AI, Adventure, and the Open Road

When you picture the future of outdoor adventure, you might not immediately think of AI. The reality, though? The next leap forward in traveling farther, smarter, and with less friction probably won’t come from a bigger battery bank or a fancier solar setup. It’s coming from founders like Josh Klein and Zach Linder, two operators working at the intersection of AI and outdoor recreation — and doing it with the urgency of people who actually spend their lives on the road.

Josh, the founder of Grover, has slept more than 50 nights a year in his adventure van. Zach, CEO of Stellar, leads the team that helped build Grover’s AI engine from the ground up. Together, they’re shaping what might be the first truly AI-native outdoor travel tool — one built not for the abstract “user,” but for the person white-knuckling their steering wheel through elk country at midnight, or trying to remember the difference between the inverter switches they learned about during a dizzying RV handoff.

This isn’t AI as buzzword. This is AI as a trusted co-pilot.

From Sales Floors to Campgrounds: How Grover Started

Josh Klein doesn’t mince words when he talks about the reality of early-stage startups:

“Everybody thinks you just go build the thing and people are gonna walk in and buy it. Product-market fit doesn’t happen overnight.”

He spent two decades in go-to-market roles, leading teams of hundreds and developing a healthy respect for the grind of getting a product into the hands of real customers. After several exits, he took the rare step back to ask what he wanted his “second half” to look like.

That inflection point landed him squarely in an unexpected place: the RV and vanlife world.

A van he built and listed on Van Life Trader sparked demand he hadn’t anticipated. People wanted what he had created — not just a rig, but the capability to get out there. That insight led him down a winding path of van conversions, ABS thermoforming for the RV industry, and eventually, a new problem: owners were drowning in manuals, underusing their rigs, and overwhelmed by the planning required to actually enjoy them.

Grover emerged from that tangle of pain points.

RV handoff days, as Josh describes them, are “full of adrenaline and anxiety for both sides.” New owners walk away with binders of documentation they’ll never read. Builders field endless support calls that could’ve been avoided if someone did read them.

Grover solves that.

It takes every manual, diagram, and spec unique to a specific RV model and turns it into a digital assistant that answers questions instantly and accurately. No more searching forums. No more flipping through PDFs. No more guessing which switch controls which system.

And that’s only half the story.

When AI Meets the Open Road

If rig support is one pillar of Grover, the second is travel itself — because buying an RV is one thing, using it confidently is another.

For Josh, a personal moment clarified the need. He was driving from Steamboat to Salt Lake in winter, dodging elk on a dark highway after a full day of skiing:

“I just wanted to know where my friends had stayed along that route. I almost needed an assistant sitting next to me.”

Instead? He had hundreds of unverified dispersed camping pins, scattered BLM sites, and campground listings with no context. He didn’t want options; he wanted trust.

Trust in the land.
Trust in the stay.
Trust that his rig could make it.
Trust that he wasn’t guessing at 11 p.m. on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.

Grover’s travel-planning AI is built for exactly those moments. It knows your rig’s off-grid capabilities, your power draw, your preferences, your timing, and the conditions ahead. It blends that with community-driven knowledge and dataset scale — including LandTrust properties — to make travel planning not just easier, but joyful.

Josh recalls testing an early internal build on a long drive:

“I told it where I wanted to be the next morning, that I only wanted to drive three hours, preferred a Harvest Hosts spot with late arrivals that’s pet-friendly… and it just found it. That was the joy moment.”

The best outdoor tech feels like magic. This was that.

The Builder Behind the Curtain

If Josh is the catalyst, Zach Linder is the architect.

A veteran of multiple startups, analytics teams, and even a stint at Johnson & Johnson (“which taught me I belong in the startup world”), Zach saw early that AI wasn’t hype — it was a platform shift as big as mobile, cloud, or social.

When OpenAI dropped its 2022 release, Stellar was born with a simple thesis: instead of building a single AI product and risking being swallowed by a foundation model, they would help others build the right thing at the right moment.

Grover became one of those right things.

What makes their collaboration unique is speed. Not sloppy speed — precision speed. Grover went from first line of code to working demos in weeks. A builder asked for a reporting feature and they shipped a full analytics dashboard — complete with AI-derived insights — in a few days.

But Zach is quick to point out that this doesn’t happen because of AI alone:

“You can get from zero to something very quickly. But you can also build the wrong thing very quickly.”

So before writing a single line of production code, Grover and Stellar spent months conducting discovery interviews, recording them, and feeding the transcripts through AI tools to eliminate human bias. Only once they knew the real problem did they begin building the solution.

That discipline is why Grover works.

Chat as the New Front Door

Both founders see a future where chat — not screens full of nested menus — becomes the primary interface for outdoor tools.

It’s a shift that seemed unthinkable a few years ago. Users historically avoided reading anything. Today, people willingly consume long responses, iterate with the assistant, and stay engaged for minutes rather than seconds.

But chat alone isn’t the whole experience.

Grover integrates maps, cards, and embedded UI elements that surface only when they’re the right tool for the job. Need a route visualized? Show a map. Need a checklist? Show a card. Need to make a decision? Present a button.

Everything else? Let natural language do the work.

This frees the traveler from rigid workflows and empowers them to be spontaneous, curious, and creative — exactly the mindset that outdoor recreation is supposed to unlock.

The Real Pain Grover Solves

Here’s the truth behind most RV and vanlife purchases: people imagine solitude in the mountains or a perfect river bend at sunrise, not a crowded campground five feet from a stranger’s picnic table.

But without confidence, most end up defaulting to the comfortable option — commercial campgrounds they know will be safe, available, and easy.

Grover and LandTrust share the same mission: remove friction so people can reclaim the experiences they actually bought these rigs for.

LandTrust offers verified, private land where travelers can feel secure and alone in the best way. Grover helps them find those places, plan around their rig’s capabilities, and navigate the unexpected without stress.

Together, they unlock the kind of outdoor moments that make people fall in love with adventure in the first place.

Building for the Next Generation of Travelers

Josh says something in the conversation that sticks:

“I think about how my kids are going to travel — their tolerance for friction is going to be so low.”

He’s right.

The next generation won’t accept fighting with filters, flipping through manuals, or stitching together six apps to plan a single weekend trip. They want spontaneity with structure. Freedom with support. Discovery with safety.

And they’ll expect technology to make that possible.

Grover isn’t replacing the wild; it’s removing the barriers that keep people from entering it confidently.

Why This Matters for Outdoor Rec Tech

Nearly every founder in this space, from mapping apps to gear innovators, is solving for the same underlying truth:

We don’t get enough time outside — so the time we do get needs to count.

Grover helps people use their rigs. LandTrust helps them use the land. Stellar helps builders bring innovative products to life faster.

The faster this ecosystem collaborates, the faster the outdoor community benefits.

As Josh puts it:

“There’s a really interesting opportunity for all of us — manufacturers, service providers, tech companies — to share in the responsibility of customer joy.”

That’s the heart of it. Not AI. Not software. Not dashboards or user flows. Joy. Because that’s why any of us go outside in the first place.

The Road Ahead

Grover is already partnering with builders, manufacturers, and travelers. If your rig’s brand isn’t yet integrated, Josh’s team will build an assistant tailored to your model. Stellar continues to help companies large and small implement AI responsibly and effectively.

And if you’re a landowner listening to the LandTrust Podcast? The same theme applies: fewer barriers, more meaningful moments outside.

The tools are getting smarter. The planning is getting easier. And the open road is only getting wider.

Adventure is calling — now with an assistant riding shotgun.

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