Meet Sarah, Co-founder of Nomad Surfing

We speak to Sarah, co-founder of Nomad Surfing. Having been to 36 countries, Sarah has quite some travel experience and speaks three languages fluently.

She is currently living in Spain, in sunny Valencia where she co-founded Nomad Surfing.

Tell us more about yourself and Melanie.

Melanie and I are both passionate travelers (in fact we met while traveling in Australia a few years ago) and we ended up studying together in Amsterdam.

My degree in business administration with a focus on tourism management has given me useful insights into the world of planning and organizing trips such as Nomad Surfing.

Melanie has a degree in social sciences and has previously worked in the fields of event management and marketing.

What made you decide to become a digital nomad?

I hadn’t planned to become a digital nomad - it just somehow happened.

While I was on an internship in Central America for my studies I became friends with someone who later offered me a full-time position in his company. The main benefit was that I was able to work remotely.

At the beginning, I wasn’t quite aware of all the possibilities I had and I ended up staying nine months in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, without traveling much, after which I made the move to Spain.

After a while of working for this online business I started realizing that being an employee didn’t really work out for me and I also didn’t see enough opportunities in the company anymore for me to grow personally and professionally.

I decided it was time to start something new. Although the idea of Nomad Surfing didn’t come until a few weeks later, I knew that I was not going to change my way of living any time soon.

What does being a digital nomad mean to you?

Being a digital nomad doesn’t just describe the way of working - online and remotely - it describes an entire lifestyle and with this the conscious choice of living a location independent life.

For some, this means constant travel and for others this means changing locations regularly, but actually getting to know a country by spending several weeks or months in it. I definitely fall into the latter category.

I always knew I wanted to work as a digital nomad, but it wasn’t until a sunny afternoon at the beach in Valencia that my friend Melanie and I asked ourselves why we wouldn’t just create a product for digital nomads.

How did you come up with the idea of Nomad Surfing?

The digital nomad lifestyle has many advantages, however, it also involves moving away frequently, leaving friends behind and a certain unsteadiness.

Melanie and I had the idea in mind to help people get started in the world of digital nomads and to show them how to overcome such difficulties.

Nomad Surfing brings together 35 digital nomads, or people who are planning to work remotely, to travel, work and surf together for four months in four different countries.

While we want every participant to experience new cultures and countries and have meaningful interactions with each other, we also want to share our passion with the group: surfing.

Our itinerary covers four different countries, in all of which we take care of accommodation, co-working spaces, leisure activities, surfing classes and surfing equipment rental for the more experienced surfers.

All locations will meet the participants’ needs in regards to a place to work and reliable WiFi and all destinations are at the beach with waves suitable for all levels of surf experience.

The itinerary was carefully designed to also cover many different cultures in on trip, with the potential to extend to other places in the future, and to also eventually a longer program than four months.