Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I really thrive off of urban energy, but I also I’m at a point where I want a little more green, a little more quiet, a little more space, and can I get those two things together. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins, and I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Mark, what’s the air quality like in Seattle right now?

00:00:33 - Speaker 2: It’s much improved. We got hit really bad by that smoke, but we got some proper Seattle rains, and now it’s really clean out here.

00:00:40 - Speaker 1: I love the uh smell of the air after a good rain, and I can only imagine how different it must be in the wake of the wildfire smoke. Our colleague Julia found it a little funny because actually in the demo video that’s on our website that you recorded, there’s some content related to Seattle and there’s actually a whole board about natural disaster risk and wildfires explicitly called out there, and I think it’s pretty low, mostly in the Pacific Northwest, I assume because it’s raining or whatever, but apparently not in that calculation is what happens if wildfires hundreds of miles away happen and then the smoke drifts.

00:01:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. The immediate area here is safe cause it’s very wet, so it’s hard to catch fire, but we definitely can get smoke as we were reminded the past few weeks.

00:01:23 - Speaker 1: So our topic today is leaving San Francisco, and we both have a personal story on this.

You moved to Seattle a few years back, leaving the Bay Area, and I moved to Berlin 7 years ago now, after 7 years in San Francisco.

And there’s a little in the zeitgeist in the discussion here, the pandemic has led a lot more companies to remote work, and in turn has made people who work for those companies have more sort of flexibility where they can work from wildfires are probably a piece of that as well, but in general, I feel like I’ve seen in my Social networks and colleagues, people considering leaving the Bay Area or in some cases they’ve done so. There’s a great article by Kevin Lana who speaks about that, that I’ll link in the show notes. And we’ve also got tech companies like Stripe and Zapier being willing to essentially pay you to move someplace cheaper, which is sort of interesting. But the topic here isn’t to debate the merits of the Bay Area, but I thought it would be really interesting to reflect on not just our personal stories, but how you make a decision like this. Because it feels like an unprecedented social shift in some ways, which is most people, and me included, most of my early life, I went to where I needed to go for school, you know, university, where can I get a good education that will have me, and then later on to pursue employment. And I didn’t make any kind of calculus of where do I want to live. I made the calculus of where can I get the best job for myself, and then that naturally dictated where I was going to live. And it’s something I feel like I’m seeing a lot of lately. I had a bunch of conversations with folks where people are going through the same process that I went through some years back when I embraced remote work, maybe you did as well, which is to realize that you have the opportunity, the privilege to just pick where you want to live and have that be based on some criteria that’s not coupled to your employment. But also realizing maybe the weight of that responsibility or it’s not the right way to put it, maybe that it’s a great opportunity, but how do you decide if you can do more or less anywhere in the world or within some time zone band, what criteria do you use? Where do you even start? So that’s why I thought it would be an interesting topic for us today. So Mark, I know you moved to the Bay Area, kind of at the start of your professional career. That’s when we got the chance to work together and I think for you it was like me, an incredible opportunity to build your early career and then just a couple of years back, you moved to Seattle. I’d love to hear a little bit of that story.

00:03:51 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so I moved to San Francisco originally. It was 10 or 11 years ago, I think. And at the time, I knew I wanted to be in startups and San Francisco was basically the place that you went for that.

Another possible option would have been New York City, but it was definitely second place as compared to San Francisco, and actually at the time, San Francisco was much cheaper than New York. Jokes kind of on me there eventually, but that was a factor at the time.

And yeah, I was there for maybe 7 or 8 years or something like that. And an incredible experience, you know, learned a lot, met a lot of interesting people, including obviously you, but a couple years ago, I was ready for something different and moved up to Seattle after a bit of a process thinking about that.

00:04:29 - Speaker 1: Yes, so I had a similar story. I moved to the Bay Area in 2007 because our company got into Y Combinator, and yeah, accessing the networks there, certainly the venture capital, but also just the wider world of tech was absolutely fantastic for our business and for my career.

But then when I set down my work with that venture 6 years later, I found myself a little more flexibility. I realized that some of the day to day life there wasn’t quite what I wanted, and that led me to starting to think about where to go next and went through kind of a pretty detailed process by which I made the somewhat surprising decision to not only relocate from San Francisco, but actually move to another country, but that I think worked out really well for me.

So you mentioned going through a process and I had one of my own as well and I guess this is what I’ve been talking to folks about recently is when you have this capability to choose a place, how do you actually do that? It struck me how that’s similar in a lot of ways to the two-step creative process we’ve talked about in the context of Muse before and we can get on to that a little bit, but I’d be curious just to know even setting aside process criteria, what makes one place or another better for the stage of life that you’re in or what it is that you seek.

00:05:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I had an interesting angle on this. So the original impetus for looking to leave San Francisco was mostly the usual reasons, which I don’t think we need to go into too much here, you know, it’s extremely expensive, it’s overregulated, and so on.

