Remoter’s Life: Thorsten Borek

This week’s featured Remote Worker is Thorsten Borek, co-founder of WE ARE NEON and Collaboration Expert from Hamburg, currently working remotely with his husband from Thasos, Greece.

4 min readAug 6, 2021

Thorsten, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m a 44 years old Rick Astley + Kylie Minoque fan, dog owner and co-founder of WE ARE NEON — Collaboration Experts from Hamburg, Germany, business graduate.
Ex-advertising and digital agency head Focus topics: User centricity, growth/ sales and collaboration

Can you tell us more about your job?

Facilitators help to clarify outcomes and establish collaboration that leads to results and learnings. So you spend less time in meetings and more time being productive.

NEON is a distributed agency that helps product teams work better together. Virtually and on site.

Do you have a dedicated space to work?

Yes, we’ve sublet office space from brand eins magazine in Hamburg because it’s nice and inspiring to be around smart people. But since day one of NEON we’ve worked remotely.

We started NEON on a roadtrip along Highway Nr.1 in California and won our first big pharma client against stiff competition from established consultancies with nothing more than a laptop, determination and professionalism.
And because it’s fun to work with us :)

What does your typical workday look like?

At our desks at 8am with a standup meeting.
We’ll try to finish at 3pm.
Once a week we have a 2hr planning session.
Once a quarter a 2 day offsite.

From September on we’ll switch to a 4 day workweek.

What tools do you use to stay productive?

Slack, Asana, G Suite, Debitoor, Zoom and Mural.

What is your current workspace setup?

Macbooks and iPhones.
To work professionally we also have a second screen, headset, ring lights, external keyboard and mouse. If we stay longer we have it with us.

What is your favourite unplugged activity

Reading autobiographies.
Learning to play instruments.

What do you like most about working remotely?

While founding NEON on our first road trip we’ve met Silicon Valley people, attended a conference which led to work for Google, Twitter and Uber in San Francisco. Being on the road led to opportunities a small company like ours wouldn’t have had under usual circumstances.