Seoul Really Is a Great City to Live In

Seoul really is a great city to live in.

It's just that the board I want to see is far bigger than Seoul.

I think Seoul is genuinely a good city to live in — at least, it fits the way I live. When I need to meet someone, most places are reachable by subway; when I suddenly need to open my laptop and work, finding a café or study café is easy. What I need can be bought even late at night, arranging a meeting spot is simple, and the odds of encountering new people and new opportunities are far higher than elsewhere. There's a sense of the whole city moving from morning to night, and for someone like me — who would rather keep building, meeting, and moving than sit still — that density is a real advantage.

So I never want to speak ill of Seoul. Housing is expensive, it's crowded, competition is fierce, commutes are exhausting — all true. But which city is good to live in ultimately depends on what a person values. To someone who prizes quiet and space above all, Seoul can be an exhausting city; to someone who values access and speed, the density of people and information, and new opportunity, Seoul is tremendously efficient. I'm closer to the latter.

Living in Seoul, you can do a great many things in a very short time. Meet a customer in the morning, talk with someone new over lunch, work at a café in the afternoon, attend an event or gathering at night. And when you need something in between, it can usually be handled at once. This environment goes beyond convenience — it widens a person's radius of action itself. When you want to do something, the friction between wanting and doing is small. I love cities like that.

But loving Seoul doesn't mean the size of the world I look at must also be Seoul.

If anything, this is where I feel Seoul's limits. From the standpoint of daily life it is plenty large, complex, and attractive; from the standpoint of business and capital, technology and markets, Seoul is one node among many in the world. Start competing only within Seoul, generating revenue only within the Korean market, calculating the size of your business only in won — and at some point the board itself can't help feeling small.

The number I want to watch is not ₩ alone.

There's $, and ¥, and £, and €, and of course ₩ too.

This is not simply a claim that one must expand overseas. It's that the unit for looking at markets should be different from the very start. Customers don't have to be in Korea, capital doesn't have to be in Seoul, and the people you work with don't have to be in the same country. In an era when software, the internet, and AI have already torn down much of the borders, the reasons to limit a business's size by street address keep shrinking.

Doing business abroad once largely meant founding a company there, renting an office, hiring people, building a local organization. Not necessarily anymore. You can open a laptop in Seoul and talk with American customers, research the Japanese market, serve Europe, and combine tools and infrastructure from around the world into one product. Where your body is and how far your business can reach are becoming different questions.

So I don't believe you must leave Seoul to see the world. What matters is exploiting Seoul's advantages fully while never mistaking Seoul for the whole world. The great transit and infrastructure, the density and speed of information, the people and services close at hand — enjoy all of it. Just don't lock the map in your head inside Seoul.

Seoul can be a base for living. It can be a fine home base. But base and destination are not the same word.

I believe I can live in Seoul and still see New York, see Tokyo, see London, see Silicon Valley. More precisely, maybe there's no need to see cities at all. What matters is not any particular city, but seeing where the markets are, where the capital is, where the exceptional people are, and where the problems I can solve exist. Seoul is simply a good starting point that connects to that world.

Sometimes people think that if you love a city you must settle there, and that if you start a business in a country you must focus on that country's market. I see no need to bind the two. You can put the base of your life in the most livable place, and expand the base of your business toward the biggest opportunity. Working from a Seoul café today gives my customers no reason to be in Seoul too.

If anything, I think more people will live this way. The place you live and the market you serve, nationality and capital, the locations of team and customers — all will keep separating. Far more options are appearing than in the era when everything had to fit inside one country's system.

In that sense, I'm quite fond of Seoul. I think it's a very good place to live. Much of what I need is close by, and it's a city that more or less keeps up with the speed I want to move at.

It's just that the board I want to see is far bigger than Seoul.

I'm not calling Seoul small. I mean I don't want to fit my entire world inside it. I want to enjoy Seoul's convenience while watching the world's markets; to live in won while watching a board where dollars and yen, pounds and euros move together. Where I sleep matters less than how far I can reach.

Seoul is a good city.

Which makes it even better.

Because having a good home base doesn't mean you must stay there — it means you can go farther.