The life of a digital hardware nomad

Spanish e-resident Santiago Cartamil-Bueno bases his photonoics hardware business SCALE Nanotech in Valencia, while enjoying location independent opportunities.

What do you think of when you think of a digital nomad? Probably someone who's in excellent shape, posting a photo of themselves on Instagram as they lounge by the beach and type out an email to someone while contemplating their next move. Should they head back to Greece? Or maybe Brazil this time? That's the stereotype anyway.

Estonian e-resident Santiago Cartamil Bueno however does not enjoy such luxuries, unfortunately, though the new headquarters for his firm SCALE Nanotech are 10 minutes from the beach in Valencia, Spain.

SCALE Nanotech is focused on developing photonics hardware based on graphene, a form of carbon that consists of a single layer of atoms arranged in a honeycomb nanostructure. This non-toxic material is inexpensive to synthesize and can find use in a variety of formats, from virtual and augmented reality goggles to telecommunications to biosensors.

To work with and produce the technology though one needs a lab. Santiago has been able to take his company wherever he relocated, thanks to being an e-resident since 2018, but he has needed a lab, a physical location for his researchers and engineers to do the R&D work and for his company to manufacture its products. For this reason, he considers himself to be a rare breed of e-resident. He calls himself a digital hardware nomad.

"Digital means that you work remotely, but we are a hardware company and we have to hire people to do physical things in a physical space," says Santiago. "It's a bit different or more complex than a standard software company, but we're pretty flexible for a hardware company."

Hardware for SCALE Nanotech means having a lab, equipment, instruments. At its new Valencia location, technologists undertake chemical processing and electrical and optical characterization with advanced instruments and tools. It's the real deal, no Instagram photos with a laptop here. "We have a lot of gadgets and heavy machines, this makes us less nomadic," says Santiago. "Being a digital hardware nomad twists the meaning a bit, but that's more or less who we are."

A Nomadic Life

Yet it's not all so cut and dry, because Santiago himself has lived quite a nomadic, peripatetic life.

He was born in Melilla, raised in Granada in Andalucia, and attended the University of Granada. There he studied physics and electronic engineering, but was more drawn to engineering because of the ability to move beyond theory and into designing technology with real impact.

"Physics tells you about nature, but it doesn't allow you to bring things into practice," he says.

He was however frustrated with Spanish attitudes. "Spain has talent, but lacks the industrial mindset to bring it to the people," Santiago says. "They have good ideas, but they don't get implemented. Nothing happens when it comes to deep tech, and this still applies nowadays."

So like Spanish adventurers of centuries ago, he left his homeland in search of gold and glory. Or rather to find a friendlier environment for applying novel ideas. He studied physics at Copenhagen University in Denmark, and also did a year of electronic engineering studies at the University of California in San Diego, where his studies were demanding and rigorous. Back in Spain, he received a scholarship from La Caixa Foundation and began to engage graphene as a material in Barcelona, and then left for the Netherlands to do his PhD at the Technical University of Delft. Here, Santiago found, he finally fit in.

"I loved the Netherlands, the Dutch people are very pragmatic and very driven," Santiago recalls. "It was a good fit because everyone is excited about technology, everyone embraces it."

In part for family reasons -- his wife is German -- he moved to Germany and began to build his business. But in Germany he found many of the same bureaucratic obstacles to setting up his own technology firm that he had left behind in Spain, coupled with a language barrier, and foreign business culture. He was going to throw in the towel when he began searching for solutions. While on honeymoon in Montenegro, he happened upon Estonian e-Residency. Santiago applied and became a newly minted e-resident following the thorough review process.

"I decided to try, fail fast, and move on. That's how SCALE Nanotech was born."

Like the Dutch

As an Estonian e-resident, Santiago was able to open and manage his business from wherever he happened to be. This would later prove to be quite useful as for various reasons, he was forced to move his lab from Germany to Spain. But he also decided to make several pilgrimages to his newly adopted digital motherland, the Republic of Estonia, where had never been before.

"Tallinn was cozy and small but very advanced," Santiago says of his first impressions. Even in the airport, he found it to be a modern place, where everything could be done digitally, and in English. "In Germany, they still tell people that the digital era is coming. Estonia is past that."

There was also a kind of familiarity from his Dutch days. According to Santiago, the Estonians are open minded, sharing a common Northern European Hanseatic background of sea trading. Indeed, centuries ago, cities in the Netherlands and Estonia were at the extreme west and east of this trading network. (In fact, the modern Estonian word for office, "kontor," derives from the Low German name for one of these Hanseatic trading posts, also called a "kontor" or "kontore.")

The only difference Santiago picked up on was Estonian bashfulness, that somewhat famous reticence for tooting one's own horn. "They remind me of the Dutch, but they lack that marketing aspect of the Dutch," he says. He adds that he likes to come to Estonia once or twice a year.

When in Estonia, like a Hanseatic trader himself, Santiago sticks strictly to business. He meets with his lawyers, his accountants, sets up appointments with existing and potential investors. He also is exploring collaborations with partners at Tallinn University of Technology and the University of Tartu. "I'm in touch with different parts of society," he says, adding that the distance between his lab in Valencia and partners' labs in Tallinn and Tartu is not necessarily a barrier.

Overcoming Obstacles

Throughout his academic and commercial careers, Santiago has been focused on applying graphene in different applications. He was even the first batch of PhD students that belonged to the EU's Graphene Flagship, which commenced in 2013, and was intended to support the development and adoption of the material, which leaves less of an environmental footprint. After successfully setting up SCALE Nanotech as an Estonian firm with a lab in Germany, he faced some obstacles in the form of the COVID-19 Pandemic, followed by the Russo-Ukrainian War. Prices went up, the university location where his lab was based was shut down and he was to be rendered homeless, as it were, or nomadic, whatever is the more polite term for the situation.

Santiago looked at options in Germany and the Netherlands, but decided to return to Spain at this time. He found a good location in Valencia, which, it so happens, is not the worst place on the planet. "We're 10 minutes from the beach," he notes. What made it easier still was that he did not need to reincorporate SCALE Nanotech as the company shed its German lab and resettled in Spain:

"If it wasn't for the flexibility of the e-Residency program I would have shut down."

In Valencia, he has continued to innovate on his initial invention, that when voltage is applied to graphene, the graphene both moves and changes color.

This enables the use of graphene as a pixel that can improve upon current technologies used in virtual and augmented reality goggles. Since graphene can produce a full-spectrum of colors, there is no need for sub-pixels. According to Santiago, this is an issue with current viewers, which many say make them dizzy.

"Our technology combines the best of two worlds," says Santiago. "It offers high contrast with low power consumption, and high resolution video with full color."

SCALE Nanotech is currently coordinating a project called MEGAMORPH, backed with €2 million in European funding, that is focused on developing graphene-based holographic displays in collaboration with partners including major industry players like Graphenea, Morphotonics, CIN-ergy, and VividQ. This project aims to bring its displays to the market by 2025, he says.

Santiago would also like to see his company become a manufacturer of such devices, a dream he calls ambitious, and one that will cement him at his Valencia office.

Should his feet get itchy again, and find the road calling, he could set things up elsewhere.

"I am a nomad," professes Santiago. "I'm here because it's convenient for the business to have me here. It’s also good for the business to have the option to freely move with the lab like the cog of a Hanseatic trader. That's still the concept."

Written by: Justin Petrone