a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: How Innovation Ecosystems Grow Around the Globe

Episode Date: August 1, 2015

Why do so many-government led efforts to build the next "Silicon Valley" in one geography or another fail? Is it misguided to even try? But then what does make such innovation clusters work? In this segment of the pod a trio of expert guests -- AnnaLee Saxenian, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information and a longtime researcher/observer of regional competitive advantage; VC Brad Feld and writer on startup communities; and entrepreneur and investor Christopher Schroeder, who covers startups rising in the Middle East and most recently wrote about the tech phenomenon in Iran -- tackle the question of how innovation ecosystems grow. The discussion delves into how innovation is being spurred differently (or stifled) in places like China and Iran; whether there are cultural differences in attitudes for failure or about entrepreneurship; and if regulatory arbitrage is one way for regions to get ahead.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6NZ podcast. Today we're talking about startup and innovation ecosystems. I know. Those are a pretty loaded set of buzzwords. In this case, though, it actually really is an ecosystem because we're talking about cities, communities of entrepreneurs, governments, universities, companies, and others. And we want to talk about what makes these innovation ecosystems around the world work or not, especially since the question we hear often, for better or worse, is how to create the next Silicon Valley. The notion of trying to create the next Silicon Valley is completely the wrong question, and it's a wrong question for lots of reasons. So that's why we have three special guests on the pod today who are experts in different aspects of this topic. Annalise Saxinian, who's the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information, and a longtime researcher who has studied competitive advantage around the world. Brad Feld, VC at Foundry Group in Colorado, and the author of the book Startup Communities, and who has written a lot about the power of networks over hierarchies, and Chris Schroeder, who's a serial entrepreneur and investor,

and who also once served in the staff of former Secretaries of State. He wrote the book Startup Rising last year, which was one of the first books to document the phenomenon of startups in the Middle East, and more recently he's written about the impact of software-eating the world and how that's been playing out in Iran. So let's start by having you guys talk about what makes a successful innovation cluster like Silicon Valley. I'm not even sure if that's the right assumption for us to begin from, given the question and given how many of those government-led experiments have failed. But since the three of you have different perspectives on this topic,

I think it would be great for us to begin there. I think the fact is that most places that have tried to create the next Silicon Valley have not succeeded largely because they focus on specific institutions and isolation without understanding that one of the most important dynamics is the opening of boundaries between firms, between firms and finance, between industries and government, that really allowing, we talk a lot about how information has opened up global access and that allowed new parts of the globe to compete. But opening up flows of information locally, I mean, at the local level between people, you know, really from the bottom up, I think has been

critical to making places like Silicon Valley dynamic because ideas move. much more quickly than they do within vertical corporations where they tend to get trapped and people can act, they can use venture capital, they can invest, they can reform, they can recruit teams much more quickly when information flows openly between them. So a lot of the things that we look at, whether it's a university or a venture capital sector or whatever, those work especially if they are open to the rest of the ecosystem. that people can learn across boundaries much more quickly. I think that people are learning across boundaries much more quickly, exactly as Anna said.

I think there's something that's very different from any time before as these ecosystems have risen, and that is a very autodidac nature of young people with mobile devices to learn not only from each other and to share and innovate and collaborate on things that might be relevant within their markets, but they are instantly seeing the best practices and the best writings of people like Anna and people like Brad and people like Ben Horowitz, and they have an ability to access and engage and ask questions and improvise on what are best practices elsewhere in ways that we simply couldn't have talked about, I think, even five years ago. I had a conversation the other day with a bunch of young people in Iraq who were drilling

me about different valuations of startups now and drilling me about different kinds of ways social networks are functioning in the United States and making their own analogies of what are relevant in Iraq, which, of course, was completely unprecedented. And when I was in Iran a month ago, all the young people wanted to show me on their smart devices, not only how they were all on our social networks, which allows them to see each other as well to see other parts of the world, all of them had access to Coursera, all of them were on Khan Academy, all of them were looking at Cora, all of them were looking at what other people are doing, and building something bottom up, which is not a replacement for some of the challenges

that are still essential in a traditional Silicon Valley story, but actually open up an opportunity and something that's happening in parallel that, again, we could not have talked about a few years ago. I think these two constructs are profound and collide nicely. This notion of opening up boundaries, making them more porous, which Anna talks about, and has very articulately for a long time

a lot of the writing I've done about networks, especially networks versus hierarchies, is built on that. And, you know, what Chris just said about, the technology enablement, which we've been talking about for 20 or 30 years, but it's actually now reality in terms of how information flows across geographic boundaries.

