Newsletter 58: on moving to Singapore 🇸🇬
Optimize for growth over quality of life
Welcome to another edition of the Struggle.
The Struggle is a bi-weekly newsletter where I share my thoughts and learnings from running a startup in Southeast Asia.
The first time I moved to a new place was when I was 17 years old. At the time, I lived in Sofia, Bulgaria, and wanted to spend the summer break busting my ass and making as much money as possible.
Back then, rumor had it that the Bulgarian seaside offers great summer jobs. Although I have never lived on my own before, I was stubborn enough to convince my parents, find a few like-minded friends, and move to Sunny Beach for four months to work in the hospitality field.
The second time I moved to a new place was when I was 18.
Since it has always been my dream to study abroad, I started applying to universities abroad early on. Once I got admitted to a university in Denmark, I did my best to save as much money as possible and embark on another journey.
11 years later, the total number of times I have moved to a new place has reached ~19. That’s nearly two times a year, including moving to new homes domestically and a few international relocations.
While I love to travel and immersing myself in foreign cultures, moving 19 times in 11 years was never part of my plan.
But as it often happens in life, there are things that you cannot, and perhaps shall not, predict.
In my experience, sometimes we feel a pull that’s hard to describe. When that happens, all we have to do is trust in our intuition. Doing exactly that has shaped me into who I am today, and in the process, I have reaped the following benefits:
Got comfortable living a minimalistic lifestyle without many material possessions
Increased my degree of tolerance and empathy for cultural differences
It has gotten easier to connect with people from all corners of the world and walks of life
Now, I am on the verge of yet another important move as I am preparing to relocate from Indonesia to Singapore. In turn, I wanted to share a few reflections on my nomadic lifestyle and why I think moving to Singapore is the right decision for this particular period of my life.
Optimize for growth over quality of life
Not too long ago, I was having a conversation with a few uni students who asked for my opinion on making career choices early on.
My answer was that whatever decision you make, there will be tradeoffs. There is no clear path where things work out great at all times.
As it comes to my experience, I spent my life optimizing for growth and embracing any opportunity that came my way, even when I was not particularly prepared. As a result, I often needed to punch above my weight to cope with the demands of each new opportunity.
My thesis is simple if you are not fortunate enough to have the financial means to get into one of the best universities in the world, you need to optimize for growth over quality of life.
Denmark
If you can take on what’s considered common wisdom and get a degree at a great university, I cannot provide much value. I was never well-positioned for such a career path. In fact, in my family, I am the first person to get a degree from a university. Thinking back, the idea of studying abroad must have been insane for my family when I pitched it in early 2008.
My parents could not figure out how I will pay for expenses while studying in Denmark, and even my friends did not take me seriously.
As I somehow managed to make the move and relocated to Denmark, I needed to change my diet to cover my expenses, eating a lot more potatoes than I would have liked. All that while getting several crappy jobs washing dishes and delivering newspapers at 03:00 am, six days a week.
At some point, I had three physically demanding jobs on top of my university classes. The quality of my life was worse than any of my peers who stayed back in Bulgaria, got regular jobs, or enrolled at local universities. I was broke, alone, and struggled speaking English.
While I gave up comfort, I grew faster than ever before, absorbing everything my university and the new environment threw my way.
Seven years later, I obtained a bachelor’s and master’s degree, enrolled in a summer school in China, completed traineeships in Greece and Taiwan, volunteered in several non-profit organizations, and made my first attempts to start a business.
I traded comfort for growth.
Indonesia
As I got comfortable in Denmark and figured how to navigate the local system, a question started playing my mind. Do I want to embrace comfort or grow further?
My internship in Taiwan showed me how big the world is and the opportunities fast-growing markets in Asia have to offer. That’s why when I got the chance to relocate to Southeast Asia by enrolling in an accelerator program, I embraced it.
Moving to Asia felt like I am starting all over again. I did not know many people. The environment was nothing like the well-organized and highly socially supportive Scandinavia.
