Prominent venture capitalist says travel is a smart investment
Foreign currencies on a wall. Photo: epSos.de / Flickr
Businesspeople often tout their insane work schedules as a badge of honor, e.g. “We stayed up all night to close that deal!” So it was rare to see this blog post saying that people should travel more instead.
Mark Suster is a tech entrepreneur-turned-venture capitalist. His blog, Both Sides of the Table, is one of the top reads in Silicon Valley. Suster regularly writes about start-ups, entrepreneurship, and angel investing.
In his blog post, Avoid Monoculture. Travel. Read Widely. Let Experience be Your Compass, Suster credits part of his success to his global background. He’s lived in England, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan. All of these experiences informed his decisions in his business career.
Here’s an excerpt:
You’ll see a world like I did – with limited landlines and electricity (India), a world with tiny apartments and thus less room for extra tech equipment & TVs (Japan), where having a sale anytime you want it isn’t legal (Germany), where corporate boards split the role of Chairman and CEO, which is much better corporate governance than the US (the UK) or where a version of the Internet (the Minitel in France) existing long before it became realized globally and we had open standards.
Suster isn’t the only one. Another tech tycoon spent time on a vision quest in India, dropping acid, and becoming a Buddhist. His name was Steve Jobs. He referenced this experience when talking about a rival:
“I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.” [On Bill Gates, The New York Times, Jan. 12, 1997]
Has travel helped you in your career? To provide inspiration or a different perspective? Please share your stories in the comments.
September 2nd, 2011 at 4:38 am
Mine is not a single-story about a particular travel. I’d like to notice that travelling ALWAYS open our eyes, gives you new perspective and standpoints on how we look at the world: different people, gestures, ways of saying, everyday life organizations… all simple things that reveal differences worth to look at.
Travel always pays, always.
September 2nd, 2011 at 2:44 pm
Did Jobs succeed because he went to an ashram and dropped acid, or despite it? Are lessons learned on one astral plane transferable to another?
People who have made vast amounts of money often think they are very smart, even if the manner they made their money and the thing they are smart in do not much overlap.
Travel, intelligently done, is an utterly wonderful experience, more valuable than rubies. Just don’t expect to be able to buy rubies with it when you get back.
And do not overvalue your own experience. You can see so little of a place when you are there, cut off by language and culture and history. Remember all those political pilgrims who visited those communist prison countries and saw only smiling children and happy workers and peasants folk-dancing around their new tractor.
Like everyone else, I like Steve Jobs and have used his products since the glaciers receded, but let us remember that though he had from the beginning far and away the best product on the market, Apple was always #2 to the Great Nerd.
You ought travel for the same reason you read the classics or become an Eagle Scout, to make yourself a more fully-realized person. So that, in life, you will be a person on whom nothing is wasted.
If you get rich: fine. If not, you will still have the treasure brought back from those realms of gold, stored away where rust cannot decay nor thieves break in. You will have what others cannot buy with money.
And if you are of an age when you must justify a trip to your parents, then by all means quote Jobs or Mark Suster or Lemuel Gulliver or whoever it takes to get you there.
If it becomes the accepted wisdom that travel will help make you rich, it will attract the wrong sort of person, and there are enough of them out there tromping around the world as it is.
September 3rd, 2011 at 4:15 am
@Gipsy Girl: I do not think it’s fair, (not to mention totally unthoughtful about the fact that there are maybe young people reading on the Internet what we more or less foolishly gossip about in here, and who may actually take example from what some better known interesting public figures say), to put on the same plane radiation or chemo treatments, which are given truly as necessary almost last stand desperate measures to save lives, with dropping acid, which is not only illegal, but also a foolish thing to choose to do, and is truly extrordinarily harmful to the brain, and can directly cause psychosis, (in some cases even long-term irreversible brain damage).
Sorry about the preachy rant, I tend to do this when I get “triggered” on one of my pet-peeves, this is NOT about Mr. Jobs, to whom I only wish the best, but when it comes to the most precious gift and asset of human beings, the miraculous human brain, there is NO philosophy, not even the habitually very pleasurable Devil’s Advocate game for me, there’s just: “Say NO to drugs !”
When it comes to ethical choices, I would much rather have on any given day a live and HEALTHY less creative or less succesful artist than a DEAD or brain damaged ex-momentarily succeful one.
September 3rd, 2011 at 12:02 pm
This is a tricky one. Before even approaching the question of whether travel could offer a business advantage in later life you need to ask if most travellers learn anything at all. Done properly, travel can give valuable insights into the way the world works outside of your own bubble – how people react to incentives, how they’re similar, how they’re different. It’s just as easy to spend years bumming around the world dropping acid (or, more commonly, downing bucket drinks and hanging out with red-faced alcoholic expats. It’s what you do with it that counts.