No Country for Digital Nomads — Until Now
In a post-pandemic world, remote work has come to the fore as a flexible career option for many people to work from home. Or, for some people, anywhere but home.
This is the age of the digital nomad, a remote worker who operates from various locations of their choosing rather than a single set workspace.
According to an MBO Partners 2022 State of Independence study, “16.9 million American workers currently describe themselves as digital nomads, increasing 9% from 2021 and a staggering 131% from the pre-pandemic year 2019.” That number is now above 17 million.
But despite its popularity, being a digital nomad has its drawbacks — lack of benefits, health insurance, income stabilization, retirement, disability coverage, sick leave, PTO, and more.
Sondre Rasch, Co-Founder and CEO of SafetyWing, is getting rid of those drawbacks.
“The biggest problem digital nomads and remote workers deal with is the lack of security and income stability they used to get through their home country and employers,” explained Sondre. “These benefits are not available for people that are location independent. Our goal is to build a global safety net to address that.”
SafetyWing is an insurance company offering affordable and flexible healthcare options for remote workers, whether they need travel insurance as they explore abroad, fully-equipped global health insurance policies, or a group policy for remote companies and globally distributed teams.
But Sondre has bigger plans for SafetyWing’s future. He wants to offer even more benefits, including global retirement and pension plans, disability insurance, parental leave, extended health and life insurance, income stabilization for freelancers, and more.
His biggest dream? Building a new country, entirely on the internet.
A large part of “being part of a country” is the social protections or “safety net” your nation provides to you. But many traditional countries aren’t able to properly protect their citizens, and, in the case of freelancers and digital nomads, they’re left out in the cold.
“We saw the world change dramatically with the internet and, unfortunately, traditional systems and institutions have not kept up,” said Sondre. “The solution is a digital country that transcends national borders, so that citizenship is no longer something you’re born with, but that you can choose.”
In Sondre’s country, these people on the fringes will be brought into the fold.
The Seeds of SafetyWing
This dream doesn’t come out of nowhere for Sondre. It started when at 13 years old when he launched his own remote business
Playing an interactive, online game called Planetarion, he learned how to program, web host, and, critically, culture build. With his mother’s credit card, a computer he saved up to buy himself, and a mobile phone he’d gotten for Christmas, he started his own web hosting business for other players.
When his mother’s credit card was defrauded, Sondre took that opportunity to sell his first company. But he never forgot his love for computers and community.
Years after his first entrepreneurial venture, Sondre worked as a social policy advisor to the government in his home country of Norway. But he was disappointed by the slow pace of change and wanted to see if he could make change himself.
So in 2016, Sondre launched SuperSide, a platform for freelance designers. Both working with the freelancers and being a nomad himself opened his eyes to the lack of social safety net for remote workers, especially considering that many people need a remote job because of location, disabilities, or needing to take care of their children. It inspired him to launch SafetyWing in 2018. And SafetyWing has definitely taken flight, making it onto the Y Combinator list of top companies by valuation, and Plumia, the umbrella project for SafetyWing’s efforts, raising more than $50 million in venture capital.
Integrating Faith into SafetyWing
For Sondre, his businesses are a form of service. He’s filling in the gaps where leaders are failing. He’s protecting those who are often forgotten, including the elderly and disabled, and creating a new (entirely digital) home for them.
But SafetyWing has more than just a Catholic-aligned mission — Sondre integrates his faith into how he runs the company.
“I am a convert, and I see Catholic insights as universally true, not just true for Catholics. My company is a remote team with people from 60 different countries and many faiths. I apply the insights I learn from Catholicism and translate them to a language that everyone can understand and glean value from,” Sondre said.
Figuring out how to integrate Catholic principles into a secular business with a diverse staff can be a difficult needle to thread. But Sondre’s background in online community building from his Planetarion days has helped him strike a good balance.
Though his respectful treatment of his employees isn’t explicitly “Catholic,” it’s informed by St. Pope John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body.” Through this work, Sondre began to see work as having three layers: the goal, the people to be taken into consideration as you achieve that goal, and divine ideals.
“I found this to be a great insight and put a lot of effort into making the company a voluntary place where people are taken seriously, persuaded, that we work to try to make our goals shared among each other rather than dictated, and where we are ruled by what is right, not just what will work in the short term,” explained Sondre. “Instead, people must be taken as ends in themselves.”
Keeping this mutual respect and camaraderie is critical for Sondre, who, as he’s navigated running remote companies, trying to build a new nation, and converting to Catholicism from atheism, realized how critical community is.
“I did not realize I had never really had a community before I experienced it. It was something I did not miss, since I hadn’t encountered it. I think having a stable community is one of the things most missing in the modern world, and what we most need to rebuild to produce a flourishing and joyful society,” said Sondre.