a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Software and Overcoming the Randomness of Birthplace
Episode Date: April 30, 2015If your income can flow from any place on the globe, and you can earn your money on the Internet, the question for individuals and startup teams alike increasingly is: where do I go? In the tech indus...try the answer more often than not has been Silicon Valley. For many people and companies that is still true, says Sten Tamkivi, CEO and co-founder of Teleport.org, but it’s not a simple binary answer any more. “It’s more a question of when, and how often do you spend time in Silicon Valley?” he says. And of course, why? Quality, cost, and opportunity, those are the key elements to consider when deciding where in the world you want to be when you are starting a career -- and starting a company. In this segment of the pod, Tamkivi relates his own experience as an executive at Skype, and how he thought about its global workforce and what made it work so well. He also describes what he’s learned from starting his own far-flung company Teleport.org, which is in the business of helping people decide where in the world the best place for their career and company is.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland, and we are here today with Stan Tom Keevi,
who is co-founder and CEO of Teleport.org. Stan, welcome.
Hello.
And Stan was also an EIR here at Andrewson Horowitz for a period, which is where Teleport, I think, was gestated.
Am I correct?
That is true.
Teleport was one of the classic stories of an EIR coming into a VC firm,
not having a clue of what to do, which company to do.
join which one to build all that and uh mere eight or nine months later bam we go out and we
found the company i will say after stan left our uh kind of dress uh and fashion quotient went down
drastically and this is a podcast you can't see him but uh you know one day you will and you'll you'll
see what i mean so stan obviously we're here in silicon valley and there is this sort of bias um
in silicon valley and you know at the firm as well that silicon valley is the center of you of the
universe. And you and your career, you are at Skype. You're from Estonia. You have, but you went to
business school here at Stanford. I mean, you've straddled all these worlds. And you've, you've gotten
pulled in by Silicon Valley. But, you know, you have this great perspective on that. Silicon Valley
is the center of the universe for somebody. It's not for others. Or you can participate in different
ways. And that seems to be what teleports all about. And also what, how the changing nature of work is kind of all
about that too. But let's talk about how you view sort of centers of gravity and how people
should think about their own careers and companies in business. Silicon Valley definitely is a
very special place in the world. Like there is no doubt. If you look at the amazing technology that
has come out of this very tiny speck on the globe over the last 40 years and more recently what
has happened in software and the internet moment and all this consumer internet businesses that
have been born here, like no doubt.
Like, it's a really unique place.
At the same time, it's a place where you have, once you go on this high tide and successes
come along and the IPOs happen and more smart people moving in.
And the Bay Area itself is like 7 million people and a quarter of a million people try to
enter it every year.
Right.
A whole bunch of them again leave because they can't afford to live here or they start a flop or
all that.
So there's this whirlpool of people going.
going around. And in that midst, you see some of the more negative sides start to pop up.
If you look at the things like a US immigration policy, how hard it is to actually get smart
people into this country. Yeah, to stay, yeah. And to stay. And if you look at the cost of real estate,
I was recently talking to an Eastern Europe entrepreneur who just realized that what he's paying
for his San Francisco one bedroom is about his mother's annual salary back home. Like if the cost base goes
to those extent, you just have to ask is that all these benefits of Silicon Valley,
this sort of plentitude of ideas and extremely smart people who have learned how to scale
businesses and build technology that scales to billions of users and all these beautiful,
nice things, like are they actually justifying the costs or the downsides that you have to pay?
So, for example, if you are a unfunded founder with nose valetize and you just land in
SFO with an intent to build a successful business, this is brought.
one of the most extensive places where you can spend your resources just to network a bit
and get to know people because nobody's waiting for you and nobody's going to hand you the seed
investment and bring you the first million users just for the fun of it. Yeah, and yet that happens
all the time. And actually you wrote a piece about, you know, should all, you know, entrepreneurs
pack it up and move to Silicon Valley and I guess maybe the answer is maybe not. Yeah, I think
there are a few sides of the answer to that. First of all, there is no union.
answer. It's a mix and match, and that's one of the key insights behind teleport is that there
are environments in the world, there are places X and Y coordinates in the world, where you have a
particular tax structure, particular cost of living, particular availability of jobs, particular
people that you might want to work with, and so all these positive things. And on the other,
on the other side, it's you as a human or you as a company where you have your particular needs.
