Well we just broke the halfway mark of Remote Year having left Valencia, Spain and rounded out month six. Here’s my normal video recap that shows where we lived and worked there:

I was fortunate to get outside of Valencia too this past month and travel around Ireland and to Barcelona. Here is the month told in photos:

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• Spain spanish is very different from latin-american spanish. I learned my español in Ecuador so it was a bit of an adjustment to get the Valencian Spanish. They speak very fast and with the “theta” accent.
• Ham, ham and more ham. Spain must do 5x average pig consumption per capita as we do in the States. Jamon was on every menu (we even went to a restaurant called “Jamon Jamon.”). If you get a chance to try Iberic ham, do it. It’s delicious. Paella too, but be prepared to take a nap after.
• Valencia was a beautiful, quiet, walkable city with clean streets and nice parks. It was a great R&R stop after Rabat and before diving into the 2nd leg of our journey in Mexico and S. America.
• Our Ireland trip was the highpoint of the month for me. The Cliffs of Moher were stunning and just driving the countryside was super relaxing. Driving on the left side of the road with the steering wheel on the right is a mental curveball but such a great experience.
• Strong month for sales at Pagely and I’m engaged in two efforts now setting up our business intelligence and implementing a marketing automation framework for improved nurture and conversion.

Anyways, I’m headed back to Phoenix to see friends and family over the Christmas break. If you’re in Phoenix the evening after Christmas we’re doing a happy hour. Hit me up if you want to join and I’ll add you to the FB event. Here are some of the songs that will remind me of this month:

We’re wrapping up our time in Lisbon and are headed to Rabat, Morocco tomorrow so I took the morning to shoot some video that shows a little of the town and where we’ve lived and worked over the past month. Check it out:

A couple points of clarification to the video:

• Lisbon, your gelato game is strong, very strong. I commend you for this. I failed to mention this in the video but it’s one of your greatest attributes.
• Indeed my sales numbers are up 72% for Pagely since being on Remote Year. In hindsight though the calculation I used overstates the effect. I averaged my sales from the past four months vs. my 11mos at Pagely prior to RY. Some of the lift in that is attributed to other factors (for instance we raised prices back in March, we’re progressively getting larger and larger clients now so deal sizes overall are bigger than they were, I had a ramp up period when I first started, etc). I realized after shooting the video that a better computation would be to compare the past four months to the four months prior to RY. When I refactor with those numbers it’s actually only a 42% lift since being on RY… but still a 42% increase!! If you’re an employer with remote employees consider allowing them to try working abroad. Not only is it possible to match performance but as with my case employees can actually outperform their prior domestically-based selves. I have some theories as to why this is that I’ll explore in a future video.
• This is the guy we just hired for the Growth Marketer position. So stoked to have Rod on the USS Pagely.
• I wrote more about our Startup Weekend Lisbon experience in my last post. Worth reading if you’ve never attended one. There are some good video testimonials in that from participants.

Here’s a chronology of our time in Lisbon told in photos:

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This month’s gear shout-out goes out to my REI Saturn pack. Love this thing. It fits in an overhead carry-on space on the airplane (even though I’ve been checking it since I have a laptop and guitar as carry-ons). Lots of compartments, pockets, webbing, straps, zippers and everything else you’d want in a pack. Solid gear.

Lastly, here are the tunes that were in my earbuds most of Lisbon:

Lisbon you’ve been amazing. Obrigado for everything. I will be back someday.

One of my best friends Benny.com happened to be in Berlin, Germany traveling on an 8wk Europe adventure and invited me to visit him for Lollapalooza. I had never been to Berlin before (nor any part of Germany for that matter) so I said yes and booked a cheap flight to meet him. Her are some quick thoughts on the city and the concert experience while they’re still fresh…

The Negatives

• Preconceptions about cities: crazy how far off some of my preconceptions have been about the places we’ve visited (Belgrade and Germany erring in opposite directions). I had envisioned Berlin, the capital of the country which is the financial powerhouse of Europe, to be this spotless mecca of German engineering and perfection. The streets there were the dirtiest of the places I’ve been thus far out of Prague, Vienna, Belgrade, Split, London and Portugal.
• Internet performance was 3rd-world quality in terms of speed and reliability. It wasn’t just cellular data service but the Internet itself seemed to be fundamentally broken there. Benny was explaining how a monopoly on the “last mile” of cable there by Telekom.de created a dearth of competition and set the stage for this problem. Whatever the cause, it was shocking to me how poor the connectivity was. It was to the level where I believe that factor alone would have precluded our Remote Year group planting there for a month with 70 knowledge workers reliant upon sketchy connectivity.
• Uber isn’t there yet: How is Uber not in Berlin yet

The Positives

• Vibrant creative feel: it has a young, vibrant aura to it. The people all look super healthy and fit and holy cow 6′ blonde German women… zastavit. Street art was abundant and there’s a skate store on every corner (which is confusing because all the streets are cobblestoned so I’m not sure where anyone skates). But mad respect for the plethora of skate shops and vinyl record stores.
• You walk everywhere. In all we did just under 68k steps and just over 17mi in 3 days. The concert venue for Lollapalooza wasn’t that big so most of that walking was wandering around the city.
• The food was solid: all the places we ate at were great. I had probably the best burger of my time in Europe the first night and the food every meal thereafter was on point.
• Benny and I still have game in foosball after all these years since iTOOL.

Lollapalooza was a blast. Radiohead destroyed it and that was my first exposure to a Major Lazer show (which was bananas). Odesza was a cool new find- I had never heard of them before. We got there late on Sunday so just caught the tail end of Milky Chance and all the other bands we saw just blended together. It was a really cool venue for it in a big park with massive trees and concert infrastructure was fairly solid. The one thing that was a real detractor was the level of dust kicked up by the 70,000 concert goers. I don’t know how they mitigate that short of constantly spraying down the field (but then it becomes a mud pit). But all in all very well-handled event.

This photo and video album below gives a good flavor of the weekend. I’m back in Lisbon now and just kicked off Startup Weekend Lisbon earlier tonight. I pitched an idea for an app I want to build called DiscoverPath and we have a killer team to execute this weekend. More on that soon…

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