I was at dinner with 80 or so batchmates from 500 Startups last night, and with half of them coming from overseas the discussion turned to “IS America still great”. While that’s pretty subjective, the consensus was that.. “it is still better than where I came from”.

And I thought about that a bit. If talent is evenly disbursed all over the world, (let alone the US) then bringing them to places that could accelerate that talent is a great arb. Dave McClure knows this well, and GOAP seeks out talent from the most crazy places. My batch ten buddies included great entreprneurs from Jordan (Silk Road), Thailand (Yoga Trail), Tomsk Russia (Promolta).

I came from Pittsburgh, and my Dad was a coal miner from Clearfield. Taking a look at this simple map that just shows earning capacity, you will see that my son Grayson has jumped from number 2,315 to 104 in two generations. Remains to be seen what he does with all that, but it does drive home the point: you can do better here.

I have a tremendous respect for Riham from Silk Road, or Sven, Alex and Alex and the Gang from Yoga Trail. Welcome to America!

But you’ll have to hustle.