Are you looking to extend your runway and save costs? Are you looking to raise money? I are looking to
hire smart people. Do you want to be close to your clients or do you want to be close to your loved
ones? Is there a particular hobby? Maybe you're a snowboarder. Like do you need to be near the
mountain? And so the trick is how do you take those two sides? You take this data about quality
and cost and opportunities around the world and the data or your personal profile of what are
you looking for and match them in an optimal way. So for many people Silicon Valley might be an answer
but it might not be or what my my thesis is that it's not a binary answer anymore.
It's not like should you move to the valley or not.
It's like, okay, you're in software business.
When and how and how often should you spend time in the valley?
And what are the other places where you need to go to?
Right.
What part does the valley occupy in your company?
Is it your development team?
Is it your sales team?
Is it closer to your customers?
Is it something else?
How has that worked out for you at teleport?
And maybe you can also talk a little bit about how that worked out at Skype.
Because I think, you know, for us Americans, there was the sense that Skype was
a company here from the valley, but of course it wasn't. Skype was born out of a Swedish and Danish
founder working with four Estonian founding engineers soon after there was a first American on
the team in Stockholm. And by the time, so it got to like seven people with four nationalities.
And then it was legally headquartered in Luxembourg and then there was a business office
opened in London. And then soon after the engineering expanded to Prague and then there was Hong Kong
and Singapore and Tokyo and all these other offices coming up.
So by the time we got to 200 people,
we had 10 offices across 16 time zones.
Right.
And US, both usage-wise in the very first years,
as well as sort of any physical presence-wise, was minor.
It was like a few pride marketing business development partnership-related people
who were working out of San Jose after eBay acquired us.
So it was an extremely international company,
partially because we're building a product that kind of allowed us to build the kind of company.
Like, oh, well, we have free video calls.
We're just built them.
Why not use them?
But on the other side, I think it really added to the sort of core DNA of the company.
Like if you're really serving an international and global user base, you need to have people close to those users.
This is, I think, a universal advice is that if startup has doubts about where to locate themselves,
is probably closest to the users is not the worst bet.
And so being spread around the globe, I think gave us some perspective
across different cultures and languages and currencies and payment methods
and all these things that you need in order to run the global business.
And it made the organization internally much richer
because we were much more free to hire talent wherever that talent happened to be.
It wasn't about like how can we get all these people move to this one location.
How do you, I mean, you say that you should be close to where your users are.
I think in some cases it's hard to know when you start.
But in the case of teleport, what does that mean for you guys?
At Teleport, we're building software for people to figure out where they should be
and then help them to get there once they know where they should be.
And we've decided that our first user group, the people we are focusing on year one right now
has been startup people like us, the founders and the employees and the tech workers and the knowledge workers.
And why that is the case is that it's this one of the first generations of people in the history who by the nature of the work that they do can do it virtually anywhere.
Like think of this stereotypical 24-year-old coder who can step off an airplane, go to a random coffee shop that has Wi-Fi, open up the computer, and they can continue working on their code and commit them GitHub exactly the same way they did in this last place.
And they probably find a place to stay for the evening or an Airbnb and they get an Uber to go there or a lift.
And like all of those things mean that they are much more free to choose their location than they used to be.
Now, if you think back at their parents and grandparents, what was happening was that most of the economic migration in the world always happened towards jobs.
Like towards places where you could get good, fulfilling work for good pay.
That's the sort of the Californian gold rush.
like people were physically coming to the place
where there's supposed to go to dig it.
And now you can actually have a whole bunch of people
doing the same thing and moving to places
where there are jobs,
but there's this new class of people
who can move elsewhere
because they can continue doing their job.
