Silicon Valley Talent Vortex, Southeast Asia Time Machine & Sea Turtle Migration with Adriel Yong - E493

Jeremy Au and Adriel Yong discussed whether Southeast Asian founders should move to Silicon Valley, and why "sea turtle" professionals are returning from America (and China) to Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam. San Francisco and New York are global tech talent vortexes, where non-American founders are attracted to their deep VC funding pools and a multi-generational legacy of founder support since the 1950s, e.g. the "father of VC" Georges Doriot of America Research & Development Corporation (ARDC). America's large ecosystem also holds transformative appeal for deep tech and frontier tech founders, as well as higher pricing power for both SaaS and consumer brands. In contrast, Singapore has the same GDP per capita (US$88K) as America, with a better quality of life for families looking for healthcare, public safety, education and housing. Southeast Asian diaspora returning to their home countries should be realistic about Asia's higher number of working hours compared to America and EU, fragmented markets, regulatory challenges and less mature economies. Savvy international founders have a "time machine" mindset: visualizing the country's future in 10-20 years, seeing the industry as it actually is and then building the companies that make sense for this decade and geography.

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(01:20) Jeremy Au:

Hey Adriel, good morning.

(01:22) Adriel Yong:

Morning to you, Jeremy.

(01:23) Jeremy Au:

Good to see you after two weeks in California. Yeah, how's California? I was just in California about two months ago and a lot of it was still as pretty as ever. I was like, wow, it's like the sunshine, the big yards, the American dream of driving a fast car across a mildly congested highway.

(01:39) Adriel Yong:

I like to joke with my friends that in California, you get the sun without the sweat you get in Singapore. It was great to hang out in the sun without sweating at all the last two weeks and see a lot of old friends from college and the tech ecosystem. Lots of interesting observations as well. Something that we definitely want to dive deeper in today's like episode.

(01:58) Jeremy Au:

Yeah. I'm happy to chat about it. And I agree with you about the sun and the weather. I mean, That's why there's a lot of path dependency, right? I think everybody goes to California. It's like, wow, it's so much nature. Everybody loves hiking as a hobby. I went to UC Berkeley for undergrad and that's where I picked up my love for hiking. If you ask me in army days, do you like hiking? Why would I spend more time in a jungle? It's like hot, humid. So It's kind of interesting where there's a bit of path dependency where those early cultural experiences where you enjoy hiking California and then you keep going. Even today, I love walking in Singapore from meeting to meeting. Actually, Singapore is a really walkable city.

(02:28) Adriel Yong:

On the good days when it's cloudy, not on the sunny days. So, as you jump into it, I think one interesting thing I've seen in the last two weeks is that a lot of Singapore founders are starting to think about just building directly in California. And I guess, two sub-segments to that, right? One is your Singapore founder who has already one or rounds of capital and it's now like expanding. They're trying to raise US capital to drive that expansion and sort of quote their first few like US customers. I think we also have some portfolio companies like that in our portfolio. The second is the Singapore slash Southeast Asian diaspora that has study, work, or just straight up immigrated over to the Bay area to try and build a company from there. It seems like more and more people are thinking of jumping straight into SF to build and raise capital. Any thoughts on that?

(03:15) Jeremy Au:

I think it's a great question. I've been talking to a lot of folks, both people who are going from Southeast Asia or Singapore to America and asking for advice or vice versa. I actually have a few friends who are traveling back from America or thinking about coming back to Southeast Asia and Singapore. So I think it's not an easy decision, easy conversation, but definitely a topic of mine. People call them sea turtles, right? They go there, they come back, but maybe they go there again after that, right? So not an easy answer. So, I would say that the first thing is to be upfront about it America continues to be the number one tech ecosystem in the world. More specifically, when we say America, we mean San Francisco and New York city as the tech hubs, maybe with Texas as another sub hub those would be the two to three ecosystems that are really what we're talking about. I think what we see is that Silicon Valley continues to have that power law dynamic where because it has the world financial markets, in the New York side, because it has such a deep capital pool, because of the talent and immigration dynamics. There's a bit of a talent vortex where they're able to draw in people. So this is not necessarily a Southeast Asia problem because it's also an EU problem. An Australia problem. Every ecosystem around the world is kind of like, how do we compare against primarily San Francisco? So I think the fact is that San Francisco's tech ecosystem is very strong and by nature, everyone else is going to say, how do we compare and should we individually move there or how do we take on some of those opportunities?

