From hosting Silicon Valley’s wildest house parties to trekking shoeless through the Carpathian Mountains, Eric Freymond’s stunts are quickly allowing the Swiss-born engineer to make a name for himself. Little, however, is known about the early life of this budding adventurer and provocateur.
Eric Freymond was born in the city of Lausanne, Switzerland, an idyllic university town on the ritzy Swiss Riviera. As a child, Eric’s summers were spent swimming in Lake Geneva, skiing in the Alps and making a yearly pilgrimage to the world-renowned Montreux Jazz Festival. Initially dreaming of becoming a musician, Eric started his first band at the age of 14 with a rag-tag collection of friends and instruments. The group was called ‘Kick in the Pants’ and lasted two years. It was this band, however, that Eric describes as being crucial in the direction his life took next.
“While Kick in the Pants’ was childish is many ways, it really opened my eyes to all of life’s possibilities,” Eric explains. “Before my interest in music, I never doubted that I would follow the same path as my other classmates […] study hard, get a job at a bank, and work until retirement. Being on stage showed me that I had the possibility to be different, to follow my own path.”
Like many of his countrymen, Eric Freymond speaks excellent English with only the slimmest trace of a French accent. His language skills are a testament to the years he spent on Western Coast of the United States, first in Portland, Oregon and then in California’s San Francisco Bay Area.
American dream
“When I finished my schooling at [age] 19, I only had one thing in my head: going to the States,” Eric says. Taking advantage of an uncle living in Portland’s Northern suburbs, Eric traveled across the Atlantic for the first time in 2007 and promptly began taking classes in communication at the University of Oregon’s city campus. While he found the content of his classes “ astonishingly boring”, it was at UO that Eric met Danielle Madera, a young software developer living two blocks from his campus.
“Meeting Danielle was the obvious highlight of my time in Portland,” Eric states matter-of-factly. “At the time, she represented everything I wanted to be doing with my life, […] creating something new, making something of yourself.” The young Freymond also clearly fell in love and the two began dating shortly after their first meeting. When Danielle announced that she had been offered the job of a lifetime in Northern California, Eric dropped out of college and followed her to the Silicon Valley.
It was in California that Eric truly came into his own. Joining a small mobile tech startup called BuzzIn in 2009, Eric found that he was remarkably gifted salesman. In one year, he had raised over $500,000 in investments for his small company before selling out to one of the majors. Eric loved the “electric atmosphere” of the Valley, and quickly integrated the social scene, throwing legendary parties left and right. Once, Swiss salesman even managed to hire a zebra for a night of festivities.
“It was a crazy time,” Eric states, with a modest smile. “I was still very young at the time, much younger than many of my friends and co-workers.” Indeed, while Eric affirms that he “loved the tech industry [for their] refusal to judge someone by their age,” he also admits that he “had a lot of growing up to do.” In May 2011, having recently broken up with longtime girlfriend Danielle, he decided he needed a fresh start somewhere away from the “materialist environment” of California and boarded a plane back to Europe.
Shoeless wanderer
Returning to Switzerland for the summer, Eric quickly grew listless. “It was great to see family and old friends but I saw there was nothing for me to do there,” he admits. Completely unsure of what to do with his life, he took a job offered by a family friend at the aid organization Relief International (RI), based in Geneva. While the humanitarian sector was completely new to him, Eric was back to his strengths as a salesman, raising funds for a good cause.
In January 2012, Eric was offered the chance to travel with RI to South Sudan to meet with partner organizations and identify potential projects. In the small city of Yirol, just north of the South Sudanese capital Juba, Eric came upon a project that spoke to him personally: ‘Connect Sudan’. Based on providing computers and technical lessons to South Sudanese children, the Connect Sudan project immediately spoke to Eric as an ideal means to provide a future for young people in one of the poorest countries in the world. At the same time, however, he recognized that the project was located outside of RI’s mandate and area of expertise.
Returning to Geneva with as much Connect Sudan documentation as possible, Eric did what he does best and started selling. Using contacts both in Switzerland and back in California, he quickly raised several thousand dollars for the cause before committing to a more personal fundraising tactic. On March 5th, 2013, Eric announced that he would hike barefoot from one end of the Carpathian Mountains to the other, a 1,500 km trek stretching from the Czech Republic to Romania, in support of Connect Sudan.
While the idea seems outlandish, Eric is determined to make it a reality. Planning on beginning his journey in May 2014, Eric has recently begun travelling the world to raise funds and promote Connect Sudan. He plans on blogging the entire hike, insisting that he will take a photo of his battered feet every day.