And this is where the most interesting arbitrage happens
is that while this income bit is becoming loosely tied
or detached from location,
and it's happening on the internet increasingly,
if you look at the cost side,
then it's still very much dependent on your X and Y coordinates on planet Earth.
Right, right.
Like for a normal person who is just doing what they do every day
and not doing a spectacular one-time financial event,
about 70% of their money that they see in the lifetime goes to just two things.
It's primary resonance and taxes.
So if your income is global and you can earn money on the internet
and you can change your location and change your cost base
and change your taxation and change all these other things
underneath, you can actually create this very interesting scenarios
where you can basically travel the world and see it for free, if you want to.
That gets to this sort of idea, and Mark has,
Andreessen has written about this, you know,
that there should be 50 Silicon Valley.
Do you start to see people pool in kind of geographies
because of all these benefits that you just outline?
There are a few things that are happening.
Definitely there are Hobbs.
It's still efficient in some situations or in many situations to be in the same room with people.
Before Oculus kicks in with proper telepresence, it will take some time, but we'll get there.
Meanwhile, it's good to have people in the same place.
So you will have flocking of certain kind of like-minded people near the universities researching a particular area,
near the places where the last successful company is, because some people leave that company and create new companies and so forth.
what I'm violently against is trying to depict us as 50 Silicon Valley's.
I think that's a crucial mistake that many, many governments around the world are doing
is that they're asking the question,
how can we create our own little Silicon Valley here?
And then there is media that often amplifies some innovation success in some part of the world,
saying that this is the new Silicon Valley of X,
Silicon Valley of the East or the West or the North or the mountains or the sea.
If you dig into that, then you realize that as any startup, in order to win the incumbents,
needs to be 10x better than that incumbent.
It's impossible to be another Silicon Valley and be 10x better than the Silicon Valley that already exists.
So I think all these other hubs that undoubtedly are popping up around the world.
And there are the examples of, I don't know, mobile gaming in Finland.
or there is an example of specific kinds of mobile payment related things that can only happen in Africa.
And as these things pop up, they usually do so because if you compare them to Silicon Valley,
they are doing something that Silicon Valley is particularly not good at,
and doing that thing 10x better, as opposed to trying to replicating the model that is working unarguably very well here.
But the other part of the sort of 50 Silicon Valley idea that you're violently
opposed to, is this idea of...
Opposed to labeling, not the concept.
Opposed to labeling, okay.
Is this idea of, you know,
and you mentioned taxes and kind of regulation
and preparing or sort of
prepping an environment that will allow
for, you know, smart people to come
and do things, you know,
drone valley, driverless car, you know,
mountain, that kind of thing.
These are perfect ideas.
I think if you look at the overall picture
of where the innovation and regulation
collide in Silicon Valley and in the U.S. in the broader sense.
Probably that's a good laundry list of places where to focus
for all these other innovation hubs outside.
Like if you wanted to build a company
that operates drones and trades in Bitcoin while doing that
and maybe layer something, I don't know, stem cells into that mix.
It's very unlikely that you should create that company in Montevue.
It's probably a massive opportunity for somebody
would it be in Asia or would it be in certain parts of Europe to say that okay a government
comes in and says that hey here is 10 square kilometers of land and here's the regulatory environment
and hey you can experiment with these things and that's fine and I think that's a that's something
that has been seen in the world before in case of special economic zones which at the time
used to be when they started popping up on the Chinese coast for example then they were all
about containers.
Like if you take a container of physical goods and put it down on this square mile of land,
then different rules apply.
Right.
Now you see in Shanghai, there is one that is fully focused on finances and money already
today is quite virtual.
So if some virtual good moves through this area, then there is a different setup of currency
exchange rules or whatnot.
But you can project that into future and see what are these other things that could influence
set of people or a set of companies to choose one location over another.
So I think the message of teleport, and your personal history is a really sort of optimistic
one and one that, you know, if I'm an entrepreneur who's not sitting in downtown San Francisco
or Palo Alto or something, it's one that I'd love to hear. What do you advise when you're
building that kind of company? I mean, Teleport, you guys are a far-flung international company
with fewer than 10 people right now, is that right?
