Why I Travel
Three Things #197: November 30, 2025
Travel has been another regular theme here. This is unsurprising, given how much I travel. And I really outdid myself this year: I flew more miles this year than ever before, which is saying something given how much I’ve always traveled. I’ll be taking at least a few months off major travel, so I’ve been reflecting on it a lot lately: why I do it, what I get from it, how much I’ll miss it while staying put, etc.
I realized that, while I’ve discussed the “how” of travel quite a bit (e.g. here, and here), I’ve never touched upon the “why.” Here’s three reasons why I travel the way I do.
Thing #1: Childhood 🧸
If you want to understand an ingrained behavior pattern, examining your childhood is usually a good place to start.
Recently, a friend asked me why I travel so much. I was initially tempted to give the easy, stock answers: “For work,” “Because I like to and because I can,” “Why don’t you travel more?” etc. Upon reflecting on the question a bit further, I realized that there’s a deeper reason rooted in my formative years.
First of all, I grew up pretty lonely and isolated on a farm in a small town in New Jersey. My family was quite poor growing up and we didn’t have the means to travel at all. A trip to visit my dad in New York City was a big deal, and I remember how we saved for years to be able to afford a single trip to Disney World.
My saving grace was the Internet. I like to say that I came of age with the Internet: my home life was lonely, isolated, and pretty boring, but I discovered online communities and began making online friends from a pretty young age. By high school, despite never having left the country, I had friends in several places around the world. This is especially remarkable given that this was the nineties, and the Internet was much less developed than it is today: there was no social media and no real chat apps. Even blogging wasn’t a thing yet. (It was mostly email, early web forums, and gaming, plus some nascent chat apps like ICQ and AIM.)
So, I was lonely and isolated, but I also knew what I was missing because real life friends in faraway places told me so. That’s a potent combination. The “world out there” existed as more than just an abstract, distant concept in books and movies (Eiffel Towers, Taj Mahals and the like). As far back as I can remember, it existed as real, interesting, flesh and blood people with a lot to offer: different languages, cultures, foods, ways of seeing the world, etc. Tourist attractions have never been that alluring to me; people, on the other hand, are extremely alluring.
I had no means to travel when I was young, until suddenly I did. I found myself far from home, in university, and working on campus meant that I had some spare cash for the first time in my life. I was surrounded by classmates from faraway places, and by a lot of other people who had traveled, and loved to travel, and who wanted to show me their hometowns.
That’s when I really began to travel. I visited a bunch of places in the country that I’d never been before: Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago. I visited the usual spots in Europe for the first time: the UK, France, Switzerland, Germany. The seed had been planted, and I never grew tired of exploring: visiting new places, meeting new people, trying new foods and being exposed to new languages and cultures. The travel bug had bitten me and I’d never recover.
Later, I studied abroad three times, including a full year spent in Japan, during which I began to explore other exotic Asian countries. I traveled alone, and with friends, across multiple developing countries. I ranged farther and farther from home, eventually visiting some extremely remote places like Tibet, Nepal, and northern India.
When it came time to graduate, I applied for jobs abroad. I eventually moved abroad again to Hong Kong for work. The rest is history. I haven’t stopped traveling since. Today, I work in a global role in a global industry, which isn’t without challenges (more on this in a moment), but I thrive in this sort of environment and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Thing #2: Extremes 🚧
I’m quite an extreme person. I like pushing things to the boundaries, to understand what’s possible and what I’m capable of. There are many examples of how I’ve done this in my life: from running, to dating (when I was younger I’d see how many dates I could go on in a single day), to diet (I experimented with being vegan, I did a year with zero added sugar, I tried cutting caffeine, and now I’m trying to maximize protein), to, yes, travel.
As far back as I can remember I’ve been this way. Why? Probably because I’ve always been good at many things. In general success has come pretty easily. It took some time to understand this pattern of behavior but I think it’s caused me to manufacture challenge for myself.
