Tag: News

• Goldman CFO Denis Coleman said pay for top performers remains highly competitive.
• His remarks signal a robust hiring landscape heading into 2026.
• Strong hiring reflects this year's robust dealmaking that's surprised some bankers.

The dealmaking market has been growing hotter by the minute, as a robust corporate merger backdrop is driving pay packages higher on Wall Street.

Banks need elite talent to tackle what's expected to be a busy 2026, forcing them to compete for top dealmakers amid one of the strongest M&A backdrops in years. The industry "will probably have the second biggest year in history," Goldman Sachs CFO Denis Coleman said on Tuesday at a financial industry conference hosted by the firm, noting that the bank has already advised on activity "north of a trillion dollars" this year.

Coleman acknowledged the intensity of the hiring market in an interview with an equity research analyst. He said the bank is prepared to shell out to retain its top performers. He described the compensation landscape as "competitive" for the crème-de-la-crème.

"Our philosophy is to continue to be a pay-for-performance organization, and we want to make sure that we're in a position to pay very competitively, particularly for our very best people," he said. "As long as the markets are as ebullient as they are and with optimism on the outlook, that'll continue to be a focus."

He also pointed to the formation of the firm's Capital Solutions Group — a consolidation of underwriting, sponsor coverage, and corporate derivatives into one centralized hub. It has enabled more complex financings and opportunities across both institutional and wealth clients since it was formed, Coleman said.

"The opportunity to deploy sizable capital into acquisition financing is a very attractive activity for Goldman Sachs," he said.

Strong tailwinds

The remarks come after a better-than-expected earnings season on Wall Street, where major banks reported a resurgence in dealmaking after nearly three years of sputtering and false starts.

Goldman's advisory revenue jumped 60% in the third quarter to $1.4 billion, while JPMorgan, Citi, and Morgan Stanley each logged double-digit gains in investment-banking fees in the most recent quarter.

CEOs across the Street have been sounding increasingly bullish: Morgan Stanley chief Ted Pick said in the fall that after years of seeing only "green shoots," the "flywheel is taking hold," prompting some bankers to wonder whether a new "golden age" for corporate dealmaking may be emerging.

The recent government shutdown didn't stall the M&A train, Coleman added on Tuesday, conceding it slowed equity offerings because regulators were closed. But as far as the advisory business goes: "We feel very very good about how the franchise is positioned" heading into the new year.

That momentum is feeding directly into pay expectations. Compensation consultancy Johnson Associates projected that year-end bonuses will rise across most corners of high finance — with M&A bankers forecast to see increases up to 15%, their strongest showing since 2021. Traders are expected to lead the bonus scoreboard with gains of up to 25%, while wealth management incentives are also set to climb.

"It is a moment in time, but at this moment in time, based on the quality of our franchise and the current outlook," Coleman said, "we feel really, really good about continuing to drive growth for our clients and returns for our shareholders."

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said ChatGPT has helped him parent his baby.
• Altman described a scenario where OpenAI's chatbot reassured him during a moment of parental angst.
• Altman told Jimmy Fallon that he feels kind of bad about asking an all-knowing AI basic questions.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says his most famous product has helped him manage life as an actual parent.

"I cannot imagine having gone through, figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT," Altman told Jimmy Fallon during an interview on NBC's flagship late-night talk show. "Clearly, people did it for a long time — no problem."

Altman said he feels "kind of bad" asking a technology that boasts such wide-knowledge questions like, "Why does my kid stop dropping pizza on the floor and laughing?"

Another example, Altman said, was a couple of months ago when he was at a party talking to someone who was also raising a newborn. Altman recalled that the parents said their six-month-old was "crawling everywhere." Altman said he grew concerned that his son was not at the same stage.

"I ran to the bathroom, and I was like, do I need to take my kid to the doctor tomorrow morning?" Altman said, describing what he typed into ChatGPT: "Is this okay?"

Altman said OpenAI's chatbot responded "with a great answer, which was of course," his son's development was "normal."

