A year ago we moved to Bangkok after a long time in the US (16 years for me, 27 years for my wife and their entire lives for my kids). It wasn’t a planned move. Unlike most folks who plan meticulously to experience living abroad as expats, we did things like we do big things — on a whim.
In the past year, I have interviewed close to 300 candidates for Agoda. I get asked this question by almost every single candidate — why did you move from the US to Thailand? How did you make such a massive decision of uprooting a settled, and by all measures, a happy lifestyle? When I tell them we made the decision in a few seconds, it is not easy to believe. But we make big decisions quickly — buying a house, having kids, moving to a new continent — instant decisions. Buying an air purifier on Amazon — we take weeks. Just how we do things. So this is a status report on how that decision has turned out so far.