Jeremie Miller, a native of Cascade, Iowa, doesn’t have to venture far from home for Thinc Iowa this week.

Jeremie Miller’s commute starts between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. That’s what time he rolls out of bed in his Cascade, Iowa home and gets in his car. He drives three hours to Chicago O’Hare International Airport, keeping his eyes open for deer and a Mountain Dew close at hand. By 7 a.m. (give or take a half an hour), Miller is boarding a plane. Four hours and 2,000 miles later, he arrives in San Francisco and heads to the Singly headquarters. Arriving at 9:30 or 10 a.m., he begins his work day.

Miller’s commute takes nine hours door-to-door, and he makes the cross-country trek every other week — sometimes more. He’ll stay in San Francisco for three days at a time then head home again, taking a similar pattern: Leave San Francisco in the early evening, touch down in Chicago around 11 p.m., drive to Cascade, and fall into his own bed around 2 a.m. “I can’t really blow two days a week (on travel),” Miller says,” So I actually steal from my sleep.” But the opportunity to raise his kids in a safe, small town where his immediate and extended family lives? It’s all worth it.

Miller, who will speak Thursday at Thinc Iowa 2012 in Des Moines, is a co-founder of Singly, an up-and-coming personal data connector company based in San Francisco. When Singly began in early 2011, its three co-founders were spread across the country — one in New York, one in San Francisco and one in Iowa. Singly needed a home — and the founders knew they’d need more tech people. So they settled in California. The New Yorker moved West, and Miller “committed to being able to commute out there, to travel out there as much as was needed for the three of us as founders.” 

Miller is no stranger to travel — he estimates he’s taken 1,000 flights over the last 10 years for many different tech projects. From California to New York to Denver to Texas, his work has flown him all over the country. And for the last year and a half, the grueling nine-hour commute has become routine. There were rocky bits, of course — months where he was away from home 60 or 70 percent of the days, or stretches where he’d make the California trek every week. He tried red eyes, but the overnight flights would leave him so exhausted the next day that he would be half awake during work — or worse, during a precious weekend with his family.

(Miller prefers the pace of life in small-town Iowa, left.)

With his current schedule, he gets around six hours of sleep a night, and manages to be present for both his work and family life. Two of his children have lives of their own, as he says — one just started college, and the other is a junior in high school. His 9-year-old stays in touch with what else, but technology. “We can hop on FaceTime any time, we can message with each other, we’ve played Minecraft while I’m gone — so we stay really well connected,” Miller says. And the three-hour nighttime commute to and from O’Hare? “It’s the only peaceful three hours of my entire week,” Miller says. “There’s no calls. So I listen to an audiobook and get three hours to myself twice a week.”

At work, the Singly team has found a good rhythm. They’re constantly on Google Hangouts, working with Miller (while he’s home) and the five other remote employees. They spread their meetings out so Miller can attend as many as possible, and the day-to-day tasks get done. But it’s not flawless. “There’s definitely been times where something important will come up and I won’t be able to be there for it,” Miller says. “And there’s things that’ll happen over the weekends, like the whole group will go out or go to a baseball game, and I — as a rule — I stay home on the weekends. So some of the evening or off-hours camaraderie I do miss out on.”

But to the people who wonder why Miller lives in Iowa and makes this commute every week, he says, “One of the values of being out here and that I talk to people about is that it’s much closer to reality. The pace is very different. People’s values and how they talk about politics and how they use social media is often different, and the communities — like the local community events, the local farmer’s markets  — are different. It’s just very safe, and everybody knows everybody else. It’s a town of 2,000 people here, and I would say over half of them probably know me by my first name.”

It’s because of this mentality that Miller has come to be a sort of champion for Iowa and its projects. And looking ahead, he’s excited to share Iowa’s technology (mobile apps specifically), and way of life with the world. “My experience having grown up on a farm in a small community in Iowa has informed a lot of how I feel and value technology as a communication tool,” Miller says. “Technology and apps and phones and devices have the ability to bring this experience in a small community to a global community, and you can have these similar experiences at a large scale across long distances. This thing can capture a moment in my life and share it in real time out through an app and reach out to other people anywhere they are. So that’s something I’m really excited about: the more technology can capture the really great parts of a small community — and let everybody experience that.”

Updated Oct. 10, 12:10 p.m. – A previous version of the story included a link to a personal site that was not Miller’s.

Credits: Photo of Miller from dsearls on Flickr. Photo of countryside from Miller on Twitter.