(04:31) Adriel Yong:

Well, you say that the SF ecosystem is really strong compared to the rest of the world. How exactly have you seen it across the different stages of your life? You're in Berkeley, then you build a company after you have an MBA and now you're frequently there in your current role at a biotech startup expanding into the US. What is the exact draw upside that people can expect if they're moving to SF?

(04:51) Jeremy Au:

Yeah. I mean, you know, Silicon Valley is named Silicon Valley because he started out as Silicon Valley, right? Before that it used to be a, you know, fruit and plantation kind of agricultural area. But after World War II, there were a lot of veterans that were moving back, there's a lot of good universities, a lot of nuclear research, like in Oppenheimer, the movie you have this first generation of people who built your first set of giant computers to microcomputers to mini computers, but all of that there. And so there's a very long generational history. I would say, two to three generations deep of technical talent. So, obviously from the 1950s, Professor Doriot, he's like a French-American.

He later founded INSEAD, but more importantly, he was considered the father of VC. He set up ARC, which was basically, the predecessor for almost every VC fund. And so, you think about it from 1950s, it's like, you know, your, you can call it, your grandparents' generation was there, then your parents were born around that time period. And then the millennials will be the third generation. And if you're like Gen Z, that's probably the fourth generation, right? So I think Silicon Valley has that depth of three to four generations of institutional memory around how to deploy capital. And it's got a good mix of cultural factors, like a little bit of a paid forward, a little bit of utopianism of like California gold rush days. We want to attract people who are high risk, high reward. And there's a bunch of policies that support that, as well, both at a city level. So you look at Cupertino where there's a lot of Apple employees, et cetera. There's a strong partnership between that municipal government with the planning and tech components. So I think basically you have that depth of ecosystem, right?

So for me, studying at UC Berkeley, I graduated in 2011 and that was right after the financial crisis, obviously, occupy wall street, started out in San Francisco and New York around that timeframe. There was this company called Google that was starting to hire salespeople. A lot of my friends, went there, and they weren't going to like consulting like I did management consulting. I didn't go into investment banking and they've done very well since then. I mean, they've done like five, 10, 20 years at Google and they've done very well for themselves because Google has grown and they've been able to use their global profit pool and ability to hold up profit to feed. And then some of them are now leaving to set up their own startups. I think you see that conveyor belt where if you're there at the right time, you know, rising tight lifts all boats and a rising tech tight lifts all tech career boats up at the same time. So I think there's a strong, uplift factor where, if you do nothing and just default to the easiest job that's hiring, it's probably going to be tech in San Francisco.

So the crux of it is that, there's that depth of memory, depth of talent, long, deep, wide network of folks, high density, obviously in San Francisco and Menlo Park. So yeah, I think it's a incredible ecosystem.

(07:28) Adriel Yong:

So for, I guess, a young person thinking about whether to build in Singapore slash Southeast Asia versus skipping that initial build and race in Southeast Asia to go straight to the US, how should they think about that decision? When does it make more sense to just up and out straight and go to the US and build from day one there?

(07:46) Jeremy Au:

I think it depends on which country you're coming from and what economic situation you're coming from personally. You can't decide whether to go to place B if you don't know where place A is, and then you compare place A versus place B. And I think if we look at Southeast Asia, I think there's two very different stories. There's one that's Singapore versus America. And the rest of Southeast Asia versus America. As we previously talked on past podcast episodes, Singapore's GDP per capita is about similar to America, it's about $70,000. If you look at GDP per capita between kind of like the rest of Southeast Asia, you know, Versus Singapore and America, the rest of Southeast Asia is roughly between $7,000 to $15,000.

