Urgency is a social phenomenon, not an internal one
We talk about drive like it’s a character trait. I believe it’s mostly a downstream effect of your environment. You don’t decide to feel urgency. You catch it — from the person shipping something on a Saturday, from the friend who just raised, from overhearing a conversation at the next table that assumes a bigger game than the one you’re playing.
Two data points from the field
One of my friends is the CPO at a Series B startup. Most of the team is in NYC, while he’s in SF, and he’s convinced his fellow executives aren’t paranoid enough about AI. The point isn’t that NY lacks talent — it’s that the ambient tempo is different, and tempo is contagious.
In Singapore, another friend runs a multi-hundred-million-dollar revenue business mostly based in APAC. He visited SF in October, came back, and immediately moved his entire organization from Microsoft to Google so they could take advantage of Gemini. When I last saw him, he said he hadn’t done any “work” in the last two weeks — he’d just been building with Claude Code.
Same people, same tools, same internet — but a different room produces a different rate of shipping. Both are noticing the same thing from different angles: proximity compounds.
You can consume SF content from Singapore and still not feel SF urgency. Information transfers; conviction doesn’t — at least not over a feed. Urgency needs proximity, repetition, and mutual witnessing. It’s the difference between reading about a workout and training next to someone stronger than you.
A group called ABC (agenticbuilders.sg) is a good example — four enthusiasts sharing tips that turned into a WhatsApp group, then live events, then a real community. They didn’t set out to build an institution. They just kept the door open.
What communities like ABC actually do isn’t teach skills — it’s import the missing variable. They create rooms where the ambient assumption is “of course you’re shipping, of course you’re talking to users, of course this is Tuesday.”
Mechanisms that matter: compressed feedback loops, normalized ambition, visible peers slightly ahead of you. They also normalize learning on the fly and asking for help — disproportionately important in a society that often prioritizes and lionizes book learning. Learning by doing matters more than ever in this era. This is why the best thing you can do for the ecosystem often isn’t another accelerator or grant — it’s another room.
You have two moves: find the room, or build the room. The cost of the first has dropped (remote communities, trips, residencies). The value of the second has gone up — a single well-constructed local room changes the trajectory of everyone in it.
Singapore / SEA version of this: the ceiling isn’t talent or capital anymore. It’s density of people operating at the tempo you want to operate at.
Gibson’s line, reframed: the future isn’t just unevenly distributed across geographies — it’s unevenly distributed across dinner tables.
Pick your table carefully. Or set one.