All posts by Drew Meyers

Drew Meyers is the co-founder of Horizon & Oh Hey World. He worked for Zillow from September of 2005 to January of 2010 on the marketing team managing Zillow’s API program and various online partnerships. Founder of Geek Estate Blog, a multi-author blog focused on real estate technology for real estate professionals, and myKRO.org, a blog devoted to exploring the world of microfinance. As passionate as you get about travel.
Serendipity

Serendipity

Leave a comment


We all love when serendipity happens.

Despite knowing more about people’s locations than ever before, it doesn’t happen near as often as it should. Here is a personal example of serendipity that could have been…

You see, Amanda and I met down in the Dominica Republic about 4 years ago while I was visiting Kayla in the Dominican Republic (who works for Esperanza). We both share a strong passion for microfinance. But I haven’t seen Amanda since, though we have traded the occasional Facebook comment or message over the past 4 years. While I was in Seattle this past June, I had coffee with Amanda to get her feedback on the travel concepts I was working on building (since she’s an avid traveler). We of course got to discussing our respective travels over the course of the past few years.

And you know what?

We were both in Bangkok for New Years this past year. And both on Khao San Road for the actual celebration.

Likely we walked within a few hundred yards of each other at some point during the night.

We had no clue.

If we had ahead of time, we certainly would have met up for a drink or two. A friendly face is always a welcome sight on the travel trail.

Do you have an example of serendipity that could have been?

Drew Meyers

Drew Meyers is the co-founder of Horizon & Oh Hey World. He worked for Zillow from September of 2005 to January of 2010 on the marketing team managing Zillow’s API program and various online partnerships. Founder of Geek Estate Blog, a multi-author blog focused on real estate technology for real estate professionals, and myKRO.org, a blog devoted to exploring the world of microfinance. As passionate as you get about travel.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:
TwitterGoogle Plus

Oh Hey World Updates

What is Your Biggest Pain Point of Traveling?

Leave a comment

Traveling isn’t all fun and dandy — as with every other activity, there are pain points that need to be addressed. Finding people to travel with. Airport security lines. Hotel directions. Cost of travel.

What is your biggest pain point of traveling?

Would love your feedback if you can spare 3 minutes.

Or you can provide feedback at the following URL at any point: http://www.ohheyworld.com/feedback.html

Drew Meyers

Drew Meyers is the co-founder of Horizon & Oh Hey World. He worked for Zillow from September of 2005 to January of 2010 on the marketing team managing Zillow’s API program and various online partnerships. Founder of Geek Estate Blog, a multi-author blog focused on real estate technology for real estate professionals, and myKRO.org, a blog devoted to exploring the world of microfinance. As passionate as you get about travel.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:
TwitterGoogle Plus

Travel Thoughts

The Traveler’s Curse. Can You Relate?

2 Comments

Holy cow do I agree with this. I honestly couldn’t have said it better myself…

From Ben Cole’s blog

An old vagabond in his 60s told me about it over a beer in Central America, goes something like this: The more places you see, the more things you see that appeal to you, but no one place has them all. In fact, each place has a smaller and smaller percentage of the things you love, the more things you see. It drives you, even subconsciously, to keep looking, for aC place not that’s perfect (we all know there’s no Shangri-La), but just for a place that’s “just right for you.” But the curse is that the odds of finding “just right” get smaller, not larger, the more you experience. So you keep looking even more, but it always gets worse the more you see. This is Part A of the Curse.

 

Part B is relationships. The more you travel, the more numerous and profoundly varied the relationships you will have. But the more people you meet, the more diffused your time is with any of them. Since all these people can’t travel with you, it becomes more and more difficult to cultivate long term relationships the more you travel. Yet you keep traveling, and keep meeting amazing people, so it feels fulfilling, but eventually, you miss them all, and many have all but forgotten who you are. And then you make up for it by staying put somewhere long enough to develop roots and cultivate stronger relationships, but these people will never know what you know or see what you’ve seen, and you will always feel a tinge of loneliness, and you will want to tell your stories just a little bit more than they will want to hear them. The reason this is part of the Curse is that it gets worse the more you travel, yet travel seems to be a cure for a while.

 

None of this is to suggest that one should ever reduce travel. It’s just a warning to young Travelers, to expect, as part of the price, a rich life tinged with a bit of sadness and loneliness, and angst that’s like the same nostalgia everyone feels for special parts of their past, except multiplied by a thousand.

Can you relate?