So depending how you look at it, 10 to 5 times lower than Singapore and America. Right? So this is the GDP per capita, which is quite important to think about because, one thing that I would say is that for a lot of people from Singapore going to America, it's almost like a seamless transition, right? Because Singapore culture is so westernized. So I could go there and we can sing karaoke and we will sing Britney Spears and everybody laughs and it's easy to get it because I, as a millennial I'm in Singapore, I listened to Britney Spears and we laughed about it and other people sing Britney Spears. So I think it's an easy cultural communication piece that's relatively equivalent. And of course San Francisco is also quite straightforward. There's also a lot of Asian Americans there. So that also makes that transition easier as well. So I think that's straightforward dynamic because similar GDP per capita, high education standards. Singapore does a lot of deep tech as well as focus on engineering. I think it's easy to move to the US but the upside of moving to the US is less, if you're living as an average Singaporean versus an average American, you have a roughly equivalent lifestyle.

Now, obviously it shows up in different ways. In Singapore. They tax cigarettes, alcohol, cars, and freehold land, right? Those things that you will see as part of your American dream. I can drink as much as I want. I can smoke whatever I want. I can have as much freehold land as I want. This is the American dream to some extent. In Singapore, there's a lot of subsidies. Education is free through healthcare, housing utilities and food. So there's a lot of different ways that it shows up. The lifestyle difference is actually different as well. And so We actually see a lot of folks who are Singaporean from America who want to move to Singapore back because they now have kids, and then when you have kids, you know, things like health insurance, childcare, being able to have helpers to support, those are all dimensions that are quite important for our family. Safety and security is another big thing that comes up.

What I'm trying to say here is that the lifestyle difference isn't so large, right? And obviously people can have their preferences. Like, I prefer to live in that kind of lifestyle, American lifestyle versus another thing, which is in Singapore.

From the other angle, of course, is, if you're coming from a country with a significant lower GDP per capita than America,, then obviously you start thinking to yourself, how do I move to America? How do I move to Switzerland? How do I move to Singapore? Because, there's a better set of economic environments. It's just a simple fact, right? And when we think about it, if you travel from somewhere that had around $7,000 to $8,000 GDP per capita, you travel to about America level, Singapore level GDP per capita on a purchasing power parity level, and let's say your economy is growing about 5%. And America and Singapore is growing about 2%. Then it's going to take you about 50 years for your country to catch up with America, Singapore. So in other words, if you take a 12-hour flight or 20-hourur flight, you are traveling 50 years in the future, so you can have a better life for you and your family.

And of course you're going to more money per hour. You're going to have more networks. Your child can live a better life. And I'm very sympathetic to that because if I think about my great grandparents, my grandparents, they left China because there was political disunity and fragmentation and war, so they said. Anywhere is better than here right now. And so let's make the move. Right. And that's why I'm here in Singapore. Right. I wouldn't be here if my great grandparents. My ancestry said, let's move if you go back, more generations, humans were very mobile, right? I'm sure the way they looked at it probably was like, how do I move from Northern China to Southern china, Southern China to Western China? Everybody was moving. So I think human mobility is a very normal piece to have.

(11:31) Adriel Yong:

You know, I like, I like that framing of, you know, moving to America and hopping on that 17, 21 hour flight. It's like a time machine almost on multiple fronts, especially when you think about it the GDP per capita level and what that means for a founder building a business. You know, a wallet hurts a lot after all the Uber rides in California, it was like easily 20, 30 US dollars on average for a trip, whereas in emerging parts of Southeast Asia never gets more than like three or five dollars, right? So that's like almost 10x multiple difference so which literally means per time unit effort, you get 10x more revenue, or 10x more profit and your software companies can consequently be 10x larger in America than say Indonesia, much more similar like time fashion.

