InterNations – The Community for Expats, by Expats

I wouldn’t be able to be an expat without the internet. Not only does it allow me to easily connect with friends and family back home, but it allows me to network with other expats who have experienced similar situations and set-backs while dealing with life in a foreign country.

One incredible resource that became available to expats in September of 2007 is InterNations – “The international social networking service for expats and global minds worldwide.” The members range from diplomats to foreign correspondents; from employees of multinational corporations to NGOs and everyone in between.

InterNations was founded by Christian Leifeld, Philipp von Plato and Malte Zeeck. They wanted to create an on-line “solution for the real-life problems of the expat community.” Their business concept was awarded the “Land der Ideen” award by the German government and the Federation of German Industries.

Having been a member if InterNations since its early days, I have seen it grow from a small online community to over 140,000 members around the world.  There are now over 100 regular real-life networking events each month in cities from Madrid to New York.

Here in Belgium, there are two active InterNations communities; one in Brussels and the other in Antwerp. The Belgian events often have about 100 attendees.

I was curious about the story behind InterNations. Philipp von Plato, one of the three founders of the site agreed to let me interview him about InterNations and his own expat experiences.

Philipp von Plato

How did you come up with the idea for InterNations?

Like many start-ups, InterNations was a direct result of my own and my co-founders’ experience. I used to live, study and work abroad during my high-school years, my degree course, and my assignments as an international business consultant. So I got more than a glimpse of what the expat life-style’s like.

No matter where I went, I always faced the same questions on everyday life, the same need for advice and the same wish to find other expatriates for practical and moral support. Of course, there were already webpages for that, but it was really tiresome to collect all this information site by site, and to “filter” those bits that were unreliable or outdated.

Moreover, I noticed that there were quite a few local discussion boards for specific cities, but no global networking platform geared to expats from all over the world. My co-founders had to cope with similar issues during their international careers – and thus the idea for InterNations was born.

Has the website evolved as you originally planned that it would?

No, not quite. In the beginning, we more or less tried to create a – well, what you’d call an „eierlegende Wollmilchsau“ in Germany: a woolly pig that gives milk and lays eggs – an all-in-one device suitable for every conceivable purpose that’s impossible to come up with. J So, we wanted to have all the features that are useful for online networking, a city guide with a rating system to assess user-generated content, forums for political discussions and exchanging tips and and and….

Along the way, however, we had to take it slow and to develop the site according to our members’ reactions and feedback. For example, we started out by organizing one or two offline events for “real-life” socializing in January 2008, and we didn’t even have an onsite event calendar yet. To our own surprise, the events proved so popular that we quickly had to add this calendar and an event notification system. Today we’ve got about 100 local get-togethers every month; we’re continually improving the calendar and planning to expand the whole event section.

What are your personal expat experiences?

As mentioned above, I’ve been abroad several times in my life. While I was still at school, I got my first taste of expat life, so to speak, when I spent a year as an exchange student in Montpellier to brush up my French. Before I started reading for my degree in business administration at a Swiss university (instead of a German one), I went to the UK for a couple of months and really enjoyed my stay in London.

Then, at university, I opted for two internships in Spain, in Madrid and Barcelona, which was a great experience as well. My first employer – a big consulting company – then sent me abroad on several occasions, for example, to their office in the States, but to a small town near Zagreb in Croatia, too.

Now it would be more difficult for me to go abroad for professional reasons. Not only because I’m running my own business, but also because I’m married, and we’ve got a two-year-old daughter. Expat life is especially challenging for families with kids, and I hope that InterNations provides them with the assistance they need.

If you could live anywhere, where would that be and why?

Honestly, I have no idea. I guess if I could do anything, without regard to real-life resources or circumstances, I would opt for the life of a cosmopolitan globe-trotter. In this way, I could immerse myself in one metropolis, its atmosphere and its zeitgeist after the other…

What has been the most challenging aspect of running InterNations?

I learned the hard way that implementing your newest idea can be very, very time-consuming if you have to do it with the limited resources of a small start-up team. I’m a bit impatient and want to get everything done at once, and I love developing new features for our site – but it always takes far longer than you think. Even when our IT guys pull the odd all-nighter, they can only do so much, and that’s just the way it is.

What has been the most rewarding?

Attending some of our InterNations events – no doubt about that. If you see up to 500 guests from over 60 different countries in one venue, just networking and chatting and having a great time, then InterNations is no longer an abstract idea, a business plan or a variety of online features: It’s suddenly very tangible, and it does bring people all around the globe together.

Why is a web community like InterNations important?

Well, transnational and global mobility is of increasing importance in today’s workplace. More and more employees and managers will spend some part of their career abroad, and many will take their partners and children with them. And just as it happened to me or my co-founder Malte or lots of our friends and relatives when they had to relocate, they’ll all have the same questions, face the same difficulties, look for the same like-minded international people. That’s where InterNations comes in.

What would you like to see in the future for InterNations?

We would like InterNations to become the expat platform worldwide – the first place to go when you’re an expatriate and are in search of support and advice for your relocation and life abroad. In the future, we would like to expand our events in both number and scope: Monthly get-togethers in up 250 cities around the world would be fantastic, and this year, we’ll also be adding the Activity Groups to introduce small-scale events for special interests, like going to a museum exhibition together, founding an international soccer team or establishing a multilingual playgroup for toddlers and their parents, etc.

We also want InterNations to become an information platform that includes a lot more user-generated and particularly editorial content on moving to and living in our top communities – a sort of one-stop shop for everything from visa regulations over opening a bank account to attending local language classes. In that way, InterNations could easily become a service provider for all companies which regularly send their employees on assignments abroad.

Last but hopefully not least, InterNations – whose expat members belong to the privileged class of the global workforce – will also give something back to our numerous communities around the globe. Supporting local charities and related projects for development aid, cultural sponsorship or sustainable living would be a wonderful way of doing this.

Thank you Philipp for taking the time to chat with CheeseWeb!

If you are an expat or are thinking about becoming one, consider becoming a part of the InterNations community.