Sort of like Mr. Hill, whom Mr. Denton described as “this Maui-New York surfing-TED person spewing carbon into the environment, even though he pays for it,” referring to the way Mr. Hill mitigates the impact of his constant air travel by buying carbon offsets. “I always joke that my footprint is lighter than his, because the only place I travel is from my apartment to my office.”

Indeed, the kite-surfing, skateboarding Mr. Hill has been mostly camping for the last decade, running his business out of a series of hotel rooms and small apartments in cities like Buenos Aires, Bangkok and Barcelona, Spain, to name just a few, as well as from a trailer on the Baja, a garage in Maui and even a bunk on Plastiki, the boat-mission made from 12,500 plastic bottles and captained by David de Rothschild, the banking-heir environmentalist.

It was these experiences, Mr. Hill will tell you, which required culling his stuff to fit into one small rolling suitcase, that made him seize on the notion of “small” as a business plan.

“Small is sexy,” he says in his six-minute TED talk. A YouTube hit, with 1.3 million views as of this week, it also includes these aphorisms: “Transfer ownership to access,” “Own as little as possible so you don’t have to store too much” and “Editing is the skill of this century: editing space, media consumption, friends.”

Mr. Hill is certainly not the first to trumpet the benefits of a pared-down life. There’s a straight line from Buckminster Fuller to Sarah Susanka, the architect and author of “The Not So Big House,” published in 1998 at the height of the country’s McMansion expansion, and to the Tiny House folks, the D.I.Y. builders of microhouses.

There are the clutter people and the simplicity people and authors like Dave Bruno, who wrote a book about editing his possessions down to 100 things. Barbara Flanagan, an architect, product designer and writer, did Mr. Bruno two better, with her 2008 book, “Flanagan’s Smart Home: The 98 Essentials for Starting Out, Starting Over, Scaling Back.”

Still, “one of the things the TEDsters embrace is not that the idea needs to be new, but the idea needs to be heard,” said Katrina Heron, a former editor in chief of Wired magazine who is now an editor at large at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, describing the hyper-voluble idea mavens who flock to the TED conference and others.