What I think it results in is that the notion of trying to create the next Silicon Valley is completely the wrong question. And it's a wrong question for lots of reasons, but most importantly, each different geographic region, any city in the world, has different natural resources. And when I say natural resources, it doesn't just physical natural resources, but structural dynamics about how the city works, about what in that geography or region is powerful or unique.

And then you have this layer of knowledge that's pervasive that transcends geography. And over a period of time, now a short period of time, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, you can have really amazing things happen in different startup communities if you take that very long arc with this notion of the permeability of this information across all kinds of boundaries, not just geographically, but within whatever that region is. Right. What are some of those assets when you, Brad, when you talk about, you know, these are assets that aren't necessarily natural assets. I mean, we're now talking about information economy. So the assets can be in the form of human capital. What are your thoughts about how that varies across regions and what it takes

to sort of make those communities thrive? Yeah, so it's important to level set and realize that every single city on the planet was once a startup. It had this phenomenon where people decided to create a city somewhere for some reason. And it might have been, you know, 100 years ago, it might have been 5,000 years ago. And so there are unique characteristics all over the globe about culture, about how the economy works, about how information flows, about what people care about, the types of people that collect and grow over a period of time, independent of the academic institutions, the business institutions that could build in those geographies, and all of that is then wrapped around by how people interact with

other people in that geography. So the thing that comes from that that's so powerful is if you have founders or entrepreneurs who are leading the efforts of trying to do things in their geography again over a long period of time learning and taking from other places you get this self-referential phenomenon

and if you look at Silicon Valley it's a great example of it it's not a phenomenon that happened in the last 10 years the last 20 years I have a book on my desk that's called 100 years of Silicon Valley and it was written in 1994

It's just a very, very long-term arc. And I think that, you know, what happens with a lot of people who want to create, you know, the next Silicon Valley in my geography is they're taking a very narrow short-term view versus saying, what is it about the city we're in that's so special and why people are here and what can we do over a long period of time to build on that? I think I agree with everything that's been said. I think that we often have two short-term view. And also each region is distinctive and needs to identify its distinctive.

capabilities. I do believe that different places have, just for historic reasons, have different skills. And it's those skills, as well as their institutions and the social structure, so, for example, that can be built on. And so the first thing is to really think about what your sort of advantage is. So, for example, in Israel, they've been able to tap a lot of the military technology that has been funded for decades. You know, in India, entrepreneurs have been able to sort of bootstrap from low-end body shopping sort of software programming into larger-scale software development. So it really is the opportunity for entrepreneurs to identify capabilities within the region and then build on them over time so that they become more valuable, not only

locally, but to an export market as well. How does history and timing play a role here? In the case, the case of Iran is actually particularly interesting given the recent news about sanctions and the existing groundswell of entrepreneurial and tech activity that's already there. I think there's no question that the arc of time is something that people really do wrestle and the idea that you can build these things overnight is as they point out a mistake. I think interestingly though in a lot of these emerging markets, time isn't also their friend and what I mean by that is you've got a lot of countries in Iran is a

perfect example of this where 30 to 40% of the population is under 30 and doesn't have jobs. And so people are kind of looking at each other and saying, can technology help us to leapfrog? Can technology help us to light maybe some of our natural advantages so that we can not only do things within our markets or within our regions, but possibly and more controversially enter into markets more broadly. In the case of Iran, of course, it's been so locked down because of the sanctions. There's been a two-edged sword to it for them at one edge. They've been locked out of some of the best practices, except as I pointed out, even with the crackdown on, you know, access to the internet.

Everyone I've met there of all ages have access to VPN. Every mobile phone I looked at had access to all the same things that we have access to. They know a lot about what's been going on, so they've always been able to end on that, I think, at one level. But the other edge of the sort has been that with other companies not being there, they've been compelled and forced, and particularly the new generation, to build a lot of interesting technology to effectively replace things. So, for example, I saw a startup, Google, you used to be able to, to get almost any app from the app stores from Google,

and if you run it a little bit from iPhone. But it became very hard, and obviously you couldn't get anything that you would have to pay for because of the sanctions. So what happened, a bunch of startups came up to fill that gap and create apps so people could use them for a period of time. And so there was this interesting both creativity and fire to make something happen, but at the same time it was out of necessity

