Vic Levitin
I built four startups. It wasn’t enough.
So I unsubscribed from the default life and started building one that actually fits, raising my family on a Thai island. It’s a messy experiment, and I’m sharing what I learn.
I stopped accepting the defaults I was handed - where to live, how to earn, where to keep my money, how to spend the short time I get - and started rebuilding each piece deliberately.
So now I’m figuring out, in public, the questions nobody hands you a good answer to:
– How do you earn a living once you step outside the comfort zone you spent your career building?
– Where do you actually bank when you live in one country, earn in another, and belong to neither?
– How do you keep a family healthy across borders, with no employer’s insurance and no system to fall back on?
– What do you do about your kids’ education once you’ve left the one you grew up in?
– Where on earth do you actually base a life—and who gets to decide?
This isn’t advice from someone who’s figured it out. It’s a field report from someone in the middle of it.
On the earning question, I’m further along than the others.
I’ve built four startups, ran a Gates Foundation–backed deep-tech company as CEO, and had one exit as an early investor - WeissBeerger, acquired by AB InBev.
Every company taught me something different. The latest one changed how I think about building businesses.
Instead of spending years earning an audience from scratch, I’d rather partner with people who’ve already earned their community’s trust. They bring the relationship. I build the software, the company, and the structure around it.
That’s the experiment I’m running now.
I tried a version of this once. Grew it to $90K/month. Then it collapsed in a weekend. I wrote about why. If anything, the experience convinced me the model was right - the structure wasn’t.
Some posts are about building software companies. Others are about tax residency, banking, visas, healthcare, raising kids abroad, or choosing where to live. They’re all parts of the same question:
What happens when you stop accepting the default version of life and start designing your own?
If you already have an audience people genuinely trust - and you’ve wondered whether there’s a software business hiding inside it - I’d be happy to chat.
You can reach me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/vic-levitin/