Drew Meyers

Drew Meyers is the co-founder of Horizon & Oh Hey World. He worked for Zillow from September of 2005 to January of 2010 on the marketing team managing Zillow’s API program and various online partnerships. Founder of Geek Estate Blog, a multi-author blog focused on real estate technology for real estate professionals, and myKRO.org, a blog devoted to exploring the world of microfinance. As passionate as you get about travel.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:
TwitterGoogle Plus

Travel Thoughts

Want to Know What’s Happening in the World?

Leave a comment

I haven’t really watched or read mainstream news for quite awhile; probably 3-4 years. The negativity of the mainstream news beats me down, and I’d rather look elsewhere for more positive and motivational news to consume. I’m clearly not alone – Joel Gascoigne doesn’t either (and a number of the commenters on that post).

Mainstream news doesn’t paint an accurate picture of what’s happening in the world. Want to know what’s actually happening? Joel answers it best:

If you want to see what is going on in the world then go traveling and find out for yourself.

Photo credit: Jon S

Drew Meyers

Drew Meyers is the co-founder of Horizon & Oh Hey World. He worked for Zillow from September of 2005 to January of 2010 on the marketing team managing Zillow’s API program and various online partnerships. Founder of Geek Estate Blog, a multi-author blog focused on real estate technology for real estate professionals, and myKRO.org, a blog devoted to exploring the world of microfinance. As passionate as you get about travel.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:
TwitterGoogle Plus

Photos

Travel Photo: Sunrise at Mount Batur in Bali

Leave a comment

If you have a chance to hike Mount Batur while in Bali to see the sunrise — I 100% recommend it. The hike begins around 4:30 am and is no cakewalk – but the view is totally worth it. My friend Brad Coy tipped me off to it, and our entire group at Startup Abroad made an outing of it our last night.

Drew Meyers

Drew Meyers is the co-founder of Horizon & Oh Hey World. He worked for Zillow from September of 2005 to January of 2010 on the marketing team managing Zillow’s API program and various online partnerships. Founder of Geek Estate Blog, a multi-author blog focused on real estate technology for real estate professionals, and myKRO.org, a blog devoted to exploring the world of microfinance. As passionate as you get about travel.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:
TwitterGoogle Plus

Oh Hey World Updates

Motives for Building Oh Hey World

1 Comment

I’ve always been entrepreneurial. I sold candy on the bus in middle school (made little to no money but covered the cost of candy for myself). I bought and sold sports cards throughout my youth (never made any money). I started a lawn mowing business in 8th grade (made a little money).

Those endeavors were all done in good fun as a form of entertainment, and to make a little bit of extra spending money to buy my next candy bar or pack of baseball cards.

But when faced with the prospect of putting tens of thousands of dollars of my own money into a real company that employees count on to pay their bills — it’s a whole different ball game. Starting a company just to start a company is, well, plain foolish. As is starting a company with the sole goal of flipping it. Prior to embarking on the journey of building Oh Hey World with my own time and money, I had to ensure the company was being started for the right reasons.

My motives for building Oh Hey World revolve around solving a real world problem I face while traveling – the inefficient nature of finding and connecting with friends and other similar travelers while on the road – teamed with making the world a better place for millions of people. In the travel context, making the world a better place means getting more people to travel.

Why?

People should lead less sheltered & materialistic, and more simplistic lives — and traveling to varied cultures is the best way to ensure that happens. It’s hard to continue to think and live the same lifestyle once you’ve seen how the rest of the world lives.

People will travel more when it becomes extremely easy to find friends and travel mates to spend time with in a given location. When I ask people why they don’t travel more, the two biggest obstacles I hear are finding travel companions & money. The vast majority of people are afraid of solo travel. Anything we can do to remove that roadblock is a step in the right direction.

As I mentioned in a comment on 1000Watt today:

I dream of a world where all barriers to traveling are removed & every single person has a stamp in their passport.

Let’s make it so.

Drew Meyers

Drew Meyers is the co-founder of Horizon & Oh Hey World. He worked for Zillow from September of 2005 to January of 2010 on the marketing team managing Zillow’s API program and various online partnerships. Founder of Geek Estate Blog, a multi-author blog focused on real estate technology for real estate professionals, and myKRO.org, a blog devoted to exploring the world of microfinance. As passionate as you get about travel.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:
TwitterGoogle Plus

Festivals

Burning Man – Craziness

4 Comments

Ever since I got back from Burning Man (in Black Rock City, Nevada), all I seem to be getting asked is “What was Burning Man like?” After 3 nights at Burning Man, I totally understand why everyone I asked about Burning Man prior to attending gave me an answer along the lines of “you can’t explain it – you just have to go and figure it out.”