Yeah, we have nine people full-time plus a number of freelancers.
We're spread around six countries.
It's two people currently here, three in Estonia, one in Switzerland, one in Germany, one in Kiev, Ukraine,
one in turn working out of London, and one of my co-founder of Silver just moved to Medellin from here
and is now hanging out in Galapagos Islands, so coding during the day and swimming with it off in
So that sounds actually great.
But when you build that kind of an organization, what are the advantages and what are the
disadvantages and what do you really need to be mindful of?
And if you're thinking about it in those terms, like, hey, I would love to hang out in the
Galapagos Islands while I'm coding.
How do I go about doing that?
There are a few things.
There are the elements that you have to look at individually.
And then there is the group dynamics of how do you make the team actually work.
On the individual level, it's actually pretty straightforward.
You have to actually have that trigger and think about it.
Are you at the right place?
What are your life goals?
What are the things you want to achieve?
What are the things you want to experience?
And different people have different settings.
Like if you don't have a family,
you have maybe much more spontaneous luxury to move around
than you do when you have kids.
But being a father of free and living in our fourth country right now,
I could argue that this is not a hard limit.
to choosing the location carefully.
So that's that said.
And then it becomes much more interesting and complex
when you're actually trying to make a teamwork.
And now we're a team that started pulling together last June,
so a little less than a year.
We've worked together.
We launched free products with this remote setup.
We've gotten into this nice rhythm of releasing software,
building software, understanding the users
from all these different locations.
So hopefully that has some credibility
towards talking to this topic.
first there is the kind of people that you can hire
there is a certain set of culture this individualism
being an entrepreneur getting stuff done without direct orders
but these things apply to most people who are the ideal target hires for a startup
so I think there is one that is quite easy to take down
people who can self-motivate and do stuff
then the second is a very good very clear
culture and routine around
how does that team communicate.
So there is this framework that is
borrowed from the open source movement.
Mind you, again, like there are a few hundred people
working on Linux core, and
it still ships and releases and works quite
well in the majority of world's web servers.
Right, right.
So products can be built that way, and there is
this framework that is derived from that world,
which is basically free things.
Write liberally, write
a lot and often because
you're submitting written tickets to
each other. You're sitting in group chats or Slack channels and all those places.
You have to document things in a way that is concise because people have to read a lot on
the other side, but it's still very understandable and why not also funny and pleasant to read.
The second point is chat occasionally. So at Teleport, we have a very good rhythm of
this is what our team call looks like because FaceTime across 10 times on hours is expensive.
Like let's minimize that, let's structure it in a very useful way.
Let's schedule it in a way that it works for everyone.
Then there is a schedule of one-to-one FaceTime calls.
As a CEO, we have a sub-10-person company.
I still want to talk to every single person every week.
So we've set up a structure where we have that opportunity.
And even more so, there is this set of meetings that have an open agenda
that everybody can populate by their own.
And then there is, again, like a set of other working groups
or people working on a particular product that are communicating.
And then the last, the third crucial point is congregate,
occasionally.
Yeah, I was going to say, when do you actually get together live and in person?
And that's something which we want to also power with our software.
So it's extremely interesting for us to see ourselves how we behave with that.
So this far, it seemed that we get somebody across the ocean.
Usually to date, it's most of the team, but sometimes it's a subset of the team, every
three or four months.
So somebody is crossing from Europe to US or US to Europe
And in between there is some occasional smaller travel happening
Like people who are based in Europe
Try to get together in a preferable pace
Like spending a week, a month together
In the early days of starting to work together
Starting working together
I think that's a learning that we got from Skype
Is that you can build human relationships face to face
And then you can maintain them over video calls
And when you're booting up a new team
You have to ensure that there is enough
of that face-to-face time happening.
The obvious potential critique for getting the team together often and congregating
is the cost attached to that, that you're not only adding complexity, you're also adding
cost and who funds that.