At some point, I ended up in Jakarta, a city with a population of +10M people (the metropolitan area of Jakarta exceeds 30M). Compare that to my experience in Denmark and Bulgaria, a population of ~5.8M and ~7M, respectively, and you get the picture.
Once again, there were tradeoffs; I gave up on pedestrian zones, green parks, great healthcare, daily cycling, and even clean air.
But in turn, I was exposed to a fast-growing economy, booming tech sector, shortage of talent, and a ton of problems, which correlates to business opportunities.
From well balanced working days, long weekends, and daily cycling in Denmark to what seemed at the time, as a never-ending hustle in Indonesia.
To get my first job in Jakarta, I was given the assignment to test a new business model for a local travel startup and monetize it over six weeks, with Christmas in between. All that in a completely foreign environment.
I got the job and stepped up as the Head of Marketing; the company just raised about $1M at the time. Over time my responsibilities evolved, covering operations and business development.
Looking back, my job was so demanding that I rarely had time for a break, working hard to prove that I am competent enough to handle all those responsibilities at the age of 26 even though I was fresh out of uni.
A year later, I joined Greenhouse, taking a role as the General Manager of our soon-to-be-launched coworking space.
Early on at Greenhouse, I barely had any holidays, and my working week was six to seven days long. There was just so much work to do, from recruiting the team to getting first clients, navigating a highly competitive landscape, fundraising, and ultimately pivoting the business to a B2B Marketplace for professional services. The Greenhouse journey has been an incredibly demanding experience where I needed to learn new skills at every step.
Once again, through all those challenges, I was able to grow like never before. I was forced to learn how to operate a real estate business, B2B sales, and the ins and outs of leading a diverse team across various products (we were ~50 people at our peak).
Singapore
The first time I started considering relocation to Singapore was in early 2020. As we were going through a pivot, bringing together, the management team made a lot of sense. Then COVID happened, and we needed to address a few more urgent issues, postponing my relocation.
Thanks to that, I had a lot of time to reflect on my relocation. Addressing questions like: have I reached a state of comfort? Am I still growing? Should I continue jumping out of my comfort zone?
Now in my early thirties, those questions ring differently and have a lot more weight. I have spent my twenties taking as many risks as possible to learn what I am good at and what I want to do.
By now, I have a pretty good understanding of that. Following all those crazy moves around the world, while chaotic at times, has resulted in a consistent push of self-exploration.
The more I understand myself, the clearer it becomes what moves I will need to make.
For example, while there are many opportunities in Jakarta, I have reached a point where I have a good enough understanding of how to navigate a startup in an emerging market like Indonesia. There is always room to learn more, no doubt about that. But now it’s time to learn how to take Greenhouse to the next level in one of the world’s most progressive tech hubs - Singapore.
In my twenties, I followed the advice of Bill Gurley in a talk he gave at the McCombs School at the University of Texas:
“There’s nothing that’s going to make you be more successful than if you love doing what you’re doing because you’re going to work harder than anybody else because it’s going to feel like work. It’s going to feel like fun. I think this is the most important decision you can possibly make in a career, is to make sure you have immense passion for what you’re doing. This should be your personal passion, not your parents, not your sister’s, not your family generation of expectation. It needs to be something that you’re doing on your own. It might be that your passionate about the same thing as your parents. You don’t have to run from them, but you need to know that this is something you’re doing on your own.”
Discovering what I love doing was my #1 career objective during my twenties. As I am entering my thirties, my priority becomes relocating to the epicenter of my field. Since I love working with technology, Singapore becomes the natural hub for me to go to.
Cities have network effects. Once a place reaches a critical mass of great people in a particular field, it naturally starts attracting many more great people, and the value of the ecosystem grows exponentially. I think that Singapore has reached such a point, and by moving there, I will be able to surround myself with great people in my field.
To wrap it up, I think my choices so far can be boiled down to the following tips:
Early on, optimize for growth over quality of life
Focus on honing your craft constantly
Take as much accountability as possible
Go to the epicenter of your field