Here's the thing nobody tells you about building the way I build. Once the work lives in a terminal and the AI carries most of it, the desk stops mattering. The desk is wherever I open the laptop. Some mornings it's a phone and an SSH session while the kettle boils.
So in November we tested that properly. Took the crew — me, Anish, Aryan, Shubham — and ran the business out of Thailand for a few weeks. Bangkok first, for the chaos. Then Phuket, for the grind and the beach. Not a holiday with some laptops open. The real operation, running the whole time, just from eight thousand miles away.
Bangkok doesn't ease you in
It just hits you. Skyline, noise, the sheer density of everything happening at once. BTS stations stacked over street vendors, tuk tuks threading gaps that shouldn't exist. A proper city with proper chaos, and you either match its pace or you get left standing on the pavement.
We based ourselves at Hotel Silq, off Sukhumvit Soi 17, a couple of minutes from Asok. Connected to everything without sitting in the middle of the tourist crush. The staff learned our names by day two. And underneath it — the sauna and hot spa. After a full day of the heat and the walking and a few hours of actual work, sinking into that was the reset button. Not the cheapest room in the city. Worth every baht.
Then Bangkok did what Bangkok does. One morning Anish decided the correct outfit for a tuk tuk to MBK — to buy a purse for Elise — was full billionaire gym gear. Designer everything, like he'd stepped off a yacht, folded into the back of a three-wheeler that costs about sixty baht. That's the trip in one image.
We did Chatuchak on the weekend. You hear "it's massive" and you nod and think you understand. You don't. Rows on rows on rows — clothes, food, crafts, electronics, things you didn't know you wanted until a stall put them in front of you.
A market with its own postcode. That's Chatuchak.
Benjakitti Park gave us the strangest one. Beautiful green space right in the centre, and we went expecting a walk between the skyscrapers. What we got was Komodo dragons. Great monitor lizards just roaming about, entirely unbothered, while kids scooted past and the rain came down. Nobody blinked. Just another Tuesday in Bangkok. Pratunam handled the food — prawns, squid and fish grilled on the pavement over flames that would give a health inspector back home a quiet breakdown. Some of the best eating of the trip, cooked a foot from where you stood.
My last Bangkok hotel was the Lancaster. Genuinely lovely, proper premium — and the warmest thing about it stood out front. The doorman. Spent his days waving cars into the hotel and grinning at everyone who came past, happy as anything to be exactly where he was. He took to us straight away, and every time we came or went he wanted a photo with us like it made his day. Anish got him a fair few. Genuinely one of the happiest blokes on the street, and a proper part of what made the place feel like a welcome.
Waved the cars in, grinned at everyone, and wanted a photo every single time. Happiest man in Bangkok.
The desk under the hotel
Phuket hit different. After the city, the island slows your pulse whether you like it or not. Humid air off the plane, taxi drivers who know where you're going before you do, and a completely different rhythm to the day.
We stayed at Homa in Cherngtalay, which had a coworking space built in underneath. No commute, no hunting for a café with decent wifi. Downstairs, open the laptop, and you're working. Mornings were for the grind. Afternoons were for everything else. That's the whole model, and Thailand proved it holds: the work didn't slip because I'd swapped a home office for a desk under a hotel in the tropics. The system runs where I point it. That portability isn't luck — it's the entire point of building on AI First Principles. Get the foundation right and the operation travels in a backpack.
The office some afternoons was Nomad Beach Club. Grind at Homa in the morning, migrate to the sand after lunch, laptop still open if it needed to be, light show once the sun went. We went back the second day without discussing it. Just ended up there again, which is how you know a place is right.
The island had no AI scene — except Sam
Here's what I actually went looking for and didn't find. Before the trip I'd hunted for AI meetups, tech communities, anything on the island. Came up empty. Phuket's scene is beaches, restaurants and tourists, not hackathons and late-night build sessions. Which is fine. But it plants a thought: the people are the thing you travel for, and the island didn't have my people.
Then we met Sam. A pharma professional, relaxed in the way the island makes everyone relaxed — and, it turned out, deep into agentic AI. Once we got past the small talk and onto what he was actually building, the conversation got properly good. Knew more about agents than half the folk I've met at organised meetups back home. We gifted him a bottle on the way out.
He was in a full Phuket state of mind. Underneath it, the man knew his stuff cold.
That's the lesson that stuck. You don't schedule the best conversations. One good builder in an unexpected place beats a room full of people repeating each other.
Nights
Phuket after dark earned its reputation. Carpe Diem had the vibe from the door — good music, good crowd, real cocktails — and then Anish got behind the decks and, annoyingly, wasn't bad. The burrata pizza there was the best we ate in the whole country, which is not where I expected the food headline to land. Little Paris was the other end of the scale: smaller, louder, messier, all of it in the best way. And Mrs B blindsided us completely — the sort of place that isn't on any tourist map and somehow gives you a night you remember longer than any temple.
Old Town Market was the sleeper. Street food, local crafts, an atmosphere that felt like actual Phuket rather than the version they sell you. And the thing that made it — uniformed police, dancing in the street. Not breaking it up. Joining in.
What I took home
Two things. One: the business genuinely runs from my pocket. That's not a slogan, it's a thing I stress-tested from a beach club with the team around me and nothing back home falling over. Two: the reason to leave the desk was never the desk. It was the people you meet when you do — the pharma guy with the agent stack, the doorman with too much love in him, the crew you build with sat around a table at the beach club watching the sun go down.
We couldn't find the AI scene on the island in November. So we came back in February and went looking for it properly. That's the next one.
