Zach Bell

Entrepreneur • Writer • Speaker • Community Architect

About

Zach is an entrepreneur, community builder, and philosopher who focuses his time helping people find connection and community. After noticing how connected he was online but how disconnected he was to the institutions he grew up with, Zach dedicated his life to explore the world's most diverse ideas around community, meaning and purpose. He’s spent the last 20 years traveling, hosting, collaborating, visiting and learning from the most disruptive and unique leaders in technology, spirituality, and counterculture.

In 2010, Zach founded Return in partnership with the Esalen Institute to explore how individuals can redefine our personal identities and build community in a world where many of the institutions of the past have become irrelevant. He’s hosted 50+ experimental salons on topics that range from Religion of No Religion to Post National Identity. Attendees include the founders of Google, Facebook, Burning Man, TED, Cirque du Soleil, SpaceX, countless fortune 500 companies, musicians, founders, artists, creators and modern spiritual leaders. Films, new communities, business partnerships, marriages and a few children have birthed as a result of Return events.

As an entrepreneur, Zach founded MyPlace to help individuals access their personal global networks to share homes, host friends, meet like minded community and live a more globally connected life. With over 20 million contacts in the network, MyPlace is well on its way to create a global platform to enable you to find your people and feel at home, anywhere in the world.

Previously, Zach has held seed stage, executive marketing roles at Remedy, now public as SGFY, and Habitas, a multinational hotel brand with over 12 properties focused on creating impactful human connection with others and the natural world. He continues to advise the founders of Burning Man, community leaders, founders and experience creators. Zach and his companies have been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, GQ, Architectural Digest, Forbes and TechCrunch.

He’s been a bartender, yoga teacher, sweat lodge fire keeper, monk, marketing executive, hotelier, confidant to the world's wildest billionaires, academic, groundskeeper, tech founder, CEO and full time devotional seeker. He’s lived in his car, co-living experiments, communes and Hollywood mansions. He currently lives between a stick and leaf shack with the best internet connection in the world on a remote beach in Baja, Mexico and a studio in Brooklyn, NY.

When not traveling the world speaking or hosting, you can find Zach between his sauna and surfing at home in Baja, Mexico.

Speaking

Summit at Sea

Paua, Paris

TOA, BERLIN

As a regular global speaker, Zach speaks on topics ranging from the sharing economy, global community, movement building, the religion of no religion and entrepreneurship. His talks inspire audience members to feel more connected to a global community and something bigger than themselves.

Zach is represented by Presbourg Speakers and you can see his speakering profile here

Interviews

Current Projects

Discover places to stay through people you know.

Cultivate rooted life practices for the spiritual but not religious.

Invitational gatherings focused on emergent topics that shape our world.

“We are making possible today, a way of life people in the future will choose.”

— Larry Harvey