What I'm doing / an election abroad
Context for why I'm here, and thoughts on watching the most important election in a generation from 5,000 miles away.
Read the top if you want to learn about why I’m in Istanbul. Scroll down if you want to read about election stuff. Read the whole thing if you’re just a real good friend :)
What I’m doing:
Contrary to what last week’s post implied, I’m not spending every waking moment gallivanting through Istanbul’s curving side streets, pockets overflowing with baklava, two dozen cats in tow. As if these cats would listen to me.
I’m here, ostensibly, to work. A year ago a friend forwarded an application to something called the Alter Global Fellowship Program. I’d never heard of Alter, and truth be told, did not take the time to learn much about it before shooting off my application. Consulting will do that to you, kids.
I was lucky enough to get an interview, then lucky enough to get accepted. At this point, I decided to read a bit more.
Jesse Sullivan and Ozair Ali founded Alter out of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Their goal was to connect founders in emerging tech cities—think Nairobi, Hanoi, or Dhaka—with Silicon Valley venture capital money. For those who hate lingo, venture capital = early stage money for startups. Many new companies aren’t profitable from the get-go but hope to become so long-term. In the meantime, they need money to help them expand and become viable. In general, this is the funding lifecycle of a startup:
Pre-seed (tiny amounts of money from the founder, grandma, and the couch cushions)
Seed (larger amounts of money from a seed, or “angel,” investor)
Series A (even larger amounts of money from larger investors)
Series B (even larger than Series A amounts of money from investors)
Series C (do you get the point yet)
Initial Public Offering, or IPO, when you give us millennials the chance to buy your stock on Robin Hood.
Alter focuses on the fast-follower model, i.e., businesses that mimic a product or service that’s proven elsewhere. Think Uber for Bangladesh, or Stripe for Nigeria, or project management consulting for Afghanistan. Too frequently, Silicon Valley finds itself obsessed with the newest shiny US-based venture at the cost of funneling funds to obvious value-adds in other parts of the world. These fast-follower ventures are not only good financial bets; they’re also the pillars of a sustainable path to economic growth. Economic growth, in turn, is (usually) the key to a more educated and globally equal populace. These outcomes are important because they 1) increase the number of trained minds to handle global problems like climate change, and 2) mitigate the effects of the global birth lottery. There’s the long game. That’s why I’m into Alter’s mission.
I’m working for Shipper, a Jakarta-based supply chain logistics company supported by Alter. I was drawn to Shipper because 1) it’s growing rapidly and 2) I thought it would be fun to think about supply chain logistics on the largest archipelago nation in the world. So far, it’s been a blast—the founders are incredibly sharp, the company is doing a lot of work with Covid relief, and sometimes we play Among Us. In 2021, I may finally put my feet down in Indonesia, but until then, I’ll be getting up before the 6:30 call to prayer here in Istanbul in my best attempt to work Jakarta hours.
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An election abroad
Three weeks ago I was leaning into a fridge at the grocery store, trying to judge yogurt quality by packaging design. I overheard two workers talking. To be clear, my Turkish extends to “hello” (merhaba), “thank you” (teşekkürler), “taxi” (taksi), and “police” (polis)—and those last two feel a little cheap. Despite my lingual disadvantage, though, it was obvious what they were talking about, because it went something like this:
*turkish turkish turkish* Biden *turkish turkish turkish* Trump
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from traveling, it’s that Americans both overestimate and underestimate the importance of their country. Standing there, containers of yogurt in each hand, absentee ballot in the mail, I was again reminded of this fact.
A non-exhaustive list of things Americans (tend to) overestimate:
how generalizable American attitudes and mores are to the rest of the planet,
how fashionable shorts are,
how much a lot of the world likes Americans,
how much a lot of the world hates Americans, and
what being an American abroad “entitles” you to, besides higher prices and potentially not being executed for drug smuggling.
A non-exhaustive list of things Americans (tend to) underestimate:
how much influence American arts (especially cinema and music) enjoy abroad,
to what degree shorts will make them stick out like a freshman wearing a lanyard I swear to God,
the hospitality and trust exhibited in a number of cultures, especially those influenced by Islam,
non-Americans’ natural intelligence and work ethic, especially in poorer countries, and
how closely non-Americans track US politics—especially in 2020.