But a more subtle thing that I think is really important is what was happening to my cohort.

So I’m in my early 30s now, and what was happening was all of my friends and peers who are mostly a similar age, were hitting that period. Where they want to start a family, they want to have a bit more space, maybe they have other hobbies, just kind of entering that phase of adulthood, and they were all really hitting a wall in San Francisco. A few people were able to make it work, having one or a few kids, for example, but most people, when they hit that point in their life, they just couldn’t make it work in San Francisco anymore. So they had to leave. Some of them went to the East Bay or the North Bay, but a lot of them just completely left. They went to Texas or To Portland, for example, or to Seattle, where it was possible for them to pursue that phase of their life. So a lot of my peers were basically leaving all around me, which is a problem from a personal perspective, of course. But also, I was starting to sense that the magic of Silicon Valley and of San Francisco was starting to break down. And here’s what I mean. The reason San Francisco has been so special for tech is that you have people who have been there for 5, 10. 15 years who are helping to bring up the next generation, right? You get that mentorship, that experience, that network. And what was happening was the amount of time that people tended to stay in San Francisco, I felt like it was getting less and less to the point where it was starting to knock on that threshold of being there long enough to kind of fully contribute to that cycle. People were jumping out after they’ve been there for 5678 years. And as that amount was coming down, I was feeling like there was a bit of a collapse in the San Francisco magic. And on the flip side of that, I had this intuition that the future is on the internet, right? It’s not going to be limited to one city. We’ve been developing these social technologies for people collaborating and forming communities across physical locations, and it was very nascent at the time, but I figured it’s only gonna get bigger. And so what I want to bet on is that it’s not being tied to one physical place, it’s having a network that actually spans more of an area. So when I was looking for a place, it wasn’t as much finding everyone being in that one city. Like it’s not that everyone who I want to collaborate with and be with is in Seattle. But for me, that’s a very good home base, and it kind of personally is a very good fit for me, and I can talk about that if you’re curious, but also it’s a great jumping off point. It’s in the right time zone for collaborating with a lot of people in San Francisco and also the East Coast has an amazing international airport, in my opinion, like basically one of the best you can get. So it’s a good place to start a business. It’s of course, where we’ve HQ use. So that’s kind of how I was thinking about moving from San Francisco to Seattle.

00:08:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, when I was thinking about or you know, enumerate a little bit, maybe my criteria for or what I discovered was my criteria for a place I like to live, but I was thinking more in terms of greenery and transportation and architecture. But here you’re talking about networks, which obviously is much as people I think like a lot of the history and architecture and nature in San Francisco and rightly so, the networks is obviously the real reason or is the big reason, the overshadowing reason for someone that’s in technology. I note that the places that we both chose. I wanted actually to be, if anything, in less a completely saturated place where I love being around these people that are in the same field as me and being connected to that, and that was very powerful at first, but then at some point I started to feel saturation where I can never get away from it. Totally. I was, you know, going to a coffee shop, every single conversation you overhear is about someone’s funding around, driving down the, what’s the main freeway there, every single billboard is a recruiting thing for some tech company and I’m not saying that’s good or bad, it’s just for me, what’s right is I want a mix. I want to be around some people who are in the same field and share this passion with me about computers and technology and the internet, but I also want to be around a diversity of people, young people, people, kids, people that do other kinds of work, artistic people, people in different professions. So trying to find a mix of those in Berlin was a good one. I feel like in 2014, there were some really fun up and coming. Companies and even now has a small but vibrant startup scene so I can be around people to do that stuff. There’s some great co-working spaces and companies I can connect with and all that sort of thing, but it’s not everything, it’s not everywhere. And I feel like Seattle has something similar. There’s obviously the legacy of both Microsoft nearby and then Amazon in the city and other smaller companies. So there’s plenty of tech around. It’s just not the defining characteristic of the city.

00:10:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. That was definitely a factor for me. And to be clear, there was a whole series of kind of personal factors on why I chose Seattle as this home base instead of, for example, Austin, Texas. And yeah, one of them was getting this better balance between being plugged into the community but not being overwhelmed by it. I actually like Seattle in that respect because Well, first of all, I think people underestimate how big of a tech hub Seattle is. You know, two of the three biggest tech companies in America are based in Seattle, not the Bay Area, for example. Also, it is really the hub of like cloud back end services, even maybe enterprise, it’s very strong in those areas, games, whereas San Francisco is more. Startup and consumer focused, I would say. And the Seattle flavor is more of my expertise. So that was a good fit. And yeah, I did want to be in a place where I still had 1 ft in the world so I could go down to downtown Seattle and talk to people about tech stuff and you know, even have that option career-wise in the future, but not be so overwhelmed with it as you are in San Francisco.

