It’s a question the 29-year-old Mexican is still asking. Currently the chief technical officer for 9flats.com, Hankins was the third employee for CouchSurfing.org and served as CTO for over four years.

With CouchSurfing.org, he felt he came close to changing the world for some people, by enabling mostly youths to travel freely and connecting them with local hosts through a volunteer-based social network. “The next step is to tangibly measure this benefit,” he said.

CouchSurfing, founded in 2004 by Casey Fenton, counts more than four million CouchSurfers, in 86,000 cities, speaking 366 languages. And Hankins said the site raised about US$2 million in revenues in donations last year alone.

In 2011, CouchSurfing raised $7.6 million in Series A funding from Omidyar Network and Benchmark Capital. It also became a B Corporation, a designation for companies committed to creating a positive social impact.

Why then did he trade couches for flats? Hankins said after four years, he felt it was time for a change, plus he wanted to work in Berlin, one of his favourite cities.

He stresses he is not out to “couchsurf” 9flats, saying they are two completely different models. “If you look at the user interface, it’s completely different. With 9flats, first you see the pictures of the flats, then you look at the maps and then you get the profile of the owner. With CouchSurfing, it’s about the experience and host first, then the place is a small box on the bottom left. One site is about the people, the other is about places.”

He says he is at 9flats to learn new things so he can arm himself with all the skills necessary to change the world his way. “I feel I need to learn about the commercial aspects of business and how to be independent as an entrepreneur so I can do it right.”

Hankins, who was in Singapore as part of a mentorship programme where he was mentoring up for four tech start-ups a day, is as passionate about technology as he is about travel.

It was during his first overseas trip to Germany, on a student exchange programme to work on a robotics project in Berlin, that he realized how small the world really was. “I travelled across Europe and found that people were very nice, very friendly and very similar. And it was their differences that most captivated me. Suddenly, the world didn’t seem so strange, distant or alien anymore.”

He took a job at Microsoft, Redmond, and worked there for a time. “I really enjoyed my time there. People are so smart and they pay so well there. It was really hard to leave, but I needed to do something where I could have a greater impact.”

So leave he did to travel. It was on a trip that he met Casey Fenton. One of his many roles was to manage offices around the world. “One way we got people to work for very little for us was to offer them an incredible lifestyle – a beach house – and lots of travel,” he recalls.

In Singapore, he says he’s met some incredibly smart entrepreneurs. “Their ideas are good but they don’t seem to have big dreams. Most of them are very focused in one field, they all have great plans for execution and I think most are looking at monetization too early.

“In Berlin, the ideas we see are really big and outrageous – how we can change the world type. So it’s interesting the difference in approach.”

So how does he want to change the world? Hankins is a great believer in the power of the web for connecting people across the globe. He is a pioneer of online tools that encourage a real, face-to-face network of individuals sharing real-life experiences. That’s what his bio says.

But something is troubling him today – as a passionate traveller, he’s concerned about how technology has changed traveller behaviour.

“I love nature, I love rock climbing, surfing, hiking, just being outside. I feel people are less connected to nature and their immediate surrounding now because of technology and there must be a way to change that. That’s what I’d like to do.”

By the way, Hankins is one of the 10 people who will take part in Unplugged 480: An Experiment in Survival, launched by WIT and Discovery Channel Magazine, all part of the journey to WIT 2012, Oct 15-17, in Singapore.