Traveling is an Underrated Superpower

In the past month, I’ve been to San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax. In the coming month, I’ll spend time in Chicago, Columbia (Missouri), London, Edinburgh and then again in both San Francisco and Vancouver.

People I meet often comment that they can’t believe how much I travel. To most, it seems absurd. Unsustainable. Irrational. But to a small number of people, it’s normal. A smile. A knowing nod.

In the world of startups, a willingness to travel is a superpower.

I’m not talking about traveling for fun or personal growth (though I certainly do love that). I’m talking about traveling in support of professional goals.

We live in a world where an increasing number of our interactions occur online. We order on Amazon, Instacart or DoorDash instead of going to the store. We have meetings over Zoom instead of over coffee. We swipe left and right and up and down for hours each day. Increasingly, we prioritize efficiency above all else.

Improving efficiency unquestionably increases productivity in many parts of our lives. It helps us solve the paradox of time, helps us get more done each day and, in theory, unlocks more time for ourselves. But at what cost?

There was a time when if you wanted to sell something, you had no choice but to travel. For centuries, the traveling salesman was a key part of society in one form or another. In fact, one of the most famous problems in computational science is known as the “traveling salesman problem”.

Here’s the thing: showing up in person still matters. In fact, in a world where it costs us virtually nothing to get on a phone call or Zoom, the potential impact of traveling and showing up in person has never been greater.

For the majority of people, traveling — especially by plane — is a stressful affair. Even people who fly regularly often experience anxiety when traveling. For many flyers, the idea of missing a flight or landing only to discover that you’ve forgotten something is nerve-wracking.

Back in 2007, we had signed MySpace as the flagship customer for Aster Data. It was a $1M deal that would change the trajectory of the company — but we had to get the system into production. And that system was the world’s first commercially-deployed 100 TB data warehouse.

We decided that I would take point on the deployment and project manage the work from Aster’s side. MySpace was headquartered in Beverly Hills, while Aster Data was in San Carlos (a small suburb of San Francisco close to the airport). For the first few months, I traveled to LA for 2-3 days every other week. Each time, I would drive to SFO, fly to LAX, rent a car, head to their offices and work for a few days while staying overnight at a (cheap) hotel. I hadn’t done much work travel up until that point, so these trips were exciting. They were adventurous. They were also exhausting.

After awhile, they became routine. And as we got closer to the launch, they became shorter.

Multi-day trips every other week were replaced with daytrips every week. I would drive to SFO in the morning, hop on the first Southwest flight of the day, grab the rental car, head to MySpace, then turn around and be back home in time for bed.

It wasn’t long before my brain stopped thinking about it as travel. I wasn’t flying somewhere exotic. I was simply commuting to a client’s office. It just happened that part of my commute involved an airplane. That simple change of perspective changed everything.

Travel isn’t easy. It’s tiring (especially when you change time zones). It can be unhealthy if you aren’t careful about your eating and exercise habits. And when you have family or other obligations, there are additional complexities and considerations.

But the moment travel stops being stressful, it becomes a super power.

You stop worrying about taking a flight. You stop worrying about missing a flight (after all, there’s always another one).

Before long, you’ve experienced almost everything that can go wrong. And just like other aspects of being a startup founder, you learn to roll with the punches. You expect the unexpected.

More than that, you start to account for travel time in your regular routine. For some people, being on a plane means reading and deep work. For others, it’s mindless movies and downtime. For me, it’s writing (I wrote this post on a plane). As a result, your opportunity cost changes. Travel time is no longer “lost” time. The return-on-investment that comes from travel is much higher, because your cost is much lower.

And that’s how the magic happens. You start going where others won’t. You go when others won’t. While competitors are trying to schedule Zoom calls to close a deal, you’re there in person taking the prospect out for lunch. When new opportunities present themselves, your default answer is yes instead of no.

You are seemingly everywhere, all at once.

Be like Michelle Yeoh

To be clear, this amount of travel is not for everyone. And the opportunity cost calculations very much change depending on the stage of your company and your stage of life.

But if you can mentally get over the hump of “travel is hard”. If you can switch your mindset from “this is intimidating” to “this is easy”. If you can transcend the stress that typically comes with travel, you’ll find yourself with a superpower that few can match.