"It is personalized, like ChatGPT gets to know you, and by the way, you're the CEO of OpenAI, you probably are around all these high-achieving people, maybe you don't want to project that onto your kid, and you should just relax, and he'll be fine, whatever," Altman told Fallon of the answer.

Fallon didn't touch on OpenAI's recent struggles. Last week, Altman reportedly declared a "code red" in a private message to employees, ordering a greater focus on ChatGPT as competitors like Google make significant advancements with their competing AI models.

Instead, Altman's late-night debut featured the lighthearted fare that's standard on late-night TV. At one point, Fallon asked Altman to explain what ChatGPT is in case viewers who were unaware, including the host's dad, might be watching.

Altman has spoken in the past about how becoming a parent has added another lens to his outlook on AI.

"My kid is never going to grow up being smarter than AI," Altman said during a January episode of the "Re:Thinking" podcast with Adam Grant. "Children in the future will only know a world with AI in it."

The OpenAI CEO and his husband, Oliver Mulherin, welcomed their son in February with an announcement on X. Despite Altman's stature, the couple has led a relatively private life.

Fallon, who has two daughters, also joked with Altman about when their kids reached certain developmental milestones, like crawling.

"Mine was on Dancing with the Stars at seven months," Fallon said. "Semi-finalist."

• After moving from Boston to San Francisco for family, the author's kids relocated again.
• The author reflects on the challenges of staying close to adult children who move frequently.
• She now considers her own needs and identity after years of prioritizing her family.

I'm thinking about moving again.

It'll be the second move I've made in a decade. After living in Boston for more than 30 years, I relocated to San Francisco to be closer to some of my adult children. Although all five were born in Massachusetts, none of them still reside in the Commonwealth. One is in New York; the others are in California.

When child #5 started contemplating a cross-country move while still in high school, I made the preemptive decision to pack us both up and head west. After all, if he moved and I stayed, who would shovel the snow for me?

I had to push through the fear

The decision to move wasn't difficult, but it was scary. I'd lost the sense of adventure my kids now had. Too much life experience made me reluctant to take a risk. I wish I could combine the wisdom of age with the courage of youth.

It was knowing I'd be close to my children that propelled me to push through the fear. In fact, push through the fear became the mantra I repeated continuously as I sorted through decades of stuff and used a push broom to sweep the detritus from the attic floor.

Our time together was short-lived

I was so happy when we first moved. I was spending a lot of time with two of my older sons and my youngest was reconnecting with his brothers who because of age and distance had missed a lot of his growing up. My daughter, who was attending college in Santa Barbara, visited frequently. Sadly, it didn't last.

Within a couple of years, the two sons who'd preceded me to the Bay Area were moving again. Apparently, it's not unusual for Gen Zers and millennials to move often. That's not something I'm inclined to do.

Honestly, if I had my way we'd build a family compound where I'd reign as the matriarch, hosting elaborate family meals at expansive dining tables each Sunday just like I'd seen in some Italian movie. They really know how to do family in Europe.

It's not easy being near all my kids

I imagine it's easier for the mother of one to settle close to her child. It's a bit trickier when there are five. If I were still married, I'd likely have stayed in Boston with my husband and expected our kids to come to us, but that's not my life. I'm the single mom who wants to remain tethered to my offspring.

For as long as I can remember, my life has revolved around these children, and I can't picture not being an integral part of their daily existence. As fully formed adults, they no longer need me as they once did, although recently one of my sons told me that he misses the days when I'd wake him up in the morning, tell him what to wear, and feed him.

Gone are the days when I was the queen of their universe, yet I'm unwilling to be a distant planet. I feel the gravitational pull toward all of them, and that's my dilemma. That one son who stayed back East is married now and the father of my two grandchildren. I love spending time with my grandchildren, who are growing up too quickly. I know I'm welcome to visit anytime for as long as I like, but what if I lived nearby?

I scroll through real estate apps constantly, looking at houses in New York, but I'm not sure I really want to go back there — at least not yet. After all the years of full-time mothering, I can honestly say my job is done. Now it's time to figure out who I am and what I want.

• After dating for three years, my then-partner and I decided to open a joint bank account.
• It was the biggest game changer in our relationship.
• Now, we have a few different shared accounts for different things. Our system works for us.