But in my experience, the competition on tech talent and the top engineers in the world
in Silicon Valley has grown to a point where that if you hire a person outside here,
Like you go to even Portland or Seattle or Vancouver or even London or Tokyo, which used to be this expensive city in the world, like the difference, your people will be still happy and paid on top of the market, but the difference for you as an entrepreneur or funding this entire thing means that there is money left over that you can easily spend on getting these people together every few months. And they will actually maybe enjoy getting out of their home office.
Right. So you can get great talent and you can bring them together on an occasional basis.
That's a recent point.
was Paul Graham wrote a great essay on this topic is that reminding the American public
and the tech scene that if you look at the statistics, if you look at the probability or the
distribution of the top tech talent in the world, it's not probable than more than 5% of the tech
talent is in this corner right now.
And so the question is, how do you get to that 95%?
Paul's argument was that that 95% probably part of that wants to move to Silicon Valley
and should be allowed to do so, which is true, but I would also argue that if you are able
to crack distributed teams and remote work and build cultures of companies that actually can
do that, then there are some examples like automatic with WordPress in hundreds of people
and buffer and this 37 signals and these companies who are like really shown that you can
grow large doing remote work, then you have an opportunity to get to those 95% of people
much faster and enable them a higher quality life or letting them live where they want to live.
You talk about how to work together remotely well and build relationships in person,
then you can take them off, you know, into video chat, say.
You are, you know, we're a Skype veteran back from the early days.
Just could you please tell me a little bit about the etiquette of video chat?
I, you know, sometimes I always, I find that it doesn't work as well as it might.
And it's for reasons of people not engaging in the right way, I feel.
Well, the video chat thing is definitely not cracked yet.
Okay, so it's not just me.
That's all I want to do.
Yeah, it's not just you.
I'm sure there are many people at the early Skype,
but many people in current Skype slash Microsoft
who would agree that there's still a lot to be done there.
There are some things that you can do,
which are pretty simple things.
Like, first of all,
is to not try to save money on equipment.
Like, if your computer doesn't have a good microphone
or doesn't have a good camera,
like get the next one,
get the, even a relatively cheap USB headset will do miracles to the quality of the call.
Then scheduling the calls or having a good rhythm helps.
So it's much harder to do this technically, the calls that have technical friction
or the meetings that have technical friction on a more ad hoc basis.
So it's good to, like if you know that every Tuesday morning you have that call at 8.30
and you know that you're behind the desk and actually you're in that coffee shop that has the good Wi-Fi.
That sort of things help.
There are simple things like positioning yourself in front of the camera.
There are so many people who try to sit in front of the window
so the camera gets all the light behind them and not them.
So these are probably a matter of practice in telling each other
that, hey, dude, I can't see you again.
Yeah, and we should just do it more, I guess.
I remember an editor who shall remain nameless
who would look at a point off into the distance
like I was staring at Jupiter or something the whole time
and I found it so distracting.
But one more thing is interesting.
There is this ambient communication
that still, I think, is a huge field
that will improve and is nowhere near perfect yet.
What you notice is that when there is already
more than one person in any location,
when you grow from this loose atoms
into some molecules of people at different places,
then it's very easy to do
to put two TVs on two sides
and create virtual tunnels
to another location.
Something that you can sort of see other people working
and maybe you can shout out to them
and somebody will walk to the screen and talk to you.
There is one thing that is obstructive to that is time zones.
It's hard to do across long time zones,
but I know many companies inside US, for example,
who are doing it across like one or two hour time zones.
You still have enough overlap to do that.
And then there are startups like Squiggle is one
that is trying to replicate the same experience
on this corner of your screen.
So you have people working behind their notebooks
when they're online.
and they all see each other images and can one click to start a call.
And I think there is a lot of innovation that still happens with this tooling for remote teams.
So you guys obviously build software and that's what you do.
And we talk about the sort of mobility of workers.
Are you seeing this migrate into other industries?
I mean, you know, you talk about knowledge workers and clearly that's an easier place to start.
