Heart and Seoul
I recently attended the Fosterbridge conference in Seoul, South Korea - and managed to sandwich it into the middle of a prior business trip I had planned to the UAE… which was immediately after this year’s jolly over to Helsinki for Slush 2024, where I shared an AirBnB with 4 of the most exceptional founders the UK has.
What I expected to be a pretty run of the mill business trip, however, transformed into a wild fortnight.
I saw numerous product launches and met tons of amazing people, as always, at Slush. Every time I go, I come away with dozens of opportunities that turn into either revenue, friends for life or stories for the campfire. This year, I found myself rounding off the trip with a gin-fuelled rave with Cascada on stage and thousands of techbros and techgals partying like it was 2007 again.
I managed to be in the centre of Seoul during the short lived period of martial law brought in by now impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol. My jetlagged (and slightly hungover, due to copious amounts of karaoke with my new friends in Itaewon) body was not as prepared for the attack helicopters, tanks and armed soldiers as all those years of playing Call of Duty led me to believe. I made the decision to ride out the 4 hours of chaos in the casino - pocketing myself a cool £40 in doing so.
My flight back to Manchester from Abu Dhabi was extremely turbulent, eventually missing multiple landing attempts due to the extreme winds brought by Storm Darragh. After spending 4 hours sat at the far end of Frankfurt airport following a diversion and waiting for new crew, I finally touched the concrete in Manchester some 17 hours after departing the UAE. It’s the first - and probably/hopefully the only - time I have ever been glad to see Manchester airport.
Other non-business highlights included racing high performance vehicles through the desert, hanging out with some migrant workers ‘off the tourist trail’ and discovering a bottomless biryani restaurant, crashing some kind of themed night (still not sure what the actual theme was) at a nightclub where it was ONE POUND PER DRINK and then subsequently getting chased out of said nightclub for repeatedly politely declining the company of a group of ladies of the night who turned hostile after my persistent rejections.
The business highlights? Well, there were too many to count - and many bear such fresh intelligence and insight that I wouldn’t give them away freely here. My eyes have been truly opened to some non-traditional tech-related asset classes for investment, though - and where the opportunity is in developing those assets. Most of all, I befriended an awesome group of people who, aside from being exceptional investors, are just truly lovely people - the type you feel compelled to spend more time with because they make you grow.
Returning to the gloom of the UK after a couple of weeks away was tough. Being in places where things are visibly, demonstrably working better - and then coming home just really highlighted how all of the negativity we are enduring is a choice - and we can choose to stop it.