because the options were limited in what they can do. And the good news is are now very talented, very capable, very tenacious, as good as almost any emerging growth market I've seen in early days. At the other hand, they're about to enter now a very, very competitive place, and I think it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. I do want to add that Iran has an incredibly highly educated population. Of course, it has been cut off in all sorts of ways. And there's also a huge, very successful Iranian diaspora, which I suspect will. I know in Silicon Valley, they've been dying to contribute back. So Iran is very nicely positioned in some important structural ways to continue

contributing and to build on this innovative and entrepreneurial story that we're seeing already. I know, what does the research show about when, because I agree completely with Brad, that starting with the question of trying to emulate Silicon Valley is exactly the wrong question. Yet whether people are emulating Silicon Valley or not, there is a tendency to sometimes start innovation by imitating, and as Christopher calls it, improvising. What is your research show about that? Innovation grows out of imitation and improvisation. So people learn by improvising, by trying things, by first imitating and then improvising, because often you can't, you know, you think you're

building the same thing, but actually you're building something different that's adapted to local conditions. It takes advantage of local capabilities that don't exist elsewhere. So I think we need to be really aware that innovation builds on and imitation. We have a sort of a sense often that, you know, it's the only intellectual property. But every, you know, every industrial region, every innovative cluster that we've seen has started, you know, from imitation and improvisation. I had the man who was the founder, effectively, of the Yahoo, the Middle East, was a company called Maktou, which Yahoo, in fact, bought for 160 or 1007. $70 million about five years ago. And he said to me, you know, Chris, he just don't understand how these things staged.

There's a lot of risk in startups under the best practices, but we're dealing with cultures often that have zero experience in this. You know, there's plenty of money in places like the Middle East. There are plenty of money in a lot of emerging growth markets, but people are used to deploy them to real estate. They're used to deploying them to something that's hard in a construct. The idea that 80, 60, whatever it is, percent of your portfolio could go to zero is just not yet part of the culture in many of these instances. So if all of a sudden, as he said,

some kid five years ago would come home and tell his parents in Egypt that I'm dropping out of college because I've got this great idea for something I'm going to call Facebook. And trust me, $650 million people are going to be on it and I'm going to make billions of dollars. His friends would have laughed at him. His teachers would have laughed at him. His parents might have kicked him out of the house. But if all of a sudden you come home and say, you see this thing called Yahoo? Well, are there a lot of people speak Arabic? Yes. Are the people who'd like to have email? Yes.

Are there a lot of people, in fact, might even want to sell things? Yes. And all of a sudden you say, well, if that worked there, maybe a smaller version that can become a bigger version works there, and then you get the flywheel starting. Because when it ended up happening in the case of Machuvus, it is literally kicked out 25 other companies, one of which is suk.com,

which is the largest e-commerce player in the Middle East, which just got valued over a billion dollars. And I can assure you out of that, there will be, you know, another 50 entrepreneurs who will come out and kick out money, and the flywheel will continue. And so I just think that this improvisation stage is an absolutely natural early stage that people will build upon. Can this all really happen at a bottom-up level, though?

Is there a role for top-down government in creating these innovation clusters, especially when it comes to things like rule of law? Yeah, I challenge the assumption that you need top-down. I think that a lot of people approach the top-down as necessary, necessary, but it's effectively not sufficient. And so when you have top-down in the absence of bottom-up entrepreneur-led phenomena, grassroots, whatever phrase you want to use, nothing really happens. You get this stagnation.

If you have a bottom-up phenomena where all of a sudden the startup community starts to develop and grow because you've got entrepreneurs, and you know, to Christopher's last point, As they're successful, they reinvest back in the community. Often, and especially, you know, in different parts of the economic cycle, you have top-down focus. And you have government start to try to organize what's going on in the startup community, or you have academia or university in the city, try to become the central point of what's going on. And that is not going to be a successful path. What is a successful path is when those institutions,

figure out how to attach to the chaotic network that's being built and participate in the network rather than try to control it. And that's where the conversation about top-down starts to get complicated because it's not that those organizations and institutions don't have a role or shouldn't be involved or can't be involved. Quite the opposite. They're very beneficial. However, when they start trying to organize and control the activity or legislate the activity, it tends to, to generate a lot of second-order effects that are siphling and, in some cases, actually constrict the growth and development of what's going on in terms of the start of community. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that. I think, you know, we have this model of government

