The a16z Show - a16z Podcast: Software and Overcoming the Randomness of Birthplace

Episode Date: April 30, 2015

If 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 industry 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. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. And we are here today with Sten Tom Keevy, 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

join which one to build, all that. And mere eight or nine months later, bam, we go out and we found the company. I will say after Stan left, our kind of dress and fashion quotient went down drastically. And this is a podcast so you can't see him, but, you know, one day you will and you'll see what I mean. So, Stan, obviously, we're here in Silicon Valley and there is this sort of bias in Silicon Valley. And, you know, at the firm as well, that Silicon Valley is the center of the unit. 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 some, but 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. 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 seven 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 the flopped or all that. So there's this whirlpool of people 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, there's 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 an unfunded founder with nose validize and you just land in SFO with an intent to build a successful business, this is probably one of the most extensive places where you can spend your resources just to network a bit and get to know people because nobody is 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 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 universal 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 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? I 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. 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 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,

you know, is it your development team? Is it your sales team? Is it closer to your customers? Is it, you know, 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 legal. headquartered in Luxembourg and then there was a business office open in London and then soon after

the engineering expanded to Prague and then there was Hong Kong and Singapore and Tokyo and all this other office coming. 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 were 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, it's probably closest to the users is not the worst bet. Right. 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 than commit on 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 Lyft.

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 gold 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 is 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 hubs. 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 that as 50 Silicon Valley's. I think that's a crucial mistake that many, many governments around the world are doing is that they are 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 10 next 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... Opposed to label, okay. Is this idea of, you know,

and you mentioned taxes and kind of regulation and, and preparing or sort of prepping an environment that will allow for, you know, smart people to come in 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 US in the broader sense. Probably that's a good laundry list of places where you focus for all these other innovation hubs outside. 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 or something. 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's 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 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. 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 a 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, free in Estonia, one in Switzerland, one in Germany, one in Kiev, Ukraine,

one intern working out of London, and one of my co-founder, Silver, just moved to Medellin from here, and he's now hanging out in Galapagos Islands. So, coding during the day and swimming with it off and serving the evening. Well, 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. 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 are applied 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 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 the 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 these 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. 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 of 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 today, 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 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 pointer 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 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, and 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, video chat thing is definitely not cracked yet. So, so. 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. the call. Right. 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 a good Wi-Fi or something. That sort of things help. There are simple things like positioning yourself in front of the 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, it 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 go from this loose atoms into some molecules of people at different places, then it's very easy to do it. 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 doing this, trying to replicate the same experience on this corner of your screen. So you have people working behind their notebooks when they're online, 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 this 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 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 rent a place, should you stay. Like, it's a job that requires a physical presence. And 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 consultant, 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 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 the 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 is 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 say 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 to 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 the 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 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. 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 one we recommended. And the one, 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 the. 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 is Balaji, who's a board partner here at the firm, Balagy was quipping the other day that there are apps that do, there are location-based apps. Teleport is kind of like app-based location. Ah, interesting, interesting. That's very clever. That sounds like Polyde 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 address or changing their primary residence. So it's already, like if you think of 350 million people,

pool, that's quite a lot of movement in that. In Europe, which is European Union is like 450, a bit more 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 cultural barriers, the European unified market doesn't work as well yet. You still need to get used to other regulations and languages and all these things, but there is 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 a better opportunity and be at the better place is very much tied to this overcoming this randomness. Like the place you're born in, my co-founder on the silver wrote a great blog post about that, that if you were 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 thousand 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 to be a great musician and is born randomly in a country where that is not appreciated, like why should you stay? 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 your location is just the thing that rational people should do when living in that world. Well, Stan, thank you so much. And 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.