I guess the other thing to think about and the other segment is the non-founders. I guess the people who are like, you know, potentially looking to move to America and join as executives, which maybe is an even larger pool than the people who are founders thinking about moving there. And I'm guessing you probably know quite a bit of them. How have you seen them navigate that sort of career decision?

(12:33) Jeremy Au:

Yeah. I think, where it kind of boils down to is what is the Southeast Asia tech ecosystem good for? And I think that you can build better outcomes. You gotta be thoughtful about how they happen, watching YouTube about American style startups for American style market. America is like 50 States. So it was very straightforward for them for an idea to ripple out across the unified regulatory market. In Southeast Asia, everyone's an island, right? And then, and then even if we're not islands, we also, you know, split by country, so being thoughtful about, are you going to be like a single country, and do our country conglomerate, versus, digitally versus being a regional player. There's a lot of different dynamics to that. I would probably peel the onion by talking about several slices of it. So for example, I would say on average, if you as a founder, who's very into deep tech, like quantum or very, very deep tech, probably America has a deeper capital pool and deeper talent pool because of the university, the PhD side, again, I'm not saying that you can't build it in Southeast Asia, but if you're building Southeast Asia, you'd probably be building a deep tech company in Singapore. And then if you're looking at globally, you're probably building this in San Francisco. And I would probably make the argument that a lot of the people are doing deep tech, they're not doing this in tech, New York, even, or London as well. There's a little bit of that again, vortex pulling to San Francisco that has the deepest capital pools for these moonshot cascading miracles type of startups.

I would also say that for folks who are, You know, coming from a low GDP per capita country, it's almost a no brainer. I would say to travel to a high GDP per capita country. I mean, first of all, like you said, you get to earn more money where the cost of labor is higher, you get educational outcomes, participate in the upside there and then you also, your personal lifestyle also probably gets better as well, you know, dealing with pollution or congestion or, you know, kind of like a low standard of living.

So I think there's a dramatic shift. And I've seen a lot of friends who came from low GDP per capita countries who are now in America and they have a fantastic life because from their perspective, it's like, wow, I'm part of my community. I moved to my equivalent of Chinatown in terms of suburb. We have a yard. We don't have war or civil war there's a very interesting dynamic where I look at them and be like, yeah, you fulfilled the American dream, right? You got to move to a better place and have that dream. So I think it's pretty no brainer in that sense.

I think there are several groups of people like I said, we're coming back to the first I mentioned people who want to set up a family, primarily Singaporeans, or Singaporean linked, because again, the GDP per capita is equivalent to America and on a purchasing power parity is actually higher most of it shows up in family friendly dynamics, for middle class folks. So that's one cluster I see coming back.

I think the second cluster, it goes back to the time machine is, people from America and China who are traveling to Southeast Asia, because they feel like, they're traveling back in time. So there's a famous type of anime called "isekai", which is basically saying a protagonist from normal day life travels back in time or travels a fantasy world, and then using their knowledge of the modern world, they become better and superior. Like, I don't know if they've traveled back 100 years ago, you'd be like, wow, did you know about penicillin and antibiotics? And then you become a wizard because you can cure people like magic. You know how CPR works. So you're able to bring dead people back to life. The guy passed out had a heart attack and you're like, trust me, it's a magic spell. And so I think a lot of folks travel back in time. So you saw that with Grab and Gojek. These were Harvard business school MBAs will travel back in time. They saw Uber, they traveled back to Singapore, Indonesia accordingly, and they built billion-dollar companies because they saw the future and they said, I will build the future into the present of Southeast Asia. That's one cluster. We saw that with Forrest Lee, he's at Sea Group, you know, Stanford MBA, and then he moved to Singapore and set up Sea Group because he was also saying like, Hey, I understand the Chinese ecosystem, in terms of e-commerce and the platform. I see America, I can see happening. So he built the future. Now we have Shopee and all these various dynamics of the Sea group. That's another cluster.