leading, and that just can't be the model. This has to be, you could have a public sector or other agencies be, I mean, at a minimum, they should be permissive. I mean, I think we have a lot of places where you'll go and find governments that are not even permissive that control flows of information or control capital markets in a ways that don't work. But just because they get in the way, it doesn't mean that they can also lead. They need to be in conversation with entrepreneurs, with innovators, about what will facilitate. What are the, you know, I think that the ideal role for a public sector or even for a university or other institution in a region that's trying to be innovative is to talk to the people who are

innovating and say, what are the obstacles and what can we do to help support you? You know, do you need more skill? Is there something that we can do to help generate more skill? Are there certain kinds of policy change that would help? These are all valuable things, but they cannot, they can't be tough down, they cannot have the sense that they will either plan in the traditional top-down sense or lead this. They have to be contributors, really almost co-equals with the entrepreneurs and the innovators. That makes a lot of sense, actually, but I do think that I don't want to assume that we're being naive about it, but I do think that there is a certain purity to how we view government sometimes.

Because when I think about travels in third world countries, I mean, it's probably not the appropriate phase. It's certain developing world countries. I think of corruption, bribery, you know, the fact that some governments can just seize your assets without no. notice, and these are not things that are familiar to us because we, for any complaints that we have about different governments, we are still used to living in a society that's actually very well-run and organized. And I want to hear your guys' thoughts on how to deal with that when it comes to an entrepreneurial ecosystem.

I'll revel in my naivete. But more importantly, I actually don't think that, for example, in American democracy, is a particularly well-organized or well-structured phenomena. I think part of the reason it's so resilient is that it's not. And the difference is we have a framework of rules, which, by the way, have a very, very hard time keeping up with innovation. And that framework of rules has then a way they're enforced. And that's the challenge.

When you go into a country where there either isn't a framework of rules, or there's not a way in which they're enforced consistently. Then you have lots of erratic phenomena where the thing you're trying to do can be stolen out from under you. I mean, I've been on the receiving end, for example, of deals that I did in the late 90s, thinking of one in particular with the Chinese company, where the merger agreement came back entirely in Chinese. We really had no choice but to sign it.

And, you know, when it was translated, the signature, you know, the document basically said, you're giving us our, your company, and we are giving you nothing, and you will be happy. Right? And at least they sent us the document, right? So, you know, I just sort of start with that. I don't think it's that it's structured correctly, that there is a framework that has some consistency, and the warning there, and we see it all the time, we see it with, you know,

the phenomena of innovative versus incumbent, of course, Uber is the one that everybody points at, but there's many, many companies that are struggling with this in lots of places in the U.S. right now because the laws don't keep up with innovation. So let's talk a little bit more about that as applied to some of the cultural aspects beyond the institutions that happen sort of tacit implied, you know, for example, attitudes towards failure. You know, Christopher, you've talked about how on one of the podcasts with some of the students in Iran who were building startups that, you know, the thought of doing a startup would be so taboo before. And now it's still not something that their families understand.

And Brad, you talk a lot about the psychology of entrepreneurs in everything from depression to the mindset of how to deal with failure and the reality, the hard slog of building a company. How do those attitudes play out internationally? And, Anno, does any of your research show how that plays out? I'm curious here from all three of you about this. You know, I wrote a book, my husband and I joke, I wrote a book that glorifies entrepreneurs when I wrote about Silicon Valley, and then I had to live with one. And, you know, being an entrepreneur is really hard. I mean, it's easy to glorify it in it.

But the ups and downs, you know, the unanticipated changes, nobody in their right mind would do it. And yes, you know, we have just growing numbers, and people are doing it all the time and very successfully as well. I think there's a long arc on this, which is I've heard for many, many years when I talk about startups, how you have cultural norms in different, mostly country-specific cultural norms around things like failure. And the U.S. has this structural advantage because of our cultural. norms. And then I end up in Iowa at startup Iowa and, you know, having pizza till, you know, midnight with 20 founders of different companies. And they start off sentences by saying things like in the Midwest, we're more conservative. And I remember that night so visibly because at some

point I said, will you just get over it? Like, it's not about being conservative. Like, you're all here doing this crazy thing where you're starting companies. You're not being conservative. And Oh, by the way, you know, three or four generations earlier, you're, you know, five generations earlier, whoever settled in Des Moines, those people were not conservative. Like, they drove in wagons that broke all the time across the United States and, you know, had to deal with, you know, starvation and disease and, you know, just the chaos of trying to get to where they're going. That's not conservative. So, you know, let go of those things.

