New Tips And Triks For You

The following guest post is by Konrad Waliszewski, VP of Business Development at Speek, which provides free conference calls and meeting collaboration tools, and founder of Apto Ventures.

The age old question for new college grads and even grad school grads has long been this: travel and see the world, or get a real job? Surf the breaks from Maui to Murdeshwara while living off a rapidly diminished savings account, or settle into a responsible 9-to-5 which offers great security but about as much excitement as a duet album of lullabies by Yanni and Barry Manilow?

Even in the disruptive world of tech, there's still an assumption that yeah, technically you can program from anywhere, but to really be a part of the team, it's pretty essential to be in the same city of at least some of your coworkers...or at least on the same continent.

But I am living proof that "work vs. travel" is not in fact an either/or proposition. I've always valued the freedom to travel and harbored a deep passion for seeing the world, but for a long time I still tried to balance my globe-trotting tendencies with building companies and maintaining a fairly stable base of operations centered wherever my business was.

No more: a couple of years ago, I started what I call my World Venture Project, seeking to join my passion for travel, my desire to make a difference in the world and around the world, and the ability to maintain strong ties with my company and projects back home.

And so this is my report from the front: Is it possible to seamlessly marry work and travel?

Totally possible, and totally awesome.

So: how do you do it? First, if you work in tech, you have a huge leg up. Startup culture is way more amenable to alternative work styles in general, way more knowledgeable about technological advances than is the corporate world (makes sense, since almost all of these innovations come from the startup world), and the actual work of a startup is way more conducive to being done from a distance (i.e. no matter how savvy a working traveler you are, if you're a mechanic in Portland, it's going to be tough to work on that Chevy back at the shop while you're strolling the streets of the Forbidden City).

Second, it's important to know about the myriad tools that are out there now that make working while traveling easier than ever before. A few things to keep in mind:

Portable power. Even if you stick to the most industrialized of nations, spending hours in transit and jumping back and forth between power plug and charge standards mean that having a back-up battery is essential. And in less-developed nations, forget about it. I use a myCharge Amp 6000: it's lightweight, has 2 USB chargers, and holds enough juice for a couple of charges.

Reliable reachability. If you're going to be constantly on the go, it is of paramount importance that your clients and coworkers know they can get a hold of you when they need to. I'm currently the VP of Business Development and Finance at Speek, a D.C.-based startup where we are perfecting the art of free conference calls and meeting collaboration. A few months ago, I was traveling around Serbia when we were in the midst of closing a venture capital round. As usual, it required a ton of conferencing to iron out the last minute details. With Speek, I didn't have to worry about international dial-ins and hundreds of dollars of charges, or asking our potential investors to try and use Skype. Instead, everyone else dialed in by phone and I joined on VoIP through my laptop. It worked perfectly.

Another example: last year I was sitting on a beach in Mozambique when a private equity firm I was doing some work for requested an in-person meeting to walk them through the finer points of an acquisition. Getting back stateside ASAP would have been a huge pain, but instead I was able to help them by using join.me to share my screen with them and go over the analysis step-by-step.

One more: A lot of places I go have power grids that could charitably be referred to as "spotty at best." Once, in Uganda, I received an urgent email from a client prepping for a board meeting, asking me to resend an important document that he couldn't find... and that's when my power went out. With my computer dead and no WiFi, I was able to use my charged phone (thanks, external battery!) to sync with Dropbox and get the doc to my client in time for his meeting.

See the world, not your screen. A huge part of traveling the world is getting to experience, you know, the world, not just bouncing around Internet cafes and hotel lobbies scrambling to get all your work done. To that end, I've found some "smarter-not-harder" tools to be especially useful while traveling. While I'm exploring an ancient temple or a brand-new architectural wonder of the world, Zirtual's virtual assistant can take care of a ton of the tasks that I'd otherwise need to be handling myself. And with the email templates I create in Yesware, I can make sure that the time I spend emailing is always time well-spent, since it takes care of the repetitive parts of emails that I'd otherwise end up typing 10 times a day in different emails ("Our company provides..."). Truly a huge time-saver.

So those are some tips to consider if you're thinking about cutting bait and getting out to see the world. And on behalf of the world, let me just say:

You are very invited. There's plenty of room out here.