Startup Jesus Takes Flight: How Zach Cole Became the World’s Most Portable Brand

Zach Cole, a name that surfaces in the digital muck with the same frequency as a pop-up ad for dubious crypto schemes, has quietly become a case study in how a single human can now ricochet across continents faster than most passports collect stamps. To the average reader in Lagos, Berlin, or Manila, Cole might sound like the latest American export—somewhere between craft IPA and existential dread—but his footprint is already smudging every time zone.

The international significance begins, as it so often does these days, with a LinkedIn post. Cole—until recently a mid-tier product manager at a San Francisco firm whose name sounds like a prescription sleep aid—announced he was “sunsetting” his own employment to “build something human-centric in the age of post-human capital.” Translation: he quit, cashed out some stock options worth slightly less than a studio flat in Kiev, and began live-streaming his journey from co-working space to co-working space like a gap-year backpacker who traded hostels for ergonomic chairs.

Within 72 hours, Cole’s itinerary had been crowdsourced by strangers in five countries. A coder in Tallinn offered him free desk space in exchange for “vibes,” a phrase that somehow survived translation into Estonian. A Singaporean VC slid into his DMs, promising “pre-seed love” if he could pivot his nebulous idea—an app that gamifies gratitude—into something that could harvest data on the emotional state of Southeast Asian teens. Meanwhile, a Brazilian meme account Photoshopped Cole’s face onto Christ the Redeemer, captioning it “Startup Jesus Saves (Your Data).” The post hit a million likes before Cole’s plane landed in Lisbon.

What makes Cole globally noteworthy isn’t the app, which will almost certainly die a quiet death between funding rounds, but the infrastructure of attention that now propels mediocre ideas into planetary orbit. Every border he crosses is less a customs check than a metrics spike: immigration officers scan his passport; engagement officers scan his follower count. The man is a living A/B test in how late-stage capitalism has weaponized wanderlust. Each airport lounge selfie is both personal branding and soft-power projection—America’s newest cultural export isn’t Hollywood anymore; it’s a 32-year-old with AirPods and a Notion board titled “Manifesting Abundance.”

The darker punchline, of course, is that while Cole racks up airline miles, the workers who actually keep the internet humming—content moderators in Nairobi, chip-fabrication technicians in Taichung, lithium miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo—remain geographically and economically shackled. Cole’s gratitude app will eventually need their invisible labor to tag toxic comments and mine the cobalt that powers the very phones on which he live-streams his morning breathwork. But none of that fits in an Instagram story, so it evaporates like duty-free vodka on a long-haul flight.

Still, one must admire the efficiency: Cole has compressed the 19th-century Grand Tour, the 20th-century gap year, and the 21st-century brand pilgrimage into a single carry-on suitcase and a Substack subscription. The planet shrinks; the egos balloon. Somewhere in the metaverse, a digital twin of Cole is already keynote-speaking in seven languages simultaneously, assuring avatars that vulnerability is the new scalability.

And so, as monsoon season floods the streets of Mumbai and wildfires tint the skies above Athens that fashionable apocalypse orange, Zach Cole uploads a photo of himself meditating on a Bali beach with the caption “Grateful for this moment.” The algorithm, that tireless international diplomat, nudges the post into feeds from Reykjavík to Riyadh, where viewers double-tap between news alerts about melting ice caps and coups. In the comments, someone asks for his skincare routine. Someone else asks for world peace. Cole responds with a sunflower emoji.

Conclusion: In a world where passports are digital and borders are mostly for the poor, Zach Cole is less a person than a distributed event—proof that the most valuable natural resource left is narrative, and the supply chain is anyone with a Wi-Fi password and a mild delusion of grandeur. May his battery die mid-Zoom, and may we all remember to charge our own before the next flight boards.