And it's interesting because that construct then collides with something that Christopher said at the very beginning, which is so powerful, which is that the information about this is ubiquitous. You can get information about the notion and philosophy of how to be successful, how to think about failure, not to revel in it, but to understand that it's part of the process. You know, some of my own writings and others' writings on depression in the context of entrepreneurship have started to defigmatize the fact that leaders actually have emotions. And, you know, but as human beings, you know, we're just big back to chemicals.

And it's not just that sometimes we have a lousy day, but sometimes we're in a place where, you know, in terms of how we relate to what's going on around us, we might be functional, but it's really, really hard. That, then, is not geographically constrained because of lack of information flow. the kids in Iran are reading that stuff. And they might be able to relate to it directly. They might not, but it's at least permeating and influencing the way they think about what they're doing in the context of the next business they create.

And I've seen this very powerfully through some of the work that I've done through TechStars, which now owns Up Global, which runs Startup Weekend, which is around the world. And it's amazing to encounter entrepreneurs from everywhere that have the same language. And an example would be I was in Rio at the Startup Weekend Global Summit a couple of years ago. And, you know, a kid that looked like any other, I said kid in his 20s look like anybody else in their 20s, came up to me, handed me a startup Tehran hat, and gave me a giant hug. and just in the middle of the room and said, thank you so much

for teaching us how to think about when things don't work. My son, Jack, who's a teenager, just came back from seven weeks in Taiwan, working for a startup there, and so we went out for Chinese food and spent hours just getting caught up about what he saw, and I found myself pressing on, you know, because he's worked for

startups in New York and others for A16C, and you know, what's the differences? So what was it like in Taiwan? How was it different? And he would come up with a couple of quick things, and at one point he just sort of looked off in the distance, and he turned to me, he said, Dad, I got to tell you, the biggest surprise I had is how the same everything was. And I said, what do you mean? He said people, they come at problems the same way, they're undaunted in the same way, they're constantly

looking for the next new idea in the same way, they support each other in the same way, they think about culture in very similar ways. It really is a lingua franca now, I think, of this era that also will not go back. That's great. So one thing we haven't talked about is what happens when these local innovation clusters are exposed to global competition. For example, in the case of Iran, as sanctions lift, what happens when the local eBay-like competitor is exposed to the actual eBay, or in India, when Amazon competes more directly with the like of Flipkart and other competitors? Is it really, I mean, is local really an advantage when they're exposed to these companies that have this unprecedented scale and operational

efficiency? One of the things we're seeing is that while Amazon may be able to go anywhere, certainly they have the resources to hire the people. Often what you see, and you see this in China and other places, is that the local imitators who get a first start actually innovate in directions that are more appropriate for the local constituency. Absolutely. So, yeah, so that Baidu and China was, it was a knockoff of Google, but it figured out what Chinese people want much more quickly, you know. So I think, again, you really, the local has an advantage. They understand their community and what the needs are,

and markets really are not completely homogeneous globally at the moment. So I'm curious what you guys think about the distinction between what makes for that local advantage versus what in the end is really the best software engineer wins, which obviously at least for the time being put some emphasis on to Silicon Valley. So take a place like India. I mean, the LinkedIn of India is LinkedIn. The Facebook of India is fundamentally faced in. The Twitter, Facebook, of India is fundamentally LinkedIn.

This is not true in e-commerce. In the Middle East, I can tell you that the American great social networks are dominant forces there, but there's a reason why suit.com is worth what it's worth. And so there is something about understanding the market, understanding unique payment issues. So, for example, the Middle East, credit cards is not a usual thing. So you have to navigate COD in very different ways. Logistic companies have gotten incredibly sophisticated on the ground there

about how to even deliver products in great efficiency and that kind of thing. And I'm wondering if you guys just think about certain kind of general criteria by which you say there are things at the end of the day. They'll move very, very quickly, and maybe they'll come from Silicon Valley, maybe someday they'll come from Beijing, maybe someday they'll come from Tehran. But once they take off, they tend to be easily dominant versus these enterprises or industries that naturally lend themselves to such local need and execution and assets that they will constantly be seeing that type of innovation.

