Soho House for Remote Executives – Without the Real Estate Overhead

01 /The Concept

Remote work has made it possible to work and travel at the same time – and Yayem is building a club for people who want to do exactly that, with more intention and more quality than the average nomad hostel.

Yayem describes its model as Soho House (the global network of private clubs for creative professionals) with lower real estate overhead, plus Airbnb Experiences (curated local activities for travelers), plus YPO (the Young Presidents Organization, the global community of senior executives). They call their audience "Champagne Nomads" – digitally mobile people with high ambitions, a taste for continuous learning, and no objection to a good time along the way.

Yayem does have a handful of its own guesthouses – currently one operating in Portugal, with a second opening soon in Mexico. In other cities, members stay at vetted partner properties: comfortable hotels and guesthouses in London, Cape Town, Milan, Lisbon, New York, Mexico City, and Guadalajara.

Beyond accommodation, Yayem organizes events wherever its members happen to be – a single-day yoga retreat in London, a dinner with an interesting speaker in Paris, a 3–4 day trip through Finland or Guatemala.

The app includes an AI concierge named Em, who provides city-specific recommendations for places to work and unwind. Em's most valuable function: matchmaking between club members who are currently in the same city, drawing on each member's interests, experience, and professional background.

Membership tiers:

- Standard – $650/year or $65/month: 12 guesthouse stays per year, one free business coaching session, access to the member directory.

- Premium – $2,500/year or $250/month: unlimited guesthouse stays, quarterly coaching sessions, quarterly in-person or online meetups with premium members, and a personal manager who can make direct introductions to other members.

Yayem is also testing a B2B model – offering companies the ability to enroll key employees as club members. The pitch: make your top people "more productive and happier" and they'll deliver better results while thinking less about leaving. This is the same positioning used by Vamoz ([covered previously](/review/novaja-zamanuha-dlja-sotrudnikov)), which helps companies send employees to work remotely from attractive locations.

Yayem launched in beta in the summer of 2021 with its first guesthouse in Lisbon. It now has 400 members, 40% of them on the premium tier. The mix: 30% startup founders, 30% senior tech professionals, 25% creative professionals, 15% finance and legal.

The target by end of year: 3,000 members. By 2026: 100,000.

The initial $900K came from founders, friends, and family in 2021. The startup has since raised $2M from institutional investors and angels.

02 /Why It Matters

Yayem's founders describe their target as "the top 5% of earners" – people who have money and are willing to spend it on growth and experiences, ideally both at once.

The concept has already proven out at scale. Soho House and YPO both exist and thrive. Chief, the executive women's club ([covered previously](/review/klub-na-milliard)), raised $140M and crossed a $1B valuation doing the same thing for a specific segment.

What Yayem adds is travel as a structural part of the business model – not an afterthought, but the core mechanism for creating serendipitous connections between people who would otherwise never meet. That's only possible at scale now because remote work has made combining work and travel genuinely practical for a much larger population.

Yayem's pitch deck makes the size case clearly. Hundreds of millions of skilled, well-paid professionals can now work from anywhere. But that freedom carries costs:

- Freedom of movement breeds loneliness. - Inspiration tips into burnout. - High expertise leads to professional stagnation without the right community.

New working conditions demand new cultural infrastructure – which Yayem frames as a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity sitting at the intersection of:

- Travel: $4.7T market - Education: $1.4T market - New work infrastructure: $1.6T market

This is the same framing move Smiler used – a marketplace for travel photographers that positioned itself as part of the massive travel sector and raised €15.3M as a result. Positioning within large adjacent markets matters for investor narratives.

Yayem's claimed edge is the ability to go global fast – but not all at once. They expand city by city, creating a network effect: each new city is both a new recruiting ground for members and a new destination that makes the membership more valuable to existing members.

03 /Opportunities

What makes this model compelling comes down to a few converging factors.

Starting with high earners is a strategically superior position: find an audience that already has money, then figure out what to sell them. That's a much cleaner path than building something first and hunting for buyers who can afford it.

The concept has proof. Premium professional communities already exist and sustain real businesses. The thesis isn't theoretical.

And travel genuinely expands the model in a way that only became viable at scale with the rise of remote work. More people can now realistically combine work and travel, which means more people can actually use a club like this. The accidental connections that happen across cities and countries represent a step-change in the value of belonging to such a community.

The direction: build your own club on a similar model. You could copy Yayem directly, adapt the Chief model for a specific demographic, or identify a different niche or audience segment where this structure would resonate.

In any version, the education and coaching component deserves more emphasis than Yayem currently gives it – it adds depth to the community and multiplies the reasons for members to engage with each other.