My partner Sam and I had been dating for about three years when the conversation about opening a joint bank account came up. We weren't married at the time, but we had just started living together after moving to Canada for a working holiday.

Until then, we split most things evenly. Sam had always earned more money than I did, but I was determined to pay my own way. Often, he would treat me to dinner or a movie, but I tried to reciprocate as much as possible.

When we moved in together in Canada, dividing up all of our shared expenses seemed like unnecessary work. Neither of us could be bothered keeping a spreadsheet of costs or using a calculator to work out who owed what for groceries and rent.

He brought up the idea of a joint bank account

"Why don't we just open a joint bank account?" Sam said one night on the couch while playing Xbox. It wasn't the first time the topic had come up — Sam had suggested it a few months before we moved in together, and I was hesitant.

To me, the prospect of having a shared bank account sounded so weird and grown-up. I was pretty immature at 25, and back then, I thought that joint bank accounts were something that only married couples had, along with a station wagon and a mortgage.

However, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. So, one afternoon after work, Sam and I marched down to the local Bank of Montreal branch on Banff Avenue with our IDs in hand and opened our first-ever shared bank account. I remember walking outside afterward and snapping a photo together, laughing. It was a milestone in our relationship that I'd never really thought about before that point.

Pooling our money changed our relationship

Straight away, something shifted in our relationship. It wasn't just about the convenience of having a joint account, like being able to pay bills or save money more efficiently. There was this sense that we were on the same page. We were pooling our resources, making joint financial decisions, and truly functioning as a team.

To start off, we each transferred a set amount into the shared bank account each week to go towards our living expenses and savings goals for a three-month trip around South America. Call us naive, but we didn't even set any ground rules around spending or have a conversation about what would happen if we broke up. We were in a pretty good place in our relationship at the time, and we both trusted each other to do the right thing.

A year later, when we moved from Canada to the UK, we used the same system of opening a joint account and transferring a set amount into it, then again when we returned home to Australia. It worked so well for us, and made living together, traveling, and navigating expenses a lot less complicated.

We have a system for dealing with money, and it works for us

After we got married, Sam and I did some reading about money management and decided to set up a few different accounts — one for our regular expenses, one each for our fun money (activities, meals out, entertainment, etc.), and one for our savings and investments. This financial management strategy has proven to be invaluable and has helped us to budget and live within our means.

We've now been married for over a decade, and we still use the same system. We know couples who keep their finances completely separate, and though it works for them, this is what's worked for us. We're raising a family together and working toward shared financial goals, so managing our money together just made sense to us.

Looking back, I think one of the biggest game-changers for our relationship wasn't moving in together or even getting married. Surprisingly, it was opening a shared bank account. That was the turning point — the moment we decided to work as a team toward a shared financial goal.

• The US charged two men in connection with an operation to smuggle Nvidia AI chips to China.
• The DOJ said the group relabeled Nvidia chips as "SANDKYAN" to evade US export controls.
• The arrests follow a wider probe that seized $50 million in smuggled GPUs and cash.

Ever heard of a chipmaker called "SANDKYAN?"

No? That's because it doesn't exist — it was the fake company name involved in what US authorities are saying was a "sophisticated" AI chip-smuggling operation.

On Monday, prosecutors announced they have arrested several parties in connection with an operation that involved smuggling Nvidia's most advanced AI chips to China and Hong Kong in violation of US export control laws.

Among those are Fanyue "Tom" Gong, a 43-year-old tech-company owner in New York, and Benlin Yuan, a 58-year-old Canadian executive. They were arrested on December 3 and November 28, respectively, after investigators linked them to the trafficking network, the Department of Justice said in a press release published Monday.

The Nvidia chips, known as GPUs, are used to train cutting-edge AI models and high-performance computing systems. They are tightly restricted due to their potential military applications.

"These chips are the building blocks of AI superiority and are integral to modern military applications," said US Attorney Nicholas Ganjei for the Southern District of Texas, adding that the smuggling operation threatened national security.