I went and figured it out. And I can’t explain it in words. So I’ll leave it at two:

Absolute craziness.

Drew Meyers

Drew Meyers is the co-founder of Horizon & Oh Hey World. He worked for Zillow from September of 2005 to January of 2010 on the marketing team managing Zillow’s API program and various online partnerships. Founder of Geek Estate Blog, a multi-author blog focused on real estate technology for real estate professionals, and myKRO.org, a blog devoted to exploring the world of microfinance. As passionate as you get about travel.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:
TwitterGoogle Plus

Voluntourism

Painting Walls in Kenya

Leave a comment

2 years since Dan and I visited Saint Monica’s Children Home (October 2010) to paint walls for 5 days, I finally shared the story of the trip over on the Mothers Fighting for Others blog. Not a month goes by where I don’t think back to all the fond memories from Kenya. The whole entire experience was, well, “surreal”. That’s really the only way I know how to explain Kenya to someone who hasn’t been to Africa. It was truly an entirely new experience that’s hard to put into words. That said, I tried — head over and give it a read.

Drew Meyers

Drew Meyers is the co-founder of Horizon & Oh Hey World. He worked for Zillow from September of 2005 to January of 2010 on the marketing team managing Zillow’s API program and various online partnerships. Founder of Geek Estate Blog, a multi-author blog focused on real estate technology for real estate professionals, and myKRO.org, a blog devoted to exploring the world of microfinance. As passionate as you get about travel.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:
TwitterGoogle Plus

Travel Thoughts

Burning Man, and Life Taking You Crazy Places

1 Comment

I’ll be honest. I’ve been wanting to go to Burning Man for about 5 years now. But I’ve never made it a priority to actually attend.

Until now.

Most of the entrepreneurs at Startup Abroad are from San Francisco. So naturally Burning Man has been a topic of discussion since it starts this week and many of their friends are attending. One entrepreneur in the crew, Scott Mcleod (who happens to have grown up in the same city as me), is flying back to San Francisco on the 28th, and leaving for Burning Man the morning of the 29th.

We spent a ton of time talking the other night, and of course one of the topics we discussed was his expectations for his first Burning Man experience.

Over the course of the past few days, I put a few feelers out to people I know in San Francisco, a really good friend from Seattle who has gone the last two years & is attending again this year, and asked the burners in the Startup Abroad crew a bunch of questions — and a few days later, I’m going to Burning Man for the first time.

I literally just wrote about the thrill of buying plane tickets a few days ago. Little did I know, a mere 3 days later, I would end up taking the plunge on a new life path and buying a one-way ticket across the Pacific (I just did the exact same thing in April) for my next epic adventure.

This time around, it cost me $921 to cross the Pacific.

You only live once.

Drew Meyers

Drew Meyers is the co-founder of Horizon & Oh Hey World. He worked for Zillow from September of 2005 to January of 2010 on the marketing team managing Zillow’s API program and various online partnerships. Founder of Geek Estate Blog, a multi-author blog focused on real estate technology for real estate professionals, and myKRO.org, a blog devoted to exploring the world of microfinance. As passionate as you get about travel.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:
TwitterGoogle Plus

Travel Thoughts

The Thrill of Booking Plane Tickets

4 Comments

As I’ve said before, buying plane tickets is the only form of shopping I enjoy. Why?

Simple. The thrill that occurs when I click “confirm payment” on Expedia, Kayak, Cheapoair, or any of the other thousands of airline booking portals. That single 1 second action instantly transports me to some place in the future, and sets a new string of events for my life in motion.

Less than 2 months ago, I decided to seize the opportunity to Bali for Startup Abroad. A few days later, I booked my plane ticket.

Travel is entirely about relationships – and I’m now on the other side of the planet with 8 amazing entrepreneurs building lifelong friendships and business connections. To me, that’s why travel is the only form of spending money that makes my life richer.

That’s why I love clicking “confirm payment”. How about you?

Drew Meyers

Drew Meyers is the co-founder of Horizon & Oh Hey World. He worked for Zillow from September of 2005 to January of 2010 on the marketing team managing Zillow’s API program and various online partnerships. Founder of Geek Estate Blog, a multi-author blog focused on real estate technology for real estate professionals, and myKRO.org, a blog devoted to exploring the world of microfinance. As passionate as you get about travel.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:
TwitterGoogle Plus