Also, I would say, I was betting that Seattle was just going to keep riding that curve up while San Francisco struggled. You know, it’s really hard for people to build an office in San Francisco and expand it somewhat notoriously. The Bay Area recently had this proposal to like, basically ban commuting for most of your Employees for large employers, it’s really wild. I’ll link it in the show notes. But on the flip side, the offices in Seattle are just growing big time. I was really impressed with how quickly Stripe, for example, was able to stand up a really solid and thriving office here in Seattle. And so I just figured there’s going to be more tech in the future here.

00:11:51 - Speaker 1: And you’re quite good at or quite connected to, let’s say local governance and being aware of and evaluating how well a city or state government is making an environment for infrastructure projects and certainly businesses, which is something I quite like and respect.

Because I think there’s a tendency to focus on national politics and election horse races, and those things are important, but many times, especially for something like your business, it’s actually the local level stuff that probably matters a lot more. It’s like a little less dramatic and a little more long term important in some ways. So I’d be curious to hear, I know you’ve looked in quite a bit in Seattle, maybe done some of that in San Francisco around things like ease of starting a business, tax rates, that sort of thing. And again, this comes back to this making a decision about where you’re going to live, if you’re someone who’s an entrepreneur or an investor or a mix of those or a freelancer, which is that it may actually be not just, hey, I like. This place because the schools are good or I like the public transit, or I like the sports team, but actually may have impact for your work life if you’re more of a solopreneur, freelancer, entrepreneur type person. So it is both a professional and a personal decision.

00:13:06 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that local and state politics are a really big deal. Maybe this is an American thing, but at least here in the US it’s really important. I think people underestimate that. I certainly fell into that bucket when I first moved to San Francisco. I didn’t really understand any of the California or San Francisco stuff when I got there. So for example, somewhat to my embarrassment, I was not aware of the rent control laws in San Francisco, which is a huge deal. And I kind of lucked out and ended up being fine, but I think understanding those dynamics is really important.

You know, it’s funny, this was actually one of the things that really pushed me over the edge on San Francisco. I was getting more interested and involved in local governance, especially around land use and housing and transportation and taxation. And the more I understood what was going on there, the more alarmed and dismayed I felt about.

Situation. And it also seemed like it was quite structural, like it’s not something that was just a little bit more organizing and a little bit more democracy, you know, you can push through and fix this thing.

It’s very deeply structural in California and San Francisco. And I just didn’t see it getting fixed anytime soon.

Whereas on the flip side, I was looking into the governance of other cities and states around the US. I think Seattle actually does relatively well and Washington State compared. to the other big coastal piers. So if you look at, for example, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Boston, Washington, DC, Chicago, I would put in that bucket. They’re all to varying degrees troubled, but I think Seattle and Washington is probably the best run of all of those cities. And so that was nice for me. And also there’s good structural reasons why Seattle and Washington are going to be, I think in much better position than those others.

00:14:39 - Speaker 1: And I wonder what effect this greater freedom and flexibility for so many knowledge workers will have in the longer term on city governments, and I’ve come to think a bit of government generally, but especially local government as maybe there’s just my bias because I’m a product guy.

A city is a product of sorts. It’s a very all around you, all encompassing product, but nevertheless, it offers a series of things and.

Requires a series of things as a citizen, and I wonder how much people, I guess it’s already the case that cities competed for or do compete for employers.

For example, you saw this when Amazon was considering their second headquarters and they essentially put out like an RFC to cities around the United States and said, you know, make us a good offer, and I think that boils down to some pitch that mostly in the end is tax breaks or something, but if individuals again these People who have a little more agency now in their own careers and they’re deciding, I wonder how that will change if governments, city governments are thinking in terms of how to attract these sorts of people and provide them a good product, essentially a lovely city to live and work in. I don’t know how that will change things, but for me, that helps the mindset you’re describing, which is not thinking of as well, the government’s just given, it’s a natural monopoly.

I don’t know, either complaining it doesn’t work well or Satisfied or whatever it is, but treating it as an unmovable force versus, well, actually I can choose. I can go here, I can go there, different cities are governed in different ways and some of those produced places that I find more amenable to living a good life, to running a business, and so I want to go give my business, so to speak, or give my citizenship or my residence to a place that is doing a good job at making a good home for its residents.

00:16:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it’s going to be very interesting to watch this reshuffle play out over the next few decades. I do think it’s going to be challenging for some cities who see their tax bases realize they’re less captive perhaps than they were in the past. And I think for a lot of it’s going to be a huge boon because people have the flexibility to move there and take advantage of the quality of life and other benefits. So I think it’ll be interesting for sure.

00:16:44 - Speaker 1: Well, maybe now we can talk about the process element here.

You mentioned that and I have one of my own.

This is the Muse tie in to me, which is, I think of one of the key purposes or one of the reasons this product exists or why I’m motivated to be pushing it forward is that I think of making decisions as a thing we could all use help with, making thoughtful decisions.

I often think of the Muse mission as being to help individuals and maybe someday even the society as a whole to be more thoughtful.