Yuan's lawyer told Business Insider he had no comment about the cases. A representative for Gong could not immediately be identified.

An Nvidia spokesperson told Business Insider that the export system is "rigorous and comprehensive" and that it will "continue to work with the government and our customers to ensure that second-hand smuggling does not occur."

It comes as President Donald Trump on Monday announced his approval for Nvidia to sell H200 chips to China under a plan that includes a 25% payment to the US.

How prosecutors say the smuggling operation worked

Prosecutors said the smuggling operation relied on falsified paperwork, shell companies, and covert relabeling.

The people involved purchased GPUs through straw buyers and intermediaries who claimed the hardware was destined for US customers or countries that don't require export licenses, prosecutors said.

Once the chips reached US warehouses, the DOJ said, workers under Gong's direction removed Nvidia labels and then rebranded the GPUs as "SANDKYAN," a fake company name.

Shipping documents were also rewritten to classify the GPUs as generic computer parts, the DOJ said.

The mislabeled GPUs were then exported covertly to China, Hong Kong, and other restricted destinations, often routed through a Hong Kong logistics firm and a China-based AI company.

Yuan, who ran the US arm of a Beijing IT company, recruited inspectors and instructed them not to disclose the GPUs' true destination, Ganjei said.

Prosecutors said Yuan also helped craft false explanations when federal authorities detained certain shipments.

The arrests are part of "Operation Gatekeeper," a wider crackdown that earlier led Texas businessman Alan Hao Hsu and his company to plead guilty to smuggling offenses. According to court documents unsealed on December 8, Hsu exported or attempted to export $160 million worth of Nvidia's H100 and H200 chips to China, Hong Kong, and other prohibited countries.

Prosecutors said they seized more than $50 million in GPUs and cash from Hsu's operation. The activity took place between October 2024 and May 2025, the DOJ said.

Gong and Yuan remain in custody pending further proceedings. Yuan was charged with conspiring to violate the Export Control Reform Act, while Gong was charged with conspiring to smuggle goods out of the US. If convicted, Yuan faces up to 20 years in prison. Gong faces up to 10 years.

• Best friends Sophie Harper and Madison White bought a three-bedroom house together in 2022.
• They were just 23 and 24 at the time they became homeowners.
• Harper and White split their mortgage evenly, but they share household costs like groceries.

Living with a friend isn't unusual for a 23-year-old. Buying a house with your bestie, though, is far less common.

Sophie Harper and Madison White did exactly that in 2022, purchasing a three-bedroom home just outside Austin.

By pooling their income, Harper and White were able to become homeowners before they turned 25.

From roommates to homeowners

Harper and White, both 27, first lived together as random roommates their first year at Whittier College in Southern California.

"We met the first day when we moved in, and we just hit it off," Harper told Business Insider. "We became best friends."

They didn't live together the rest of college because White was a resident assistant, but they planned to rent an apartment together once they finished school.

"We lived in California for a year after graduation, and then we were like, 'We should move. Why don't we try something new?'" Harper said. They decided to relocate to Austin in 2021, renting a space together in town.

They rented for about a year, settling into their respective careers: White is in PR, and Harper works in the flower department at Trader Joe's. They were happy in their rental, but White aimed to become a homeowner as soon as possible.

As she looked at available homes in their area, she realized she and Harper could likely afford to buy a home if they pooled their incomes.

"One night, we were talking, and she was like, 'I think we could buy a house for about the same price as renting,'" Harper said. "I was like, 'OK, why don't we go see? It doesn't hurt to see if we can get preapproved.'"

Buying a new build

Rather than approaching a bank for a loan, Harper and White decided to work directly with a builder, as the new-build market was booming in their area at the time.

They started working with Lennar Homes, which approved them for a loan of $290,000. White and Harper narrowed down their search based on that price point, finding a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house that was already built and available in 2022.

In addition to their loan, they also applied for a down-payment assistance grant, which they said enabled them to purchase a property without having to repay the down payment as long as they lived there for three years. Thanks to the loan, the grant, and some careful saving they had done in their first two years out of college, they were able to buy the house for $296,000 when they were just 23 and 24.

