Slow Travel Webinar
Visiting 193+ Countries Without Flying  

Profile picture
Ian
Founder, Travel Massive
⭐️ Community Leader 🔥 Top 12%

Hey everyone, I built this community to do something good for travel.

👉 How I started this. Before starting Travel Massive, I co-founded a software consulting firm — and worked on many projects (too many to list) including the first search engine for large-scale climate research data. On a trip to the US (way back in 2006) to visit some colleagues at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, my friend sent me on an adventure to the Green Tortoise hostel in San Francisco. That trip mostly changed my life, and I decided to build my own travel startup to help connect fellow travelers. I quit my job (blah blah) and continued traveling and after a few months of living cheap and working from internet-cafes in Thailand and Laos, I presented at CES Australia (2009) and met a travel insurance company who bought my startup. At a hostel in Sydney, me and a few friends started a meetup for travel startups and bloggers, that accidentally grew to a few cities around the world. After a few thousand meetups in a few hundred cities, this created Travel Massive :)

I've also invested in a few startups, including an accelerator in Sydney that funded Tinybeans.com (which floated on the ASX). I'm interested in programming, the open internet, and ways to help people connect and share ideas online and in-person.

I've spent time living in Sydney, Bangkok, Berlin, and Tasmania. Get in touch!

Member for 8 Years
Joined December 2014
Location
Tasmania
Meetups
296 events
Discussion
553 comments
Sign in to share your membership badge

🌎 Search our Community

Explore 15 000+ Verified Members and find travel professionals, creators, and startups from all around the world.

What is your favorite travel destination?

East Coast, Tasmania

Where do you dream of traveling to?

East Africa

What was your first travel job?

I wrote a booking engine for a small airline.

What do you want to learn more about?

The most remote places in the world

Three words that describe why we should travel?

Travel with purpose

553 Comments

  • A beautifully branded app for networking and digital nomads to meet over breakfast. The authors claim this is not a dating app. Instead, the idea is that every introduction is a "chance" for a genuine in-person interaction. Think: meeting another start... show more

    Profile picture

    The Breakfast App yesterday

  • Off topic, but for Barcelona members... here's an interactive website that shows only 8% of Barcelona's streets are named after women! https://only8.org/

  • "There is a 62% probability this text was entirely written by AI" according to https://gptzero.me 🤨

  • Good point, I agree that it's a social trend. I just hope the trend of impact travel doesn't lean towards "I'm saving the planet" and instead focuses more on "I'm traveling better than last time". The tourism industry has a fixation on being a "force f... show more

  • When we turn up to destinations with the intent of "making a positive impact", are we more or less some kind of modern-day tourist missionary? Did anyone actually ask us to visit? As a counter argument to "impact travel", look at China. They lifted 800... show more