We live in this age of hot takes and the next outrage wave and sometimes it seems like we just lack space for contemplation and of course one version of that is, you know, build a log cabin and disconnect, but I don’t think that’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater kind of thing and this is a place where I think There’s potential for it to help and something like deciding where you’re going to live and work, if you have that flexibility is a great example of this really deep important decision that involves both facts and research, but also just a lot of thinking and a lot of reflection on what’s important to you or what factors are in your life.

So I’m curious when you were in the position of considering moving and considering options, what did that process look like for you?

00:17:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, there were a few angles. A big one for me is just spending a lot of time in the actual cities. So for several years before I ended up moving, I actually had a habit of spending time visiting different cities, often long weekends or working remotely from a week for different cities in the US and around the world. And I’ve always found that you get very different energies, just being in different cities, being on the street. I always feel very different depending on where I am.

And the only way you can know is to go there and do the actual. So I Did some more of that with cities that I was thinking about more seriously, including Seattle.

Come here during different times of the season, which by the way, is something people always warn you about in Seattle. You know, you visit in the summer, people like, oh, this is amazing. Why isn’t everyone move here and like, wait, you gotta, you got to experience the winter before you make any rash decisions. So I was sure to do that. And also, you know, see different neighborhoods, see the city at different times of day, early in the morning, at night, things like that. So that was a big bucket.

Another bucket was, frankly, it’s a fair amount of reading. Again, to me, the governance situation is quite important. So I did a lot of reading about the politics and the land use situation and transportation and taxes and business law and all that stuff in some different municipalities, and also researching some basic stuff like the weather, for example, and seeing how that’s going to line up with how I feel about where I want to live.

So, it’s kind of a mix of the more analytical, explicit, studying the situation and the more emotional, just dive in and see how it feels and then ultimately get to intuit a decision from there.

00:19:19 - Speaker 1: How many places did you seriously consider, particularly when you talk about the reading and research side. It’s one thing to go visit a friend for a weekend and just be like, oh, the city’s nice. Maybe I wouldn’t mind living here, but it’s a whole other thing to think, you know, I’m going to really consider this as a serious place to live and what would my life look like and let me do some deep research on it.

00:19:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so honestly, there weren’t a ton of candidates because I did want to live in a global city with an international airport and a reasonable population.

And even if you include other westernized countries in addition to the US, there’s not a ton of cities that fit that bill. Actually, another thing that was pretty much a hard criteria for me was walkability. So especially in the US that limits you to a pretty small. Set of cities.

So in my kind of first round of consideration, I did have maybe a large handful of cities in the US in the bucket, including Seattle, New York, Chicago, and then a few others internationally, Berlin and Tokyo were two big ones for me.

But actually it pretty quickly got narrowed down to Seattle and Berlin, and I ended up spending a fair amount of time in both those cities and thinking about it pretty hard. How about you, Adam? Did you just dial in on Berlin right away, or is that more of a winding process?

00:20:28 - Speaker 1: Definitely more of a winding process, yeah, similar to you both more focused research, but also, yeah, the visits. I often would use, I don’t know if maybe this was on the tail end of my experience. I was still getting invited to speak at professional conferences or yeah, just would have a friend to visit or something like that.

And if I had an opportunity like that in a city that I was interested in, I would be more likely to go and do it and then I would purposely plan extra days to just, yeah, go feel the vibe of the city, go to a coffee shop, try to not go hit the top tourist attractions on TripAdvisor because that’s not what your life’s gonna be like when you live there, but see this is a place where knowing someone that lives there versus landing in the natural tourist districts is helpful, but just try to absorb that urban character. And this is something I love about cities. I’m very much a city boy and I love that they each have this personality that seems stronger and bigger. than even in the national character. People say Berlin’s not Germany, for example, which is absolutely true, but it’s the same thing. Yeah, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, these places all have a very different character, not only than the United States generally, but even in their immediate surrounding state. And I love that and trying to go and get to know whatever that character is, is a fun part of travel.

00:21:43 - Speaker 2: It’s funny that you mentioned going to coffee shops. People often ask me, Mark, what do you do when you go to these cities? And I’m like, uh, I uh go to the coffee shop and uh walk around the neighborhood and I don’t know, maybe go grocery shopping. It always feels weird to them, I think that you would go halfway around the world and do this very mundane stuff, but the grocery store. But for me, that’s like that’s the vibe. That’s what you’re looking at and that’s what’s in some ways, that’s just daily life. So it’s the most interesting thing.

00:22:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, coffee shops, libraries, another one I like to do. And then I’ll also just look for big public parks or if there’s a dock or a waterfront or some space like. That it kind of open public spaces where people naturally walk or cycle or walk the dogs or just hang out with their friends. A really good way to get a feel for what the people who live there are like, right, because that’s a lot of the energy. When we talk about the energy, often what we’re picking up on is that vibe from the people. What are the kinds of people that are here and how do they behave when they’re out in public.