I don’t think I’ve ever spent as many waking hours in a week thinking about the US as I did during the election. If you charted my screen time, it would look like the dot com bubble. Watching the country burn on my obsessively-refreshed Twitter feed while sipping Sleepy Time Tea at a café gave me my daily study in contrasts. A lot of people have written about how this was the most globally-watched election of all time, and from conversations with coworkers and café-mates, that’s probably true, albeit slogan-y. Other people have written about how important an example POTUS is for leaders abroad, and while there are elements of truth to that, I think what’s more important than presidential personality is the perceived US response to certain actions—e.g., would Jamal Khashoggi be dead today if Trump hadn’t been so buddy-buddy with MBS? Or would that murder have happened with barely a dent on US-Saudi military contracts regardless of the administration? Who knows.
What’s been clear to me in Istanbul, though, is the degree to which the US projects hard and soft influence abroad. Here are some anecdotes from the last few weeks that stick out:
Anecdote 1:
It’s November 5 and I’m jumping onto a call with my Indonesian teammates. I’m two minutes late. The first audio I hear is “… looks like Monroe County is only 78% reporting and it’s leaning blue right now.” My first thought is that I accidentally turned on CNN. My second thought is that I have no idea where Monroe County is.
“Hey guys, US election? Which state are you talking about?”
“Pennsylvania,” they say.
Oh, you mean my home state. I google. Oh, Monroe County is three counties north of my home county. I’m on the phone with people who live on almost the exact opposite side of the globe from Pennsylvania, and they’re discussing my home state’s counties like NYT newsroom analysts. I realize that I’m not the political junkie that I thought I was.
Anecdote 2:
I’m walking the streets of Cihangir, an art district in Istanbul, hunting for a teashop and doing everything I can to channel Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris. I come across Chado Tea. Outside, a mighty chonk of a cat lounges on an ottoman. The sign has a subtitle: THE WAY OF TEA. I nod, drop the Owen Wilson, and walk in with hands folded like a monk.
I order and sit next to man who’s the word “intellectual” incarnate. He’s got the tweed, the goatee, the sharp face that you see in pictures of anarchists from the 1900s, and ruffled, receding hair. When I sit next to him, he’s anxiously looking at his own Instagram page on his laptop and muttering to himself.
The muttering picks up volume until I realize he’s asking me a question. He’s asking me to look at his Insta. Specifically, he just posted two nearly-identical pictures of himself and is asking me which one he should keep. Wait, no, they’re the same picture, just with slightly different cropping. I punt to the wisdom of the crowds and pick the one that’s gotten a few more likes. “I agree!” he whoops, deleting the lesser-liked with an artful stroke of his forefinger.
I smile and turn back to my laptop, but he asks me where I’m from. I say US. “Ah, beautiful, Hollywood!” he says with a smile. He then pitches an entire screenplay to me. I realize about 3/4 of the way through that he thinks that because I’m American I either a) work in Hollywood or b) have very close friends in Hollywood high places. I’d make a joke here about DC being Hollywood for ugly people, but it’s too true to joke about. Anyway, I ask him to send me the screenplay. I’ve read the synopsis; it’s a wild tale of gangsters, cockfighters, love, and "the Intellectual Mafia.” If anybody knows a producer, let me know.
Anecdote 3:
It’s Friday night, baby, and I’ve got my favorite pair of jeans on. We’ve finally got reservations at Nardis Jazz Club, Istanbul’s best, and we’re sitting on the landing, watching a jazz trio below. The bassist is pulling out deep rhythms; the guitarist is soaring up the fretboard, nary a note missed. The singer is riffing with a voice of soulful lows and softened highs. The songs are sung in perfect English, and they’re all classics. If my cocktail were 3x more expensive, I might have been in Manhattan.
Not every American export is a good one, but jazz may be its best.
Anyway, if I can tip my own political hand here, I’m bummed to have missed the celebrations in DC on 11/6, but trust that I downed some raki in cheers to what will hopefully be a far more relaxed four years.