What does this mean? Studying, and immersing myself in foreign languages, is a good example. I had zero exposure growing up to non-European languages or cultures including Japanese and Chinese but immersed myself in them starting in college. If reading a book or giving a presentation in English wasn’t already hard enough, why not try doing it in a language radically different from your own? Then there’s fitness: I’ve written many times here about the physical challenges I’ve given myself, such as in running and strength training. A darker side here is social: when I was younger I once went out late every night for two months, just to see if I could do it, and if it would have a negative impact on my work. (I could, and it did.)
Travel follows the same pattern. I was fully nomadic for several years, never staying in one place for more than a few weeks. I consider this behavior extreme and unusual, and I see the enormous negative impact that I had on my health and productivity, but it’s been largely normalized in my industry, which in my opinion isn’t okay. It took a pandemic to get me to slow down, travel less, get married, start a family, and start putting down roots in one place. Today, I’m much happier for all of that.
I also tried maintaining a life in multiple, distant places at the same time. During the four years I lived and worked in Hong Kong, I also spent a lot of time in both Japan and New York. I had close friends in all three places and, briefly, romantic partners in multiple places. This was fun, but I realized after a while that you can’t meaningfully have a life in multiple places at the same time. I’m tempted today to divide my time among places including East Asia, Oceania, and North America, because I can and because I deeply love each of these places. But I know from prior experience that this is a mistake. Everyone needs a true home base.
Since then the amount I’ve traveled has varied over time. There have been periods of time when I traveled intensely, mostly because I was relatively unattached, or unhappy, especially at work. Travel slowed a bit when I became a parent, but picked up again recently for a few reasons. My team, and my community, are very global so there’s almost always a reason to visit someone, somewhere, or to attend an event (see next section). My in laws have been more involved in helping raise my son lately, which has given me more freedom to travel this year. We have another child on the way, which means this is also my last opportunity to travel for a while. And I’ve also just gotten very good at travel: at booking good flights and hotels, at being reasonably healthy while on the road, etc. In some ways travel has become gamified: how many points can I rack up, how many miles can I fly, and how effective can I be while constantly on the road? When I arrive on the other side of the planet, how many hours or days does it take me to get back to full and complete health and productivity?
However, the cycle has repeated itself, as it inevitably does when taking things to extremes. Despite whatever story I might’ve been telling myself, travel has begun to have a negative impact on my work, my health, and on family life, too. I’ve struggled to keep up with some basic work tasks while constantly on the road, constantly jet lagged or distracted with in person events, etc. The fact that I’m several weeks behind posting here shows that, regardless of what I tell myself or whatever brave face I wear, in fact I’m not very effective when traveling constantly. I’m healthier while on the road now than I ever have been before, but I still always struggle to eat healthy, to find time to work out, etc. while traveling.
With respect to family, all things considered I’ve done a pretty good job of being present in my son’s life thus far, but I don’t want to be an absentee father, even one who regularly appears and disappears. It’s hard on me, my son, and my wife every time I disappear.
It’s not all negative. There really are advantages to all of this travel. There are social and professional benefits to having an extremely global network. There are benefits not only to me, but to my team, and to the entire organization: being able to make introductions and connections, staying on top of trends in other places and other communities, etc. That’s what makes this so hard: it’s so easy to construct a plausible story to myself for why I need to keep traveling. But those benefits don’t outweigh the disadvantages.
It’s time to restore balance, to find the right amount of travel going forward, one that’s healthier and more sustainable, personally and professionally. This, too, is a form of challenge and it’s one that I’m excited about. I moved abroad with my family six months ago and I think I’m finally ready to stay in one place for a while and adopt a healthy, sustainable work, health, and personal routine. I’m finally ready to invest in relationships closer to home. And focused work time is more important now than ever before, given that I’m in my professional prime and that it won’t last forever. I understand this.
I look forward to sharing more here in the future about what is and isn’t working.