00:22:37 - Speaker 2: Yeah, speaking of vibe, one interesting thing for me about Seattle is I had this sort of 2 by 2 quadrant that corresponds to the geography of the US.

So in California, I think of it as being informal and kind of cowboy, and in the Northwest, I think of it as being informal but professional.

And in the Northeast, I think of being Being formal and professional. So in the Northeast, you have like the bankers in suits, and in Northwest, you have the really elite systems programmers, but they wear like t-shirts. And in California, you have sort of people wearing flip flops, right? And for me, actually, that upper left quadrant, the Washington State Quadrant was a good vibe for me.

But it’s kind of hard to figure that out until you spend some time in the place.

00:23:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so for me, I did some visits again both in the states but also internationally. Another thing I did quite a bit of was just talking to people, to people that I knew had either lived in one place or another for a long period of time and would have thoughts on it, as well as just asking them, even just asking well traveled people where they thought I would be interested in. I at one point I ended up I think with the 4th ranked list of five places and Berlin made it to the top there based on often the conversation I would have is saying something along the lines of not just what did you like, but what do you think I would like.

That question often had people answering Berlin, which they turned out. You write about. So yeah, there was very much that kind of open ended process and yeah, the cities did include some places in the states like Boston and Austin, Texas, but also I was really interested in this living abroad experience.

And so yeah, Berlin, Amsterdam, Cape Town, Tokyo were all under consideration.

One of the things I like to do, and these days I didn’t have Muse, of course, so I would use just kind of my paper sketchbook and Dropbox, I think it’s kind of my collection point, but I would take a few notes or my Google Maps, I would kind of star places that I thought were interesting and then photos was really big for me. I would just snap photos and of course you can snap photos when you’re traveling and those are memories of the.

But for me, it’s a very evocative way to remember that vibe of the city. What was it that I liked or didn’t like about this place and putting all those together and then I have a pretty distinct memory actually of scribbling in a sketchbook one morning when I was actually visiting Denver, which is another place I was thinking about just because I’ve had some friends move there and having this feeling of looking at all this together, kind of looking through the photos and some notes and Writing in my sketchbook and kind of an emerging for me that, you know, I really think I want to try one of these European cities.

And that was basically a surprising result for me. I would not have thought that before, but I feel like that is the benefit that can emerge from a more not systematic process exactly, but it’s not based on going to one place after another, and then at one point you feel good enough, you think I’ll do this. Kind of being able to zoom out a little bit and look at all of it together if that makes sense and having these reminders which include your notes and your photos and so forth. And you know, when I describe it that way, of course, that experience and others like it are exactly what I wanted Muse for. I wanted a digital tool that was built around that exact process versus this weird hodgepodge. So I wonder what it would be like considering a new place to live with Muse in my toolkit.

00:25:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, interesting. Now, when you came to this realization about the European cities, were you able to back out the reason for that? Like the factors that unconsciously had come to that decision for you?

00:26:00 - Speaker 1: Absolutely. Well, there was a lot of the collect all the raw data, which is largely making visits, but also, as you said, some reading and also talking to people.

But then having this sense of, OK, I like these three cities but not these two. And there was also some sense of coming back to my home in San Francisco and Seeing the ways that San Francisco wasn’t meeting my needs.

You mentioned walkability, that’s a big one for me. I walk to think, to get fresh air, to just move around and exercise, and at least where I was living at the time, just was not a very walkable place, not a lot of green, not very pedestrian friendly.

I don’t want to slam on San Francisco. It’s just that I had the comparison of being in some of these other places, particularly these European cities, which tend to be amazing for walkability and they have cycle paths and public transit is good and lots of trees and Berlin in particular, you know, San Francisco is very constrained by being on this little peninsula and so there’s kind of a not quite a space limitation, but things are tight and I know that ties together with the governance and all these sort of things and that low amount of space, I think contributes to this.

Everything’s packed in and it’s always a little too small and there’s never quite enough space to walk by something in Berlin by comparison is this big giant flat Northern European city where there’s essentially all this space. Sidewalks are very wide and it feels much more open and comfort.

And maybe what I’m describing, a lot of people go to the suburbs for that, especially once they have kids for that exact reason, they want more space, but I wanted the density and the vibes of the city. I just wanted to see if I could do that while being a little more comfortable when I took a walk.

And so visiting a number of cities, which included again, some in the states but also particularly stood out in Europe, trying to look at that and say, OK, what’s the pattern here and even looking at photos of them side by side and just reflecting on my experiences and realizing that, yeah, the walkability, the greenery, and it’s not just parks, it’s not just that I want to go to a park, but it’s the amount of green and plants and things that are on each street, it’s the history and architecture.

Yeah, of course, it’s things like, is there a good coffee there and bohemian vibe and some other stuff like that. So I saw some patterns, and there’s some things that are specific to places like, for example, Berlin has this music culture.