The third cluster that I see is obviously people who are like civic-minded. Living in a country is not just living in a country. You're actually participating so do you agree with their politics, their economics, their government structure? And some people basically say like, you know what? I grew up in Singapore, I'm Singaporean and I don't want to spend my entire life in America and become American. I want to contribute to Singapore society, so that that's actually a big, I'll say, chunk for a lot of people, like where is home from a emotional and almost spiritual level, in terms of like your civic mindedness and community level.

(16:37) Jeremy Au:

I think lastly, you know, let's be real. Like a lot of Singaporeans don't leave Singapore and a lot of Indonesians don't leave Indonesia and they are still successful. So, you would say that you look at a lot of Singaporeans, obviously we see the Zopim folks for SaaS. They built it out of Singapore. There was a successful outcome. Obviously we see a lot of VCs that grew up here. You see Mohan Belani at e27. You know what I mean? He's just built his entire career in Singapore. And you know, the way they pay their strengths is basically saying like in Singapore, you're like, Hey, you know, I'm playing the long-term game. I have all of the social networks. I'm accumulating that over time. For example, when I moved back from America to Singapore, a lot of my social networks didn't move back with me. I think my skillset, my knowledge, my experience move back with me, but not my social networks. I think that's one thing that doesn't port easily. And so Something that doesn't port easily has a competitive advantage. If you're in Southeast Asia and you still hear one of the ways that you can out compete somebody who travels to America and back. It's really true networks, right? You know, you're building out 10, 20, 30 years of working with leadership, trust, affiliation, identity, and that's what wells for many types of companies as well as jobs, right? VCs is helpful. In fact, I'll probably make an argument that if you were wholly educated in America, VC for 20 years and you move to Southeast Asia, you're probably not well trained for the Southeast Asia ecosystem, right?

If you want to be VC, you still want to spend time in America to some extent. You still want to learn, you still want to get trained there. You still want to read, YouTube, and learn the future, but to some extent, if your core asset is a network, then you just can't build that remotely. That's why all your online schools and communities kind of died out because humans are still physical monkeys in meat space. So I think companies that require more networks is one side. Also, there's still a lot of like private knowledge also depends on like what kind of background and advantages you already have in your home country. If you come from the top 1% in Southeast Asia, because you're affiliated with a family or something, then that strength doesn't port with you to America. You're just going to be starting from the ground level in America, but in Indonesia or Thailand, or wherever you are part of that, so why not play to the advantage depending on how you look at it? I think it really depends. It's kind of intersectional, right? One part is geography. The other part is your prior economic status. The third is actually your prior affiliation or network status. And then fourthly, is your life stage. And lastly, maybe the fifth is your interest or skillset. So those are the different dimensions.

(18:47) Adriel Yong:

Yeah. I think, maybe just to double click on the sea turtles that go out and have done well and are now thinking to come back because of all sorts of reasons. I think you navigated that decision coming back before, right? And you know, a lot of the successful examples, you brought up Forrest Lee, the Zopim guys, Mohan, they all became founders. What does the non-founder life look like? You know, moving back from, the US to Southeast Asia, are there opportunities for people? Are there good enough companies to do it? What can they do? And I think there's probably a bunch of folks in the bay Area who are now also thinking about that, right? After spending a couple years there.

