in 2006, Lincoln Loop, has no office.
His interests shifted from skiing to surfing, and Baumgartner has lived for the past three years in a small surfing town in Mexico, from which location he spends his days enjoying surfing and running the company. And his staff also live and work from wherever they choose. They are located in California, Seattle, Texas, France, Sweden, Portugal, New Zealand, Germany, and many other locations all over the world, with no two living in the same place.
How would one form such a company? Turning the question around, why exactly do we think that such a company is even strange in the first place? The founder of Lincoln Loop, Peter Baumgartner, has proposed three ways to rethink your work style.
1. It's crazy to be forced to live in a certain place for work!

"Nowadays, it's crazy that where people live is still limited by their work." After an explanation of how Skype interviews worked, Baumgartner started talking right away from the other side of the screen.
"The communications infrastructure is already in place. Right at this moment, as you're there in Tokyo and I'm over here in Mexico, we can talk as if we were right next to each other. All of the reasons as to why you had to live in a certain place are disappearing day by day."
Lincoln Loop is a company that handles contracts for website development and design, but Baumgartner says that we should look for ways to make it possible for anyone to be able to choose where they work, no matter what kind of work they do.
"To be sure, there are a lot of kinds of work where all of the employees at a company have to be in a single location, even in the modern world. But there are also many others who sit at an office desk, just handling the phone and email all day long. I don't think there's much of a reason for those people to have to work in a particular location. Also, whatever kind of work someone does, I think we should think about making it so that they can work from wherever they want at least a few days a week."
Baumgartner thinks that if we have the freedom to work from wherever we want, our level of happiness will increase. He bases this on his own life experience.
Baumgartner studied computer science at the University of Michigan, and his graduation in 2000 coincided almost exactly with the first dot com bubble. There was no way that he was going to want to compete head-on with the surplus of talent in Silicon Valley. Instead, he moved to a Colorado ski resort, and started working at a small shop at the base of the slopes. There he would handle computer repair and website creation, eventually taking it freelance to be able to make a living. Looking for more that he could do, he decided to form a company and hire employees. Thus Lincoln Loop was born.
He married and had children, and as he approached his thirteenth year living in Colorado, he decided to try out a "home exchange" with a family living in California, swapping locations for a while. That was when, Baumgartner says, he came to love being able to go to the beach and surf whenever he wanted.
"I had access to the internet, there was a supermarket within walking distance, I could surf, and my children could go to school. There were a lot of candidates that fulfilled all of these conditions. But the decisive factor was that it had to be someplace that I had never visited before."
That was when he got a bargain airplane ticket to Sayulita, Mexico. Without hesitation, he went to visit the small surfing town, taking his entire family along. In the three years since, they have enjoyed living in this new country.
Being able to move to where you want to live, without worrying about money or work. To the many who don't have that freedom, the thought of moving when you feel like it, like Baumgartner, must not even occur.
But Baumgartner predicts that there will be many more like him in the future. "When you compare an office with a ping pong table and free soda to a company that allows you to work wherever in the world you wish, it's obvious which one is more attractive. Our company has been able to attract a lot of top-notch talent for that exact reason."

2. Become your own manager

Baumgartner goes on to tell us that the most important consideration for an employer that is willing to let an employee have the freedom to live wherever they wish is earning trust.
"If everyone is in a single location, employers can confirm whether or not an employee is at the office, and look over their shoulder to see what's on their screen. Of course, that's not possible if the employee is working in a separate location, and the employer has to be able to trust that everyone is getting their work done."
The value of those whom one can trust to do work is considerable. Baumgartner tells me that many employers are apt to get stuck in the pitfalls of searching for employees who can work from a separate location, what is called working remotely.
"There are many who have this misconception that hiring online means that you are going to find someone in India who is working for 10 dollars an hour. I've had a lot of those conversations, and truthfully I started out thinking that way myself and failed a number of times. A great worker will be able to work in an imaginative way, and provide something that fills in between the lines of directions given. A cheaper employee won't do anything more unless it is specifically in the instructions. Often the work won't be completed on time, and this causes grief for the client. I often feel that if I have to spend so much time managing something, I'd rather just do the whole thing myself."
As the staff of Lincoln Loop are their own managers, they end up deciding on their own salaries. As some of the employees' countries have a lower standard of living, the base salary changes according to where an employee lives.

3. In the future, we should pay attention to "community"

As one of the important steps leading up to the Tokyo Olympics to be held in 2020, people are looking into the possibilities of developing the city and its transportation. How much will the world change if there is no longer any need for people to commute every day to a fixed location, and more people end up working remotely? Baumgartner puts a good deal of emphasis on the word "community".
"In suburban bedroom towns, everyone wakes up in the morning and heads downtown for their daily commute, the kids are left at nursery school, so in the middle of the day there's practically nobody around, and I think that that situation is going to end up changing in the future." He predicts that work and life will become more closely intertwined, and work will end up merging into daily life. "People who work remotely are under fewer time constraints. If people can take time off in the middle of the day to attend their child's baseball game, you're going to see more life brought into the local communities."
Baumgartner may not make much use of a shared workspace himself, but he's keeping an eye on the development of new kinds of workplaces.
"Even if colleagues all the world over are connected to each other through the internet, there are probably still many who feel lonely working alone in their house. I think that, even if everyone is doing different work, it would be something that people could really enjoy to have a local place where they could gather as a community to work together."
Baumgartner thinks that there will be a lot more people who end up moving to a location because they appreciate its individual community and culture. "Those are the reasons why I came to love Sayulita. Most of the people here don't go downtown every morning for their daily commute. Even if they work, they spend about half of the time talking with friends or relaxing.
By 2020, maybe our "sense of time" while working will have changed a good deal.