But is there any reason to think that we can't, you know,
build companies and build organizations and build groups and solve problems that are sort of
outside of coding, say, or maybe coding is a big part of it. But anyway, they're in different
industries. I think there are many people working jobs that require physical presence that are
constantly on the move. I don't know. You can think of people flying airplanes or whose job
is in logistics. But leaving even those aside, I recently heard the case of there is this entire
industry are people working on movies behind the scenes. The guy is doing the lightning and the
costumes and set design and whatnot. And if you're in top of the world in that, and then you're
working with a Hollywood studio who, again, for cost reasons, is going out to a certain filming set
in Eastern Europe and then the next movie happens in New Zealand and you have to be in all these
places two or three months at the time. All of a sudden you have a location issue. Like, okay, where do you
go when? When is your next gig? Like, should you buy tickets now? Should you buy tickets now?
Should you rent a place?
Should you stay?
Like, it's a job that requires a physical presence.
Then there is many,
where, like, technically niche areas.
Like, if you are a specialist in fixing oil platforms or something like that,
then you're constantly traveling.
If your telcos are employing a lot of people who go around the world
and fix certain kinds of data network equipment or something like that.
And the list goes on and on.
So, traveling salesmen, business consultants, like ask a typical McKinsey consultants,
like how many days did they spend at home last year?
Or what even home means, yeah.
Yeah, and that is an extra, how we think about it in teleport is that if you have this slider
where on one side you have the two-day business trip, okay, I need to go to this meeting
in this other city and then I'll come back.
Probably the answer is get the plane ticket that is on sale and stay in the day.
hotel closest to the meaning, period.
And then on the other side, you have this sort of major move that people do, on average in
US, between five and seven years apart.
Like when you graduate university, you move, then you maybe set up a family or you have
kids, or then you have a few moves during your career, and then you retire and you move again.
So that's the other end of the scale.
Every few years you move.
I think there is this uncovered gap on that scale between a two-day business trip and five-year
move where we can help a lot with software like if somebody's going to a business trip for 10 days
in a new city like they shouldn't stay in a hotel i personally hate staying in a hotel for more than a week
so you should already look at okay what's the commute optimal place in bay area for me to stay
should i stay in an Airbnb this time oh actually i want to go running and eat out well where are the
restaurants and running trails and so our first product that we actually built is a bay area
teleport, which you tell us where your work is, and you can optionally tell us where your home
is in Bay Area, if you're already there, and we'll just run the calculation for you, where should
you actually live?
Oh, interesting.
Like, what is the cost and commute optimal place?
And then you have a little slider that you can pull that, okay, 45 minutes a day is too much.
What if I only commute 25, and then you pull it to the other way, and then you realize that maybe
20 minutes of commute might change your annual budget by $25,000.
So people should think about the location more.
You've described how this works for Bay Area, how teleport Bay Area works.
How do you apply that to the rest of the world then?
Is there kind of a slider for the globe?
And also, if I want to get together with people, how do I manage that?
After we built the Bay Area experiment, which really for us was an experiment,
like can we get the cost and quality of life data about the planet in a reasonable way and
can we make it searchable?
Can we build a user experience on top of that that doesn't suck?
So I hope we proved all of those for ourselves and early users with a Bay Area product.
Then we went on and we now, three weeks ago,
we released a mobile app that allows you to search across 100 cities in the world.
So say you're a founder or so you're an engineer and you are looking for what's the best place to build my company.
What's the place where I could find the coolest Python developer job right now?
Where could I lower my cost and have questions like that?
Now you can go and get the teleport for startup cities mobile app.
And we have 100 cities and about 100 layers of data about them.
So, yeah, what kinds of things can I kind of put into my own calculus?
Beyond just this basic cost and income layers, we look at the things like pollution.
We look at the things like, can you get around by public transport, what's the flight connectivity,
what are the places you need to get to?
