Founder Story — No. 01: The Mountain, the Burnout, and the Question I Couldn't Stop Asking

A personal essay on why I left everything behind to build AWAYO®

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It was 2019. I was somewhere in the Alps, on my mountain bike, in the final stages of a project with an electric mobility startup from China. The landscape was extraordinary. The silence was exactly what I needed. And somewhere between two mountain passes, a thought arrived that I couldn't shake off.

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What if I just didn't go back?

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Not back to the office. Not back to the Jira boards and the bug reports and the endless conversations about software features that nobody outside a very small room would ever care about. Not back to the version of success I had been chasing for years without ever quite feeling like I had caught it.

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By any external measure, things were going well. I had my own company. A good team. Well-known clients. Investors from Silicon Valley. I was travelling constantly, building products, moving fast. I was doing exactly what an ambitious entrepreneur in the German tech scene was supposed to be doing.

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And I was exhausted in a way that sleep didn't fix.

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The word for it is burnout, though I resisted that word for a long time. It felt more like a slow-growing certainty that I was building the wrong thing. Not that the work was bad. Not that the people around me weren't talented. But that the fundamental question — why does this matter? — was getting harder and harder to answer honestly.

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I had the goal of becoming a successful entrepreneur. Maybe the contact person in Germany for tech and entrepreneurship. But the more I built, the more I felt pulled in a completely different direction. Toward something real. Something physical. Something that existed in the world in a way that software does not.

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Toward nature.

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The idea that became AWAYO® didn't arrive fully formed on that mountain. It arrived as an instinct — a feeling that our increasingly digital, hyperconnected, impersonal world needed an antipole. A place where people could find themselves again. Where nature wasn't a backdrop for a photo but an actual experience. Where stillness was the product.

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The question I kept asking myself was the simplest and most uncomfortable one: What if?

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What if I stopped doing what was expected and started building what I actually believed in? What if the thing I was looking for — meaning, impact, the feeling of working on something that genuinely matters — was on the other side of a decision I was too comfortable to make?

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I had been asking myself that question for months. And I knew that if I didn't act on it, I would be asking it for decades.

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So I decided to go through with it.

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A few years later, I was standing on a stage at the NIO Berlin "A New Horizon" event — NIO, the Chinese EV manufacturer that had understood something profound about what a company can be when it puts community and user experience at the centre of everything. I, the former BMW guy from Munich, was speaking at the Seeds stage, sharing my vision for the future of travel, minutes before William Li, NIO's founder, took the main stage for his keynote.

I could barely believe I was there.
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But what struck me most that evening wasn't the stage or the keynote or the incredible energy in the room. It was NIO itself. A car manufacturer with the mindset of a startup. A team of diverse, motivated people from every background, all oriented around a shared conviction that they were changing something important. NIO Houses. NIO Communities. NIO Life. An entire ecosystem built around the user, not just the product.

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It was the model I wanted to apply to hospitality. Not just a place to stay — but a world to belong to.

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AWAYO® started as a question on a mountain bike in the Alps. It became a conviction. And then it became a company.

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We are building experiential outdoor hospitality destinations across Europe — places where people don't just visit but return to, because the experience of being there changes something. Modular cabins in remarkable natural settings. Community at the centre. Design that serves the landscape rather than dominating it.

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The umpteenth software solution or app was never going to be the thing I looked back on with pride. This is.

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The "What if?" question has a different quality now. It's no longer a source of anxiety. It's the engine.

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I am Marco  — founder of AWAYO®, building experiential outdoor hospitality destinations across Europe. Based in Munich.