The Best Place to Build Might Not Be the Best Place for You
Founders hear the same advice all the time. Move to where the action is. Usually that means San Francisco or New York. Sometimes London or Stockholm.
The advice is mostly right. Being near talent and money matters, and so does the luck of running into the right people. But I think belonging gets way less weight than it should.
By belonging I mean whether you can build a life somewhere that keeps you going.
I was born in Trinidad and Tobago. I moved to the US at 16, Spain at 23 and Sweden at 30. I’ve been in the south of Sweden for a few years now, lately in Malmö. Every move opened doors. And every move made me work out who I was all over again.
Who am I in this place?
John Berry, a psychologist, spent decades studying acculturation. That’s what happens when you grow up in one culture and then live in another. His work comes down to two questions.
- Do I hold on to my original culture?
- Do I take part in the new one?
Your answers put you in one of four broad strategies.
Real life is messier than four boxes, obviously. What I find useful is how often these questions come up day to day. In friendships and dating as much as at work.
It’s also easy to underestimate how tiring it is to keep translating yourself. You don’t notice until it’s built up.
When I was building, I worried a lot about whether we were in the right ecosystem. But one of the hardest parts wasn’t access.
For me, it was the isolation.
Very few people understood the life I was living. I had one investor who’d also moved and built a life in the Nordics. We talked startups, but we could also talk about identity and loneliness. I didn’t realize then how much it helped to have someone who got it.
People usually talk about resilience like it’s something you find on your own. Grit. But some of mine came from other people. Sometimes just one person who didn’t need the whole backstory.
The older I get, the more I think belonging is what lets you keep going.
Adversity and discomfort are good for you and push you forward. But productive discomfort and chronic disconnection are different things. You have to be honest with yourself about which one you’re in.
It gets harder with age too. At 23 it’s easy to chase opportunity. Later you start thinking about a partner, kids, how settled you want to be.
So when someone tells you to move to a specific city, I’d ask myself who I’ll become there. Not just whether the opportunity is there. For me it comes down to three questions.
- Can I build relationships there?
- Can I take part without erasing where I came from?
- Will this place give me enough energy to build the life and the company I want?
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Written by Kyle Rowley
Founder, operator, former pro basketball player. I write about revenue, building things and sports.
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