Personal Reflections on 2024

I’m not sure whether this year was fast or slow. Some of it was a blur like in July when I was running to AWS Summits and Community Day events on different continents. Then some periods were slow like April when I remained in the US and mostly stayed at home.

Same goes for travel. It did not seem like I traveled as much this year as in the past. Then I added up all the mileage and it came to 251,978 miles, 248,116 by air and the rest by train or long-distance car rides. I was not on the road as much as I thought though. I was away a total of 190 days (even on my birthday), or 76% of 250 business days in the year.

Being on planes for business means a lot of time in your head thinking. Sure, some of that time was sleeping or watching movies that were too bad to see in the theaters or stream at home. I also managed to do some work, including building the deck for the first public pitch of my startup. Mostly though, I was sitting alone with my thoughts.

That was the case with my last flight of the year from Taipei to New York. One benefit of all the flying is sometimes you get nice perks or recognition, like when I passed one million miles flown on United and got to hang out in the cockpit before takeoff. What was even better about this particular flight though was I had nothing to work on, I was closing out the year on a high note without any near term obligations and could have plenty of time to let my thoughts meander.

2024 was a momentous year. There was the US Presidential election with global impact from the economy to innovation to security. The effects of global warming continued to wreak destruction with severe weather such as Hurricane Helene wrecking the Carolinas in September. AI made significant advances towards rewriting the future while companies retreated backwards with RTO (Return to Office) policies.

For me, this year also had several big changes. I spent January as a digital nomad living in Saigon. I finally made it back to Malaysia in March after a two decade absence. I visited Morocco for the first time in May to speak at Connect Morocco Summit. I spoke at some AWS Summits and my first AWS event in mainland China in July. I returned to South Africa for AfriLabs and Australia to share my insights on emerging startup communities. Along the way, I still kept cranking out newsletters with my 50^th in May and this one being the 80^th .

Those really weren’t the big personal news items in 2024 though. In September, I received the Taiwan Gold Card granting me access to freely live and work in Taiwan for three years. The following month I left AWS after four and a half years as the Global Startup Advocate to launch a startup pursuing my vision for solving the big gap in community building.

As I sat pondering a bunch of random ideas 40,000 feet in the air, these were four things that stood out (among many dumbs things like whether they ever clean airplane seats):

Build a startup anywhere, but some places are better than others

When I announced my intentions to build a startup in Taiwan, everyone asked why? It is reasonable to ask since it would probably make more sense to just do that in the US where I am from and have more access to capital and talent. I boiled down why I chose Taiwan to five reasons: affordability & livability, runway, connectedness, culture, and impact.

My decision was based on a broader evaluation of Taiwan as a place conducive to building a startup as a foreigner. When I received the Gold Card, it made the choice even easier. But this also meant there were places I did not chose based on those same factors from over 30 countries I had visited during my time at AWS representing startups.

Simply put, some countries are not setup for foreigners to succeed in their countries. Many countries are not supportive of startups launched by native-born entrepreneurs either, so it is understandable that doors are not exactly open for immigrants. Some of it boils down to tax burdens, business registration hurdles, weak IP protections, and lack of policies to help startups such as equity ownership and ESOP’s. For foreigners, the hurdles are even higher with baffling visa programs, unhelpful bureaucracy, and foreign ownership restrictions.

While it is not for me or any foreigner to pass judgment on the priorities of other sovereign nations, many of these same countries are promoting themselves as open to highly skilled foreign talent. The same goes for investors that advertise they are investor friendly and actively pursue foreign investments. Many countries could benefit from the infusion of entrepreneurial energy, global business experience, advanced technical skills, and capital that foreigners can bring to their emerging startup ecosystems. This is especially the case for those countries that are experiencing a talent brain drain and lack the skills needed for scaling companies regionally or globally. It is up to the government officials and business leaders in these countries to decide if that is something they want, and then take decisive action to enact startup and investor friendly policies.

Amazon has already fallen into the inevitable Day 2 abyss

Jeff Bezos said something astounding during an employee all-hands meeting in 2018:

This year was the 30^th anniversary of the founding of Amazon. While the world’s largest e-retailer and cloud computing company is still outperforming the markets, the size and scale of the organization is becoming increasingly more challenging to maintain.

In September, a memo from Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, was sent to all employees that announced the start of full time RTO (Return to Office) in the new year. One item that did not get much attention in that memo was the call to reduce the number of managers to remove layers and flatten the organization. He also created a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” for employees to send messages directly to Andy about inefficient processes.

These changes will help in the short term, but the Day 2 rot has already set in. It is a bug of large organizations that have so many interoperable teams and process dependencies that things that would normally take hours or days for a smaller company can drag on for weeks or months in an enterprise. The Amazonian practices also create needless delays such as writing 6-page docs in order to get approval for anything. More time was spent on revisions and meetings for revisions before presenting it to executives.

In writing my first 6-pager for the APJ Startup leadership team, I learned just how broken the doc process had become. After that, I ignored Amazon’s practices and just tried things. The stuff that worked, I wrote a doc detailing the results and impact for the business. I ignored doc revisions or meetings, I simply executed as any entrepreneur would do. Could Amazon allow more “think big” to “deliver results” without the weight of its mechanisms? Yes, but it would also result in a lot of chaos, which large organizations find ways to snuff out. Nothing will happen to Amazon to cause its demise anytime soon, but the pace of real innovation is hitting a wall. Once that happens, it will face a slow, painful decline much like GE, IBM, Intel, HP, and other past great companies have experienced.