Is it close enough time zones-wise to your clients?
who else is living there
we're getting increasingly more
into an optimization around groups
on that note
we released another product
just a week ago
which we called teleport flock
which is a really simple tool
based on the data that we're already
collecting for our core products
where we'll just ask you
where are the members of your distributed team
and
with one click we'll calculate
where they should get together.
You know, bosses always want you to come to where they are,
but maybe that's not the most efficient nor the most value-driven.
In this first week, we've had some amazing searches.
Like I had a user tell me that they were a team in six countries in Europe,
and they just had 17 people come together two months ago.
And now he ran a flock query on the same set
and found out that the place where they went intuitively
was 2,000 euros more expensive than the...
the one we recommended, and the cost estimate for the place they actually went to,
we were off by like 200 euros or something like that, on 17 people.
So we calculate the cost of tickets and housing and flight hops and all these things.
So basically it's a task that every office manager in any office with several locations,
any company with several offices, has gone through.
And it means that you open 28 browser tabs and you look at flight schedules and do polling
and voting by email and all that.
So we do that in two seconds, which I think is an interesting.
way how people can get the glimpse of where we're headed with the sort of optimizing groups
to find the optimal location for a short meeting, but the same principles apply even more
when you're making a life decision of going somewhere. Right. So again, it is this slider for the
globe where, okay, I'm going to move someplace, I'm going to start a company, or I just want to have
a two-day meeting with all the people in my company. Exactly. As one of our co-founder's
Balaji, who's a board partner here at the firm, Balaghi was quipping the other day that there are
apps that do, they're location-based apps.
Teleport is kind of like app-based location.
Ah, interesting, interesting. That's very clever. That sounds like
Polygy would say that. I think my final question, though, is how should we think then about
place? You seem to have a much different point of view than, you know, many Americans and
many of us here in Silicon Valley, I think. But what does place mean to you? And then in this
new work world that we all live in, how should we start thinking more about it?
Americans by culture, I would say, are already very mobile.
Like if you look at the numbers, then inside US you have 1.5, 2 million people coming to the US from international, from other countries legally, as some people want to underline.
Then you will have 7 million people moving state to state every year.
And then you have 40 million people changing their own.
address or changing their primary residence. So it's already, like if you think of a 350 million
people pool, that's quite a lot of movement in that. In Europe, which is European Union is like
450 million people, then this sort of movement from state to another is maybe two million a year
instead of US seven. So people are more put. There are more culture barriers. The European unified market
doesn't work as well yet. You still need to get used to other regulations and languages and all
those things, but there's already some millions of people moving. And then, like, you can turn to Asia
and you look at, there are 20 million people a year moving to cities in China alone. So we're probably
being a European rooted software team, we're not the guys to build software for Chinese moving
into a Chinese city, but all these international moves are super interesting for us.
And how we think about placing all that, this liberty to move and this intent to move and to find
the better opportunities and being at the better place is very much tied to this overcoming
this randomness.
Like the place you're born in, my co-founder Silver wrote a great blog post about that,
that if you're born tomorrow, he calculated the probabilities of certain not necessarily
pleasant things happening to you.
How likely it is to be born in a country which happens to be on the communist regime?
Or how likely are you going to be born in a country that has recently had.
an armed conflict with more than 1,000 people dead.
And so if you look at these numbers and overlay all these things,
some of them are behaviors, some religious, some of them are political,
then basically he came to a conclusion that there is 92% chance
that if you're born tomorrow that you might be in an environment that you will not appreciate.
A place you'd rather be out of or something.
So if that's the case, and if you are a talented mathematician
or a coder or a designer or somebody who's dreamed you,
be a great musician and is born randomly in a country where that is not appreciated.
Like, why should you stay there?
I think there's this long history of political and social theory around becoming a global village,
and I think now we're just living technology, making that actually happen, and changing your
place and picking the optimal location, considering location is just the thing that rational people
should do when living in that world.
Well, Stan, thank you so much.
I hope to visit you in another place one of these days soon.
I know you're heading back to Estonia in the summer,
so I think that's where I would be in the summertime
rather than the wintertime, but still...
Thank you, Michael.
All right, bye-bye.