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Entrepreneur — Speaker — Technologist. I’ve spent the last 20 years building cooperative technology. A pioneer in global trust systems. As the original founder of Couchsurfing, the largest trust experiment of all time, I helped to spearhead the sharing economy & grow the platform to over 20 million users worldwide. FEATURED IN. & many more.
- Entrepreneur, Speaker, Technologist
Entrepreneur — Speaker — Technologist. Casey Fenton
- Entrepreneur, Speaker, Technologist
Couchsurfing began in 2004 as a small passion project by founders Casey Fenton, Daniel Hoffer, Sebastian Le Tuan and Leonardo Bassani da Silveira. An email to a group of students in Iceland gave birth to the idea that people anywhere would want to share their homes with strangers (or, as we like to call them, friends you haven't met yet ).
- What Is Couchsurfing?
- Digital Dreamers Versus Profits
- More Money, More Marketing
- New Features, Fewer Couches
- The Final Straw
- A Rich Legacy
“You could get off the plane practically anywhere in the world, and someone would want to meet you and take care of you, make sure you are safe, make sure that you have a roof over your head, some good food and know where all the cool places to visit are,"explained Casey Fenton, who famously founded Couchsurfingin the early 2000s after booking a ch...
A good decade before the rise of digital nomad culture, Couchsurfing was built by young, digital dreamers in the early 2000s. Volunteering their time, they programmed the website during recurring international events called Couchsurfing Collectives, free-spirited parties that helped the service thrive. But as Couchsurfing grew, so did its challenge...
With the new business structure, Couchsurfing attracted a number of investments and opened a headquarters in San Francisco, where the team that programmed its website, whose members used to travel constantly, set up permanent shop. "Once Couchsurfing attracted its $22 million investment, unfortunately the ethos started to get confused," Liss recall...
As a for-profit company, Couchsurfing's success relied on, well, profits. The service introduced ads and began to aggressively promote paid verification, a problematic shift for the community, according to Davletshina. “[It] didn’t make the service any better," she said. "It made it more dangerous because any person could now just pay money for a l...
In 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Couchsurfing went back on its early promise to never charge users for hosting and surfing, and implemented its most controversial change yet: a mandatory service fee. “It was basically a betrayal of its users," Martinez recalled. "They argued they made this change because they were affected by the pan...
While Fenton admits he could've done a better job explaining to his community members why the service became a for-profit company, he said the positive legacy of Couchsurfing lives on. Just ask Teo Odena, a Filipino based in Anchorage, Alaska, who's hosted 270 travelers and has friends from nearly every part of the planet. Or Liss, who filmed a doc...
Mar 30, 2015 · Casey Fenton is the co-founder of Couchsurfing, a hospitality exchange and social networking website. He’s also the founder of so-volve, the makers wonder app, a social mirror that lets you see what people think of you and get others to trust you faster.
Nov 10, 2011 · By Roshan Paul Nov. 10, 2011. This is the third and final in a series of interviews where we speak with leading innovators who are appropriating lessons from open source thinking—once purely the domain of the software engineer—for social change. Casey Fenton is co-founder of CouchSurfing and an Ashoka Fellow in the United States.
May 25, 2023. Remote Teams & Modern Equity: Casey Fenton's Insights for Building an Ownership Mindset in Remote Teams. . The Transformational Power of an Ownership Mindset. As the founder of Upstock.io and Couchsurfing.com, I've seen firsthand how a shared ownership mindset can supercharge a team's performance.
