Just Move to San Francisco

One founder clears the path for companies entering the US and UK. The other is building personalized cancer vaccines. Their advice to a room of Korean builders was not hedged.

One clears the path for founders entering the US and UK. The other is building personalized cancer vaccines.

Founders need to be near other founders. Salespeople need to be near customers.

The visa is a solvable problem. The harder part is becoming local.

Based on a Bloom event in Seoul during ICML week with Expedite and Serova.

Two very different builders

The pairing was deliberate. One founder works on the infrastructure of moving, helping founders enter the US and UK markets and dealing with the machinery that makes that possible. The other is building one of the harder things a company can attempt, personalized cancer vaccines.

Both were in Seoul during ICML week, in front of a room full of people trying to go global.

Proximity is the argument

The advice was not hedged. If you are serious about the US market, base yourself in San Francisco.

The reasoning splits by role. Founders need to be near other founders, because the information that matters moves through conversation rather than through publication by the time you read it. Salespeople need to be near customers, for the same reason in a different direction.

Everything else, including engineering, can be more distributed. Those two functions degrade sharply with distance.

The visa is the easy part

The immigration question comes up in every conversation like this, and the response reframes it. Visas are a solved problem in the sense that they are a known process with known paths. They are expensive and slow, not mysterious.

The harder part is the unglamorous work of becoming local. Opening a bank account, signing a lease, getting a phone plan. None of it looks like company building, and all of it determines whether you can actually operate.

The underlying point is that a global mindset is not exotic. It is recognizing that the person across the table is a person, with a problem, and that solving their problem works the same way it does anywhere.

Where the hard problems still are

The biotech side added a useful counterweight to software pessimism. If you believe the remaining opportunity in productivity software is thin, biology is the opposite case. It is a field where a large majority of the underlying science is still not understood.

Which means the work is not compressing. It is accelerating, with far more territory left than people in software assume.