I was a music creator earlier in my life, and being around that feels good to me even though I’m not involved in sort of music stuff anymore. So that’s kind of unique to Berlin, but then I also saw these patterns across and again it’s something I think would be hard to get if you didn’t look at them in relatively short succession and then from there I could back out.

Now I feel like I could actually make a pretty good list of abstract criteria. Here’s the things that I would want out of a city or a place to live, and that’s visible to me now because of that sort of data gathering and reflection process.

00:28:44 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so looking at the examples gives you the criteria instead of always insisting on going the other direction of starting with the criteria and applying them to the examples.

00:28:52 - Speaker 1: Exactly. I feel like I use this a lot in my work.

A good example here is user research. So I really like the exercise of, OK, we’re going to start to work on a new area of the business or a new area of the product. Let’s go and collect everything everyone’s ever said to us in support tickets and Twitter and whatever. Let’s also go look through our user interview notes, but maybe do some new user interviews and get everything that’s related to one particular thing.

I don’t know what, you know, reading long PDFs or something like that, get a bunch of quotes all together in one place that that pulling out the specifics of that and seeing it all together, that’s where the patterns emerge from. That’s sort of like key technique in my general toolkit.

00:29:32 - Speaker 2: So you did end up eventually deciding on Berlin and Germany, which is a big change from the states. Was that a hurdle for you to get over?

00:29:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, a huge one. There’s been some incredible benefits to, first of all, just the experience of living abroad and experiencing a culture and a nation that’s different from my own, as well as specifically the ways that Berlin really fits my vibe and makes my day to day life a happy one, but it comes with huge costs.

For sure going any new place, you have to learn new stuff, you have to adapt to the culture and even figure out, I don’t know, I remember when I moved to Los Angeles many, many years ago. I spent several years just struggling with trying to understand the freeway system and the intensity of the traffic, just trying to get around the city was just this really difficult thing. And eventually I figured it out. I figured out the rhythms and I mastered it and I was comfortable. Then I moved to San Francisco and it was a whole new story because things are very different there in terms of how you get around the city.

So there’s always some element of that. But going to a new country where there’s just different cultures, business happening in another language is always a challenge, but then German for whatever reason. Ends up being a particularly challenging one for a lot of native English speakers. Yeah, it comes as being an immigrant is a, it’s like a tax on your life and everything you do, certainly trying to start a business, but even something as simple as opening a bank account. I was turned down by several banks because they don’t really like doing business with the Americans because the US tax authority, the IRS requires certain reporting from foreign banks that it’s just sort of not worth their while to take on American customers. So the list is pretty long and it’s ongoing, even though I’m pretty settled and adapted now, having been here 7 years, basically not a week goes by that there isn’t something that would be much, much easier to get done in my home country. And I’m aware of that and that’s time and energy and money that takes away from things I could be doing otherwise. The fact that that cost is worth it to me tells you how much, I don’t know, what’s the word for it. I’m just living a happy life, and it feeds my creative soul, and I’ve found a sense of home and a sense of a nest that maybe I hadn’t had in other places I lived. So, in the end it’s worth it, but it comes with a big, big cost. So, certainly moving within your own country is a much safer bet if you’re not prepared to bear that cost.

00:31:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I ended up on the other side of that equation. In terms of the city life of Berlin and the vitality of the city, it’s probably my favorite city in the world.

Just being in the physical environment, it’s so energizing.

There’s so many interesting people. There’s all kinds of different families, amazing businesses and art and history. It’s just an incredible place to be, but I couldn’t get over moving. From the US to Germany, it didn’t make sense for me. I was trying to reflect back like you were saying, like kind of trying to pull out why that was. And I think for me, I really value understanding where I’m living, and not just the language, but the history, the political environment, the legal environment. That’s all a big deal to me. And I had spent, you know, several decades learning that stuff, and I really valued that security here in the US. I was feeling actually, in retrospect, really bullish on the US. I know that’s not a popular sentiment now, perhaps, but I was surprised to see that, you know, I came in with this very global flexibility, could live wherever I want, maybe I’ll move to New Zealand, who knows. But in the end, it was like, actually, I’m willing to bet on the US and that’s where I want to spend the next years of my life.

00:32:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll second that the United States remains one of the best places in the world to live. It’s certainly a great place to work and start a business, and I feel incredibly lucky that that’s where I was born. And in fact, one of the reasons I was motivated to go have the experience of living abroad is I met so many people living first in Los Angeles and later San Francisco who are immigrants that came from other places, sometimes very far away. I had so much respect for what they went through to transplant their whole lives, to come pursue the opportunities and the lifestyle that’s afforded to Americans and Californians. But because I happen to be lucky enough to be born in California and be a Californian, I could certainly Just sit back and enjoy the fruits of that serendipitous occurrence, but I felt like I wanted to have the experience of living in another place. And it certainly has given me new appreciation. Being an immigrant just gives you a whole new perspective on nations and cultures because you’re outside of As programmers like to say there’s 1 and there’s N, so most people only have ever really seen the inside of one nation and one culture. Once you’ve seen two, now you can see the, call them pros and cons, but even more than that, you just see the variations, you see the ways that human nature is pretty constant across all these cultural differences, but you also see things that are maybe more accidents of history or fallout of particular geography or history that a culture evolved in.