"We are pretty good with our money," Harper said. "I like to save. I think it's just an anxiety thing. I want to make sure I always have a cushion."

"We had the money that we were able to do it, and also the timing was just perfect," she added. "It was right before interest rates really started to rise."

The pair also had no concerns about sharing financial information.

"We're really open," Harper said. "I think it's important to talk about that stuff anyway as young women."

"I don't think there's any shame between us about what our credit scores are or what we make," she added. "When you're buying a house, you just have to lay everything out. You have to be honest about what debt you have, income, all of that."

Home sweet home

Harper and White have owned their home for three years now, personalizing it with a pink living room and a gallery wall full of their memories as friends.

They've loved taking on this step together, as White told Business Insider.

"Owning my own home was always a dream of mine, and I feel so grateful that I've not only been able to accomplish that early in life, but also to have been able to do it with my very best friend," White said. "Any time you make a major life decision with financial consequences, there is going to be a risk, whether you do it alone or with a friend or a romantic partner or a family member."

"Knowing that you have somebody that you can depend on and that can depend on you is an amazing piece of mind," White added.

Harper agreed, telling Business Insider that she and White are "really proud" that they could buy a home when they were so young, and that "doing it together was just icing on the cake."

In terms of their finances, Harper and White split their mortgage and other utility fees, but they don't keep score when it comes to day-to-day costs for their life.

"We treat it much more like a family, like a partnership," Harper said. "If we buy something like furniture, I'll buy one thing, and she'll buy the next thing."

They also don't keep a formal chore chart. Instead, they help each other wherever they can.

"We're good at going off each other's energy," Harper said. "If there's been times where I'm really busy, or I'm sick, or I'm just down bad, I'm not in the mood, she'll pick up a sock and do a load of laundry. She'll clean the kitchen. And vice versa. If she's ever in that situation, I know she knows that I'll pick up the sock, too."

Looking to the future

Because of their grant, Harper and White moved into their house knowing they would live there for at least three years.

"We just treated it as a long lease," Harper said. "I had no idea what was going to happen in three years career-wise, or if we would have boyfriends, or if we would want to move. We knew three years was a minimum."

Those three years have passed, and Harper and White don't intend to sell their home anytime soon, even if they move out.

"It's a good investment," Harper said. "We want to be able to keep it and sit on it and have it with us."

They may rent out the property, or White and her boyfriend might live in it if Harper moves out. Whenever they do sell the house, they'll split the profits.

Harper said she hopes more people realize there are creative ways to become homeowners, rather than just waiting for a romantic partner or saving to buy a home solo.

"If owning property and having a home is something you want, and the goal can be achieved by doing it with someone else who also wants that, I say go for it," Harper said.

White told Business Insider that it just "made sense" for her to own her first home with Harper by her side.

"I know that it's not the conventional way that people buy homes, but we have lived our entire adult life together as a team, and it really only made sense that we would do this as a team too," White said.

• Walmart just pushed its latest delivery window to 5 p.m. local time on Christmas Eve.
• The retail giant can now reach 95% of US households in three hours or less.
• The ultrafast service is part of a broader race to make shopping more convenient — and immediate

Picture this: you're just arriving to Christmas Eve dinner with your in-laws and your niece says she's been eying a talking plush Bluey doll.

You find it in your phone app, place the order in a tap, and by the time desert is ready, your gift is at the doorstep. (You can even get the whipped cream you forgot to bring for the pie, too.)

Such last-minute shopping options are becoming increasingly possible as major retailers make a big push into ultrafast delivery.

Case in point: Walmart told Business Insider exclusively that its shoppers will be able to place store-fulfilled express delivery orders as late as 5 p.m. local time on Christmas Eve — a full hour later than last year.

"More people are using Express Delivery to get their items faster, and December is when it truly shines," Walmart's chief e-commerce officer David Guggina said in a statement. "No one delivers for customers like Walmart, from the first Holiday deal to the final gift on Christmas Eve."

The retail giant can now reach 95% of US households in three hours or less, and the company has said that more than a third of shoppers opt to pay extra for one-hour-or-less delivery.

