Ep.391 ~ Creating Collaboration in the World From the Founder of CouchSurfing ~ Casey Fenton

Casey Fenton ~ Founder of CouchSurfing and Upstock

~ Current Series ~ 100 Interviews with 100 Major Influencers

 

Imagine being a young man hacking the University of Iceland’s directory to meet new people and trying to find a couch to crash on for a free place to stay.  Then turning that concept into a 20 million person platform that changed the way people travel. Casey Fenton is that young man and the platform he built is called Couch Surfing.  

Casey joins us on the podcast today for a really exciting chat. These days Casey has built a new business called Upstock that is modernizing an antiquated stock option system that allows team members and employees to earn equity instantly without an undue cash burden on the company. He got this idea from his days at CouchSurfing when he didn’t have the ability to give his team and employees a shared part of the company. This frustrated him and it created a passion that started Upstock and the drive to help businesses help themselves.

We dive into Casey’s passion about Upstock today but also chat about the book on human egos that Casey is writing. He has another mission to help people understand their egos better and how we can use them for good. Of course, we also discuss about the Couch Surfing story and how it led Casey on a wild ride of world travel, startups, venture capitalists, challenges with the US taxation system, helping business grow and changing the way people travel all around the world.

 

04:19: Climbing the Great Pyramids

08:46: Casey on His New Business Upstock

17:50: Examples of Sharing Equity w/ Team Members

23:16: Casey on Gamifying Business

26:06: Ideas on Gamifying for Entrepreneurs Today

31:46: Ego Hacking

45:01: The First Couch That Casey Surfed On

48:47: Number One Lesson from CouchSurfing

51:32: Other Lessons from CouchSurfing

55:31: Casey on Influence

 

Contact Info:

https://upstock.io/

http://www.caseyfenton.com/

http://bit.ly/egohack