So yeah, it’s a really mind expanding experience, but certainly I am and continue to be thankful that I was lucky to be born in a time and place that is really, frankly, a great place to be.

So another interesting factor of this decoupling of where people live from their sort of work and school life is that when it comes time to incorporate a business, now you have also a similar decision. So for example, in our case, we had 3 founding partners and they were all essentially located in different places and so basically you just got to pick where one of them is located and that’s where your business is going to be. In our case, that made sense to be Seattle, but you can even take it a step further. Other than that, for example, it’s been for a pretty long time. I think most San Francisco tech companies are incorporated in Delaware. I don’t have exact numbers there, but I’d be willing to wager it’s in the 80 to 90% range.

00:35:13 - Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it might even be higher. And to be clear, we are a Delaware corporation, you know, we’re incorporated there, and our HQ is in Seattle. It was kind of funny because you basically have to pick an HQ and, you know, we don’t have an office and I guess we’ll pick Seattle because it needs to be somewhere and Mark lives there and that’s where the lawyers are sure.

00:35:32 - Speaker 1: We did the same thing for I and Switch, which was again, distributed founding team. We just arbitrarily picked Miami because that’s where my colleague Ryan lived, so, yeah.

Some are taking it even a step further.

You’ve got services like Stripe Atlas or Firstpace is a company I just recently invested in, where they actually take this a step further and say, OK, you can be anywhere in the world, most anywhere in the world, and in corporated company in the United States, and it’s really more of a shopping for a jurisdiction, a legal jurisdiction, a legal home for your legal entity, which again takes that uh Whole another step that fits into this globalization story, but all of these mechanisms I feel like were created for, yeah, I live in any town USA and I want to open a restaurant on Main Street, so of course, what do I do? I incorporated the local jurisdiction because that’s just what makes sense. And now in this global internet connected world, the both people and the companies kind of can choose their home based on, I don’t know, more expansive criteria. But what do you think about the whole, yeah, stripe Atlas kind of phenomenon?

00:36:42 - Speaker 2: Well, I think first of all, anything that makes it easier to start a business and gives the opportunity to more people is awesome.

I think entrepreneurship is such a powerful force in our society, and I think a lot of people are limited by just the practical things of it costs money and time and expertise to know how to start a business, especially before these two things existed, and they’ve made it much easier.

So that’s huge.

I’m also pretty bullish on this idea of having more flexibility in jurisdictions. I do think there’s a lot of benefits to that. There’s the long running example of being able to incorporate in Delaware, and just gives a lot of practical benefits for people to have familiarity and confidence in their jurisdiction and There’s some sense of competition, dynamism among the different jurisdictions to be a good home for businesses. So I think that’s quite good. I do think they’re going to be some big challenges. I think one is going to be the tax situation. I think honestly, that’s going to be a fiasco. I mean, it already is internationally. So the deal there is companies take advantage of being able to move jurisdictions for tax purposes, so they might flow a lot of profits through, I’m not an expert in this, but like, you know, Ireland or something, and it’s basically totally artificial.

00:37:46 - Speaker 1: As I say, wasn’t there a big court case with Apple over that a lot of their profits flow through Ireland and so the way they were paying taxes, maybe to the at least American authorities felt like they were not doing their fair share.

00:37:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s kind of one of many examples of what’s going on here where historically you had businesses where the business, the physical plant, the employers, the customers, transactions, they were all in the same place. Like if you have a mom and pop shop that they’re all in the same place, for example. And so it’s kind of obvious what to do.

But if you have a business where you’re incorporated in one place, your headquarters in another place, your employees are in different place, your customers are in different place, the transactions. Nominally somewhere else, the servers are somewhere else, your lawyers are somewhere else, who gets that tax money? And it’s not an obvious question. And there’s a lot of wrangling over that right now. And by the way, it might actually get even worse this coming year because everyone’s going to have to do their taxes with everyone working from home. And you know, is your income in where you used to work, or is it in where you spent 7 months or yeah, it’s going to be a mess. But I’m confident eventually we’ll be able to figure this out.

00:38:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s one of these problems that society needs to tackle and find a way that’s fair and comprehensible and navigable to everyone. I think of something like the Amazon sales tax issue, which I think took many years to sort out, but essentially collecting sales tax once. commerce largely moves online. You buy and sell stuff in the cloud and then where does sales tax get charged?

00:39:11 - Speaker 2: I’m smiling here on the podcast because while the sales tax situation is better, it’s still not fully figured out as we recently realized with news, we’re getting there.

