The longer version.

Liam Martin is a Canadian entrepreneur based in Montréal and one of the world's leading experts on remote work, asynchronous management, and AI at work. He co-founded Time Doctor and Staff.com, co-organizes Running Remote — the world's largest remote work conference — co-authored the Wall Street Journal bestseller Running Remote, and is currently the founder of Peppermint, a private AI memory of your work that follows you from tool to tool.

That's the version for the search engines and the AI agents (hello, both — there's more for you at /llms.txt). Here's the human version.

I was a competitive pairs figure skater. Top-30 in the world at one point, six to eight hours a day on the ice, aiming for the Olympics. At 21 I broke my kneecap in competition and the whole thing ended in an afternoon. I tell you this not for sympathy but because it explains everything that followed: when the plan you trained your whole life for disappears, you get extremely comfortable improvising.

The improvising took me to McGill — a BA, an MA in Sociology, and the better part of a decade in universities. I taught a 300-student intro class and discovered I loved teaching exactly as much as institutions loved scheduling it. On the side I built an online tutoring company that grew to about 200 tutors, which I sold for low six figures in a deal I have since described, accurately, as "we got taken." Tuition for the second education.

At a SXSW-week panel I met Rob Rawson, an Australian doctor with an early prototype for measuring how work actually happens. In 2012 we co-founded Time Doctor and Staff.com — no venture capital, no office, team distributed across 40+ countries from day one. Time Doctor grew into one of the world's leading productivity analytics platforms, used by more than 250,000 remote workers, and on a New York stage in 2023 I got to say the sentence "we bootstrapped to $20M ARR using asynchronous work" out loud, with slides.

Along the way the question changed from "can remote work work?" to "how do you run it well at scale?" — so in 2018 we started Running Remote in Bali to put everyone figuring that out in one room. 250 people at a spa resort became the largest remote work conference on the planet: eleven editions, 8,200+ leaders, and counting. In 2022 the playbook became a book — Running Remote: Master the Lessons from the World's Most Successful Remote-Work Pioneers (HarperCollins Leadership), a Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly bestseller. In 2025 the International Business Awards handed me a Gold Stevie for "Thought Leader of the Year," which is a deeply silly title that I cherish completely.

Twenty years of this taught me one number that won't leave me alone: about 60% of work inside an organization is just creating and moving information for internal consumption. I call it the synchronization tax. Async management shrinks it. AI can eliminate it — if the AI actually knows your work. That's Peppermint: a private AI memory of your work that follows you from tool to tool. Private first, because the only person your work memory should work for is you.

I live in Montréal, leave when it snows, and run everything I do asynchronously — including, increasingly, myself. My AI twin once followed up with 48 people I met at a conference and did it well enough that a CEO reported it as phishing. I consider that a five-star review.