(19:22) Jeremy Au:

Yeah, I think for folks moving back from Silicon Valley, and to some extent New York, to Singapore, I think there are three warnings or heads up I will give them. The first of all is that Singapore works more. You know, every single part of it works 50% more working hours than the average American, right? And then I'm not even talking about tech American, like your Google campus and you know, so you just work more. And I mean, that's why Singapore has a higher GDP per capita on PPP, purchasing power parity. Obviously it's three factors, right? One is singapore has lower productivity per hour than America, but Singapore has worked 50% more and of course, Singapore subsidizes it with cost of labor, pools to help subsidize the cost of construction and domestic help and so forth. So those are the three sections that support Singapore's headline number, which is, wow, Singapore is GDP per capita, unadjusted for purchasing power parity is the same as America, adjusting for purchasing power parity is even higher than America. But I think what's hidden is that Singaporeans work harder, on average than the average American. So you've got to work harder moving back to Singapore. Some people are like, okay, forget about it. You work harder. Some people are like workaholics, you know, like me, and I'll be like, Oh, great. No problem. So I think that's a really fundamental fact is I think the average Singaporean works 50% more than average American. Now, obviously maybe you were an above average American versus a below average working Singaporean, but I'm just saying that's a fact.

I think the second part, is like, obviously your end markets are very different. So when you're working in tech in America, you're building deep tech, servicing B2B SaaS, for example, because American cost of labor is high. So the Uber is more expensive. Well, because America's cost of labor is higher than in Singapore and Singapore's cost of labor is a lot higher than that in say, Indonesia, Vietnam right? So if you look at a cost of a ride hail, it's equivalent to the Big Mac index, which is the cost of a Big Mac in America versus Singapore versus kind of like Philippines or Thailand or Malaysia. So I think you need to be aware that it's hard to automate a B2B function in SaaS if the cost of labor to do is very cheap. I think America and to some extent, Europe has more B2B SaaS adoption because cost of labor is expensive. So, oh, I'm like, wow, if I buy this subscription, it's straight away replaces the cost of like, half a full time person that is $50,000 per year. My SaaS has only cost me $5,000 per year. Wow, it's like a, 10X ROI, right? Versus if you say wow, I pay $5,000, but it replaces one half a person, but my cost of labor $7,000 GDP per capita. Then wow, I'm actually paying more for S than for using a human to do it, right? And the human is more nimble can do more different things.

So I think, that's one cluster, is like your end market is different because now you're building for more fundamental stuff. That's where the time travel machine, going back in time things like, yeah, you know, Southeast Asia doesn't have a lot of stuff. It doesn't yet have a strong B2B SaaS place and it's a matter of when, not if it happens, because Indonesia is growing 5% year-on-year. Prabowo was promised, you know, seven to 8%. So, the whole point I'm trying to say is that America and Singapore is growing about 2% year-on-year GDP per capita. So we said about, It'll take about 50 years to catch up, but there is that threshold in about maybe 10 to 15 years where it really makes a lot more sense. Are you willing to be patient and build that B2B SaaS in Southeast Asia? But take a long time to get there is one side of it. Or you can build something that's a little bit closer. So you see a lot of Southeast Asia, there's a lot of growth in e-commerce consumption, cross-border commerce, entertainment.

So these are more like, I'll say China style to some extent, because China's GDP per capita is actually only about 15,000, per capita, which is about equivalent to Malaysia and Thailand, around there. So to some extent, you know, the future of Indonesia is a Malaysia style GDP per capita, Thailand style GDP per capita. So I think to some extent, some of the models that're there, and so you see a lot of, founders actually in Southeast Asia, a lot of them have experience through Alibaba, the founders program there. A lot of them have spent time in China. So they also went to a time machine, but the time machine only went forward 10 to 15 years and then came back. And now they're like building, a more grounded startup, that is not deep tech, not super AI agents, but it could be something simpler, like call center automation. In America, there are no call centers left because it's so expensive, but in the Philippines, there's a huge BPO, huge call center business. And so, you can automate that by 10%, 20%, 30%. That's a P business. You can automate that by 50 to 80%, which is I think what we're approaching. That's a VC type of business. So I think being thoughtful about how business is category number two.