AI has radically changed the speed and pace of innovation

When Instagram was bought by Facebook for $1 billion in 2012, the startup only had twelve employees. WhatsApp had 35 employees when they were bought for $18 billion. This was before generative AI came onto the scene, which Sam Altman of Open AI had this to say:

While AI technology is still early in its development and clearly has some issues, the level of productivity that it has unlocked is substantial. I have personally knocked off 50% of the time it takes me to research things on the Internet using Perplexity and writing social media and blogs posts using Claude and ChatGPT. I am now using Cursor to accelerate building the MVP for my startup despite my coding skills being pretty rusty.

The cloud reduced the effort it took to launch a startup by magnitudes of time and cost. It also unleashed a flurry of startup activity beyond Silicon Valley. AI is doing the same, taking the time and cost down by another order of magnitude and reducing the need to hire and manage a big team early on. A solo founder can simply use AI and some online contractors to quickly iterate on MVP’s until one shows promise. While I believe the one person billion dollar company is a pipe dream, the future of tech is less hiring and smaller teams.

Community is the future of engagement and trust

One takeaway from the recent US Presidential election was just how misinformed many voters were of facts about policy and the economy. With everyone getting their news from social media sources like TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook, it has become easier to spread conspiracy theories and outright lies as truth. This is creating vast levels of disillusionment and distrust in the world as people start questioning fundamental pillars of our society.

Disinformation tactics are also working their way into how corporates sell and market to consumers. Paid professional influencers make their living pitching brands and products of dubious quality. Algorithms in social media are programmed for engagement rather than what benefits users. The large tech platforms are using the weight of their ecosystems to game and influence consumers towards their chosen products or bully smaller companies into high fees.

An unfortunate side effect of the rise of AI is that it further accelerates the spread of false information and dishonest tactics. We now have fake reviews written by AI, automated outbound B2B sales campaigns driven completely by AI, and support chatbots that are mostly AI behind the scenes.

People are yearning for trusted information and connections. This is why community as an engagement pillar is growing in interest. Community avoids the trap of influencers and AI bots by being a place where real people gather. Businesses are investing in new strategies like community-led growth to create broader awareness and interest. Doing so allows the community to be a natural extension of marketing and sales without being driven by the company. One challenge however is how notoriously difficult it is to measure effectiveness of communities and the business impact, something that I am now working to solve.

What trends did you notice from 2024? What do you see in 2025 as things we should be watching out for? Please share and hope we can catch up about these in the new year!

MARK BIRCH

I flew one million miles on United and all I got was this lousy coin!

All kidding aside, that is a shit ton of flying. If the average air speed of a commercial airliner is about 500 miles per hour (taking a conversative side of the range), that comes to 2000 hours in the air or just over 83 days. Add in all of the taxi time and delays on the ground, and that easily another 10%, bringing up the total time on planes to 90 days or three months.

That is wild to think about and also a little depressing to spend so much time traveling to all the places I have been to over the years. That does not even include the air travel on other carriers such as ANA, Cathay, Delta, Emirates, Singapore, etc. That is easily another half million miles spent in the air.

What did I learn from all of this traveling? Here are a few thoughts that come to mind:

• Travel lighter than you think should. Reduce your luggage to a carry-on or backpack. You can get anything you need or forget at your destination.

• Never check luggage. Only a few airports are efficient with getting bags distributed. Also the hassle of dealing with lost bags is not worth it.

• Avoid eating and consuming alcohol on a plane. The food is full of garbage ingredients and the alcohol messes with your head worse when in flight.

• Sleep when you get to your destination. If you can sleep on planes great! For everyone else, don’t bother. Better to adjust to time zones by staying up.

• Bring a change of clothes for long haul flights. Changing into comfortable clothes makes the experience more relaxing, especially if you do try to sleep.

• Carry a pair of hotel slippers in your bag. Like comfortable clothes, taking your shoes off and using the free slippers you get at the hotel is way more comfortable.

• Get a pair of noise cancelling headphones. This is a game changer that blocks plane noise, screaming babies, loud passengers, and inflight credit card offers.

• Buy a wireless Bluetooth adapter. Pair with noise cancelling headphones to access the onboard entertainment without the lame airlines provided earphones.

• Read a physical book. While this sounds old school, being on a plane is an ideal time to do a digital detox and escape into a good book.

• Work travel is your time. Your company may be paying, but you are sacrificing your time. Don’t feel pressure to work where you will not be truly productive.

• Collect airline status. The perks may seem minimal, but they save you a lot of time and stress, things like early boarding, free baggage, picking better seats, etc.

• Get credit card points cards. This is mostly for US folks where the credit card offers are insanely good. Playing the points game is worth it for upgrades.

• Never accept a seat change. Some people try to scam or bully passengers to switch seats with a sob story. Ignore them, this is 99% always a bad deal for you.

• Do not argue with flight staff. You will never win that battle. They have all the power. Stay focused but keep positive if you feel you are being screwed over.

• Have airline support numbers in your phone. Delays and cancellations happen. Time is of the essence to have the best chance of booking a better flight option.

What are your best travel tips? Let me know and I can include in the next edition!