This week's episode was meant to be about Vietnam and the many pros and cons therein, but something more important came up. For the first time since embarking on the entrepreneurial mission, I felt a flash of insight around who really needs help at a global scale and why. This isn't meant to come across as some sort of prophetic experience, instead I wanted to write about it in a way that I could hopefully come back to so that this type of insight becomes a repeatable and predictable event. And just to be clear, the insight itself isn't revolutionary, but I'm more interested in reproducing the feeling that it came from. Like that moment after joining a new company where you really begin to understand where the inefficiencies are and what could be done to solve them, only this time out in the open global market. Lets get into it...
If you've been following along for a while, you'll be familiar with a concept my cryptography professor taught me which was having a 'creative moment', that is the moment when solving a problem where you begin to see a solution. These moments are created when you are at the edge of your understanding but you encounter some new information or take a new approach which then led to a deeper understanding of the problem and a possible solution. So what does this have to do with building a business?
As we know, the central mission of a business is to help someone, and to then monetize that help. But, as humans, everyone needs (wants) help with basically everything, but there are a few common themes. The main theme at the global scale is money. Everyone wants to have more money, or wants to spend less money. This is particularly true in the context of currency arbitrage, where workers paid in e.g. US Dollars but live and spend in places with a very favourable conversions like Vietnam (the Dong) or Malaysia (the Ringgit).
The problem is; although people are willing and able to work for foreign (Western) companies, there are a number of logistical, operational, and legal challenges to employing people in these locations. For example, an overseas company employing you if not set up properly can be exposed to tax liabilities, strict employee rights/terms (which are a good thing), and legal issues to name a few. This is on top of management and cultural concerns, languages, time zone issues, and that type of thing, but I wanted to focus on the lowest level of first making true international employment 'possible'.
The current best practice for multinational corporations is to use a local corporate entity (e.g. a subsidiary or staffing company) which will then employ the local person. This means that this separate corporate entity is responsible for all of the tax, legal, and other things whilst the 'main' corporation is offshore somewhere. This is all well and good, but it only really works if it's worth it for the multinational, with setups for this type of thing running into the hundreds of thousands or more (per year) depending on the scale. It also means that such companies have to really want specific talent in a specific country for it to be worth it, as otherwise simply paying to relocate people is the better option. Quick note: I know there are services which wrap up international employment in a palatable way for corporations, but they are still prohibitively expensive given salaries in most high-arbitrage regions (>$500/month/employee which represents a significant chunk of a salary).
The insight here is that the current global situation leaves a hefty slice of the population whose careers and roles are not so profitable that multinationals would relocate or set up local offices for them, but they still stand to dramatically improve their quality of life if such remote positions became available and accessible. For example, there is a shortage of [insert profession here] in [country], but this is really just a shortage of people eligible to work in that profession with respect to the laws and limitations in both the overseas and their home country and not a global shortage (although that can happen too). And the stakes here are high. Companies in [country] stand to benefit massively both by solving their labour shortages and enjoying the other side of the currency arbitrage (e.g. a British company hiring a developer in India for example could pay the market rate for India +30%, so the company wins and the employee wins).
So, what's the business? Doesn't this whole episode just describe Upwork and Fiverr? Sort of, but they and similar platforms lean more towards freelancing than long term (and therefore stable) employment, which is I think what most people seek. If there was for example a simple site with a list of very granular and repeatable tasks which people needed (e.g. send emails, create accounts, etc), a bit like microworkers.com, but with higher budgets and better descriptions, and with engagements over a longer period of time, then that could be really powerful. For example; 'we need someone to triage customer support emails' or 'we need someone to proof-read daily articles for our website'. Even more powerful would be if this was wrapped in a decentralised smart contract, so that it was immune to censorship and verifiably fair, but to avoid sounding like a drooling libertarian I won't elaborate on possible architectures here.
So, I'm not sure that my description has fully captured the feeling of 'I can see something is wrong and I can see that there are a few ways it could be fixed', but I wanted to share since it's the first time this has happened and I think it's a sign that I'm on the right path. That or I'm severely dehydrated in this heat and my lukewarm philosophical musings don't actually mean anything, but there is hope either way.
I'm not going to act on this idea yet since I don't know enough about international tax and employment law to reliably assuage foreign enforcement agencies. But that's not the point, the feeling that this idea came from is the main event. I need to continue learning about new parts of the world and what people are doing, and then pair that against my existing technical knowledge so that I have more of these 'something is wrong' feelings.
I also wanted to quickly mention that in the previous episode I had considered dipping my toes back into the world of academic research with a specific focus on behavioural tracking tech in the gambling space. After this week of clicking around, reading up on where the industry and the research has gone in the years I've been away, I have to say it's a bit of a mess. Cryptocurrency casinos have fragmented into a million different platforms and centralised operators continue to push products they know have no societal benefit to desperate audiences, but now with even more enhanced capabilities to completely capture attention and funds, taking more lessons from the world of social media and advances in applied psychology. On top of that I don't think I would be happy in 10 years if I had made my fortune anywhere near the gambling industry, even on the player safety side of the equation, so it was a romantic idea of going full circle back to my research roots but I think one that will remain just that. My advice would just be don't gamble.
That's it for this week. A much more interesting one (I hope) than the shorter ones which came before, and also a strong end to what has been a pretty chaotic but exciting year. By the time you read this it may already be 2026, in which case I hope the human alliance is winning against the robot empire, but if it hasn't happened yet I hope you had a great 2025 and continue to follow along as I figure out what to do in 2026.
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
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