(23:33) Jeremy Au:

And I think number three, I think what you just had to be aware of is, I think that, market selection is much more important. So I think for me, when I was in America thinking about going from Boston to expanding to New York or DC, it was difficult because of demographics economy and housing structure, but it wasn't different language. It was a different culture. It was a different political structure. It was a different regulator. It wasn't different regulations. So I think a lot of Singaporean founders who are starting from Singapore have to be very much more thoughtful to be like, Okay. I'm not expanding to Indonesia, I'm expanding to Jakarta, the capital city, which is also several orders of magnitude higher GDP per capita than the rest of Indonesia. I'm expanding to KL, not the whole of Malaysia. So I think there's that thoughtfulness to be like, you know, how do I want to expand expand the geographic markets in a much more thoughtful way? And I think that's something that looks easy on a PowerPoint slide, but actually it's a lot more difficult when you're actually doing it and running it.

(24:25) Adriel Yong:

Interesting. It goes back to your point again about the US 50 States, single regulatory market, Southeast Asia, pick off all the capital cities, but each capital city belongs to a fundamentally very different political regulatory economic regime. So I guess the complexity for multi-city expansion is also much higher than in the US. Yeah, consequently probably takes you a lot more time for that sort of new market expansion growth that people want to see, especially if you're building a VC type business.

I think that's all my questions for now. Thanks so much, Jeremy, for talking through some of your reflections about what you see across the US and Southeast Asia from an immigration, diaspora flow perspective. Definitely, a lot of things have changed since the COVID era where America didn't do such a great response and everyone flocked back to southeast Asia. I think we're now starting to see that outflow come out again. Any parting thoughts about the whole southeast asia diaspora, both the inflow and the outflow?

(25:18) Jeremy Au: Yeah. I mean, a lot of stuff I've talked about has all been generalities, right? So it's about the average country GDP per capita, the average man hours per worked per citizen of that country. These are all averages, but I think first of all, everybody has a individual story, right? So they have an individual set of decisions. Like, am I having a family, do I have to take care of my aging parents back home? you know, What are my skillsets? What is my alumni network? So there's a bunch of individual dynamics that's really boils down to the individual person. And then of course the future may also change.

Maybe America's GDP per capita grows from 2% to 10% because of AI. Maybe a country in Southeast Asia's GDP per capita growth drops from 5% to 1%. So I think the future can change. And then the last thing is that I think for most people who are in the tech world, you're drawn to it because you have higher risk appetite and higher reward appetite. You're not the average person. You're exceptional in some dimensions, not necessarily in skills, but also maybe in your preferences. So a way I would think about it is it's like, a two-way door, right? Like traveling to a country and traveling back, it's not really a problem. It's a 20-hour flight there is a 20-hour flight back. So, you know, like, what's the cost to try one month, three months, one year there is actually relatively low compared to like my great grandparents' time, who took a boat for months and then they never moved back because it was just impossible. And then they'll write letters once every five years. I mean like, like now you can FaceTime your loved ones back home. You know, it's just the world is so flat. It's getting flatter, more.

So what I'm trying to say here is some extent you have to try it, which is maybe you have to travel there and see whether you like it and see whether it makes sense for you. And then vice versa is like, if you're there and you want to move back, you have to try it out, and then see for yourself whether it's time for you to move back. We're all going to live a hundred years on average. You know, one question that I often talk about other folks is that how much is enough, right? You know, like how successful do you have to be in your career? And what is that right cadence.

Some people want to go as aggressive as possible for that maximal top 0.01 percent outcome as much as possible, you know, kind of outcome. And some other people, like you said, high executives and it's like, okay, I hit a certain level. This is my best set of working hours, my personal life, my hobbies. So I think that dynamic is key because then you make a decision to yourself, like, okay, I have one life, how do I want to use it? And if you're not happy in a country, if you have the privilege to move, then you get a move. And so I think that's how I would think about it.

(27:26) Adriel Yong: Awesome. Thank you so much, Jeremy. It was great catching up after two weeks in California.