00:39:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. And then when you have small businesses that should be focused on survival, they’re trying to, you know, in our case, try an innovative new product and see if people will pay for it, and we have a small team and we don’t want to be caught up in tax law jurisdiction stuff that’s just going to drain energy and time and everything else away from just making a good product and pleasing our customers.

But at the same time, yeah, it’s often not clear. I have a personal story on that, which was funny. I living this immigrant lifestyle is I often mystify my working with tax advisors or attorneys or other things like that. For example, a state planning, you know, I pay into both the American Social Security system but also the German pension system, and there’s all sorts of weird ways that those interact.

Many cases, there’s international treaties that govern that kind of stuff, you know, is a driver’s license from this place accepted over here, or can you Diverted or if so, how? So yeah, things get thorny and then my partner, my life partner is from yet another country and then we’re living in this, so you’ve got two people from different countries who are living together in a third country and they want to do things like I don’t know, a joint bank account or purchase a home together or something like that. Yeah, things get confusing fast, even hiring experts, attorneys and advisors and other things, they’re often just mystified or You know, who’s going to be an expert in either 2 or certainly all three of these jurisdictions and sometimes it’s just not even clear. One good example for that is because I do so much work for companies where I earn equity rather than cash or some mix of cash and equity, which is of course really, really standard in the startup world, but I have earned equity from companies over the course of many, many years, have a portfolio on that that I’ve built up over. Time and of course it takes a long time to pay out. Most of it’s never worth anything, but some of it eventually is worth something. And I recently had a company I did work for back in 2010 went to IPO, so I made some good money from that and that was nice, but I’ll tell you what, trying to figure out the tax situation as it relates to Germany is quite interesting because there you go, OK, well, I worked for a company, you know, almost 10 years ago at the time, almost 10 years ago, in a country. The company was in the United States. I was in the United States. I had never even been to Germany at that point. I had no work visa or anything. That’s when I did the work and I earned the equity then and of course it wasn’t worth very much then, basically, effectively worth 0. And then here I am, but now I’m here in Germany, I have a work permit and I I should be paying taxes on my earnings. The work was actually done previously and honestly, no one really knows. It’s just a legal gray area and you end up in this position where you have to try to figure out, obviously I want to pay what’s fair to all of these nations who are involved in it, the United States that was hosting me and the company and at the time as well as to my new adopted home, but it’s in many cases people don’t know what’s fair and then you’re trying to figure that out as you go along.

00:42:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the tax stuff is quite a rabbit hole for sure.

00:42:15 - Speaker 1: Well, maybe we can end on, if you were to give advice or give you at least your thoughts on how someone could or should approach thinking about where they want to live, if they have that flexibility in 2020 in this new Zoom centric world that we live in, what tips would you offer them?

00:42:33 - Speaker 2: Hm. I think I’d go back to a sort of personal motto of mine, which is to be honest with yourself, and this means really understanding what motivates you and drives you. So whatever your process is, try to dial into what is in fact really important to you and where you live. And I think it’s being open to the possibility that that is not obvious, that’s maybe a little bit alarming to you, that it’s not what your friends expected or think should be the case, but really being true to what you actually want and need, and then going forward from there. What about you, Adam?

00:43:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that.

I’ll add on to it that I think when I’ve been in the position of offering this perspective to someone, I’ve compared it to dating, which is you can have some idea in your mind of who your ideal partner is just like you can have an idea of what your ideal home is, but in many cases you don’t know until you see it because you don’t really know what the variables are, what the options are, and sometimes a place or a person just has some special combination of. Elements, some chemistry with you that never would have predicted just from the on paper analysis. So I think that’s for being a little open, maybe trying to cut free of what is expected from you by your culture, your friends, your family, and being open to seeing what place you vibe with and then doing that reflection and trying to understand for me, a lot of the reflection. was realizing, you know, I thought maybe I was in a place in my life where I want to be a little bit out of the hustle and bustle of the city, the big bad city with all its crime and dirt and intensity. That’s a young person’s game. But I actually found when I looked at the different options, now, I really thrive off of urban energy, but I also at a point where I want a little more green, a little more quiet, a little more space, and can I get those two things together. In fact, you can. There’s a huge amount of diversity in cities in the world, and if you’re open to absorbing and seeing what your experiences are in terms of this place feels good to me. I feel at home or I feel comfortable here and the self reflection on understanding what that means for you in terms of understanding what you value, but maybe also stage of life. Maybe you have an image of yourself in the mind that I’m a young dynamic person and I want to be in. Some young dynamic oriented place like Manhattan, but maybe in fact, that’s not really what you want. Maybe you wanted it when you were younger and you don’t want it now or the other way around. So I think being very open but also self-reflective is the key.

00:44:56 - Speaker 2: Right on.

00:44:57 - Speaker 1: If any of our listeners out there have feedback, maybe a little about your own journey in thinking about where you want to live and work, then reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or by email, hello at museapp.com. We always love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes. And Mark, thanks for holding down Muse World Headquarters there in Seattle for us. You bet. Thanks, Adam. See you next time.