This Tech Founder Runs His Company Between Surf Sessions in HawaiiThe staff of the social media management app Buffer can work anywhere in the world. Here's how the company was designed for nomadic employees.

By day Joel Gascoigne works on the Hawaiian island of Oahu as CEO of Buffer, which netted $8.25 million last year from sales of its social media marketing platform. By night, the venture's cofounder, Leo Widrich, is performing his COO duties on the other side of the world, in Vienna.

How long Gascoigne will stay in Hawaii or Widrich in Austria is anyone's guess, since the two founders, like the rest of their roughly 80 employees, have the freedom to live and work anywhere. The result is a company whose employees work from coffee shops, home offices, coworking spaces and yes, even beachside lanais, in places like Cape Town, South Africa; Stockholm; and Silicon Valley, where the company is based, if in name only.

"It's totally open. We don't have any concentration of roles in one place. Some of us are quite nomadic," Gascoigne says.