I remember a friend of mine out in Silicon Valley who's talking to me about some of these emerging markets said to me something very interesting. You look at a couple of great ideas. These are mobile first societies. These are folks who have never known landlines. We ought to be able to think that some interesting innovation will come from such places. And he said, but you've always got to ask yourself, you know, Once that idea starts to move, is it going to be something that a Silicon Valley entrepreneur is going to take global faster than they can?

And Pesa was a very tactical, specific need at a specific time that allowed it to become the largest payment mechanism in texting specifically in Kenya and not around the world. And so I'm sort of curious how you guys wrestle the idea of what makes for a global software for which perhaps even Silicon Valley will continue to have a great advantage. and what in local, you know, two or three things or whatever, really stick out that gives that kind of advantage for these emerging markets. So, Christopher, the examples that you gave lay right across how I tend to think about it, which is the more complex, I mean, I would say value chain. I was going to say supply chain, but it's really value chain. going back to Michael Porter's value chain framework.

The more complex the value chain is between the end customer and the supplier of the product or the manufacturer of the product, and the more complex that is, the bigger the local advantage. And I think you can probably dissect it across, I'm not being precise in my language when I say manufacturer and I'm saying value chain, but I think you could probably take, you know, even Poor's framework and look at

the different steps of it and say, is there a local advantage to this stage in, you know, whatever you're looking at? And if the answer is no, then you know, that's going to have less defensibility against it well-bunk comment. And I think that's

why e-commerce is such a good one. There's, you know, getting the product, like your example earlier, is the best way to ship something from somebody in one country in the Middle East to another country in the Middle East is through New York, okay, like that's not going to work for, you know, the model that Amazon's executing on. The last comment they made in this, I can't remember who I, I can't remember as Fadi was his first name.

I was in Dubai, and I met with Fadi and Fasel, father's son, and they were describing soup to me. They had a relationship to it through their investment in their company. And they were describing the logistics and how the logistics. logistics dynamics of companies that were physical logistics companies, they had such an insight into the way that goods and services moved throughout the region that really nobody that was outside the region was going to have a chance of getting that implemented anytime soon. And so in some ways it almost wasn't worth it to somebody else to try to do that.

I don't think that that's limited to e-commerce. I think it's limited to anything that has a lot of complexity. that value chain. The only thing I would add to that is that the example you gave was India and software and the language differences do matter. So a lot of our social media transports very easily to India because of the English language there where it's probably not as successful in Brazil. But I agree about the complexity of these supply chains being a key variable.

Okay. Well, given the topic that we're on about local and regional advantage, I am curious about what you guys think about an argument that Mark makes and that he actually made in an op-ed in Politico last year about entrepreneurs and regions being able to use a sort of regulatory arbitrage to their advantage to help attract innovation and become leaders in like a particular technical area. So for example, like with the UK embracing Bitcoin and being more thoughtful about fintech, is it, you know, as a way for them to be more likely to get an early advantage there? Or Canada, moving faster on drones regulation.

and so on. Not only do I agree with him, I think there's actually a physical manifestation also, which is that this is the most mobile generation in history. And when I say mobile in this case, I don't mean phones or smart devices. I mean, they will move to where talent is. And this in a way brings us back to the conversation of whether Silicon Valley or whatever. I think one of the things that we didn't quite touch on about Silicon Valley here, and it's odd to me that people often don't focus about it, which is just simply the network effect of talent

that's there, that the more better, the more the excellent people are there, the more excellent people want to be there. And so what I'm finding, for example, this is going to be very interesting to watch in the Middle East is that if you go to Dubai now, as compared to three years ago, I see Egyptians everywhere, I see Lebanese everywhere, I see Jordanians everywhere, because those things have been a little bit rougher in other parts of the country, and because, in fact, the environment has opened up, the rule of law, some of the top-down stuff, has opened up. people are saying this is a place where I want to be.

And so not only will they be attracted by the opportunity to do things like Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, blockchain things, but they'll also want to go to a place which simply they can succeed physically as entrepreneurs. And I think that's a very interesting thesis to look at it as an arbitraris as you suggested. Yeah, the mobility is real. It's staggering. Mike, I have a 22-year-old who has lived both in China and India. I mean, I grew up in a time when, you know, I lived in Hong Kong for two years, and I never called home because it was so expensive.

So we are mobile, not just on mobile devices, but we move everywhere. Everything can move now. Okay, well, that's all we have time for. I wish we could keep the conversation going. But thank you very much, Anna, Brad, and Christopher. I really appreciate your time. And thanks for joining the A6 and Z podcast.