Thing #3: Community 🌍
Those are the more personal, abstract reasons why I travel. There are also practical reasons, of course.
The crypto industry is inherently global. There are local pockets of people and projects in places like New York and Lisbon, but my team and my community are spread out around the world. 80% of our work can be done asynchronously, but the remaining 20% that requires synchronicity is a huge challenge.
Partly this is simply about coordination. There are certain kinds of tasks that really just require higher bandwidth: getting the team together on a call or, ideally, face to face in a room. Product ideation and design are great examples of this. Once the design is locked in and everyone knows their role, a functional team can make great progress remotely and asynchronously, but this isn’t true early in the product or team lifecycle, when big questions remain.
But synchronicity is needed even more in order to build trust. In relative terms it’s easier to do this on a call than asynchronously, via text, but in absolute terms this also doesn’t work very well. Call me old fashioned, but I believe that the only thing that works well for building trust is meeting face to face, and spending time together as humans. Note that unstructured down time, after work hours, is at least as important here as the working hours. One of my favorite quotes is “Progress moves at the speed of trust” (Stephen Covey), which is why it’s so critical to build trust the old fashioned way.
This is true for the team, but it’s also true for the broader community. We’re just not built to trust text on a screen, or social media avatars. By contrast, there’s a great deal of social signal that can only be conveyed face to face. If we want people to care about us and what we’re working on—in other words, if we want to do sales effectively—we have to meet people where they’re at, both literally and figuratively. Since our community is global, this necessarily involves some degree of travel.
Conferences are a controversial topic in crypto. On the one hand, there are way too many of them, in too many different places, and most are quite low quality. They’re one of the very few things that have found product market fit in the industry. They tend to be extremely repetitive: the same small group of people sitting on stage in various permutations of talks and panels repeating the same tired talking points over and over. In my experience, listening to podcasts and watching recordings of talks at home is a far more effective way of learning.
It’s extraordinarily easy to “surf the conference circuit” and travel from event to event to event for weeks or even months at a stretch. During this time, you may never go home—you may be nomadic and not have a home at all—and you may get basically nothing done other than meeting people. I’ve been guilty of this in the past.
On the other hand, conferences are useful for reasons related to what I just outlined. They do allow a certain degree of trust building: for a team attending together, for leaders who share the stage, for investors meeting candidate portfolio companies, etc. They’re most useful for social proof, however.
There’s a lot of noise in our industry. We’re constantly bombarded with new project launches, new token drops, airdrops, shills, and pitches, and after a while all the L2s and all the rollups and all the crypto AI projects start to sound alike. This is inevitable: there are only so many ways to describe a L2 blockchain! The differentiator is the team, but it’s difficult for a team to stand out remotely or virtually. It’s much easier in person.
I attend conferences to reconnect with friends, to meet new people, but also to get a handle on the people and projects that I should pay attention to. I ignore pretty much all digital forms of shilling and advertising, but when I attend an in person event it’s immediately obvious who’s worth paying attention to. It’s difficult to describe exactly why, and exactly what I’m looking for, but it’s a combination of humility, competence, and charisma. That’s a rare and powerful combination and you know it when you see it.
Looked at from the other side, it’s equally important to be the person at these events engaging with the world and explaining why your work matters. Everyone else is also ignoring the online shilling, which for all but the loudest influencers is anyway drowned out in a sea of noise. If you want to be successful, you need to pound the pavement and present your ideas to people in person: face to face, the old fashioned way. Obviously, the whole team shouldn’t be traveling, but there should be designated spokespeople: the founder, biz dev, dev rel, and evangelist types who do this important work.
One big reason for my travel the past few years is that I’ve often found myself in one of these roles, although this is evolving and may be less true in the future. I want to be more focused on building product, and the builder’s focus is inherently the opposite of this sort of work. Both are important, and they’re almost perfectly at odds. That should be the subject of a separate issue!