Those express delivery numbers jump by 2.5X in December compared with the year's average, the company said.

The company also told Business Insider that it recently rolled out a new "Get it Now" option in the Walmart app, which shows shoppers an estimated number of minutes to receive an item, and lets them place the order in one tap.

Walmart said earlier this month that it fulfilled its fastest Black Friday order in 10 minutes, with big increases in both the volume and speed of deliveries fulfilled from its stores.

But Walmart isn't the only player in the ultrafast delivery game: Amazon and Target are also racing to offer last-minute fulfillment options on Christmas Eve.

Target says customers can get orders within two hours via curbside or in-store pickup, or opt for same-day delivery for a $9.99 fee, with stores closing at 8 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

And Amazon will show an "Arrives before Christmas" message on items that can be delivered as late as Christmas Eve via delivery or one of the company's 25,000 pickup locations.

• Consulting firm Accenture and AI darling Anthropic have announced an expansion of their partnership.
• Accenture says it will use Anthropic's Claude to serve both staff and clients.
• Accenture announced a similar deal with OpenAI just over a week ago.

Accenture has announced an expansion of its partnership with Anthropic, its second deal with a leading AI developer in the past eight days.

The deal includes a suite of new solutions and offerings that will help Accenture's clients "accelerate the shift from experimenting with AI to using it as a catalyst for reinvention across the enterprise," said Julie Sweet, Accenture's CEO.

The two companies said they would form the "Accenture Anthropic Business Group," which will train around 30,000 employees in delivering Claude-powered solutions.

Tens of thousands of developers at Accenture will also receive access to Claude Code as part of the deal, and Accenture and Anthropic will launch an offering for chief information officers to measure the value of AI solutions and scale them.

"AI is changing how almost everyone works, and enterprises need both cutting-edge AI and trusted expertise to deploy it at scale," said Dario Amodei, CEO and cofounder of Anthropic.

He added that the rollout of Claude Code to Accenture employees was the company's largest ever deployment.

Accenture announced a similar deal with OpenAI earlier this month, saying it would provide tens of thousands of its employees with ChatGPT Enterprise to use across consulting, operations, and delivery work.

Accenture and OpenAI also announced plans to launch a "flagship AI client program," which the firms said will help clients adopt OpenAI products across their workflows.

"Accenture invests in strategic partnerships with the best across the ecosystem, co-developing solutions and going to market together," Lan Guan, chief AI & Data officer at Accenture, told Business Insider.

"The addition of Anthropic as a strategic partner is about expanding client choice, meeting client demand, and accelerating innovation," Guan said.

The professional services industry stands out as one of the industries most exposed to AI-driven transformation. Top firms are racing to prove they can deploy AI effectively in-house and guide clients to do the same.

For AI developers, global consulting firms offer access to the back-end systems of some of the world's most valuable companies.

The Big Four firm Deloitte, for example, has a partnership with Anthropic, providing its global workforce of 470,000 with Claude-powered solutions. Deloitte is also developing AI agents in partnership with Nvidia. It counts Boeing, Morgan Stanley, Starbucks, and the US federal government among its clients.

The top consulting firms have a similar suite of partnerships with companies like Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, and Anthropic.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at pthompson@businessinsider.com or Signal at Polly_Thompson.89. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Dylan Field had no management experience before cofounding Figma. He had to learn a "whole new skillset," he said.
• "Management and leadership are different," he said on "First Time Founders." Field said he came in as a leader, not a manager.
• CEOs of Duolingo and Asana have also struggled in the transition from founder to manager.

Some people are natural managers. Others need a bit more time to figure it out.

Before Dylan Field cofounded Figma, he interned at companies like Flipboard and LinkedIn. He'd never been a manager. Now, his company has over 1,600 employees.

On the "First Time Founders" podcast, Field said that he wasn't a great manager initially — and that he had to learn the hard way.

"Management and leadership are different," Field said. "You can be a good leader and a bad manager or vice versa."

Field said that he'd always been a leader, so he came into Figma thinking he was "good to go." He said he learned that there was a "whole new skillset around management" that he "definitely didn't know."

Field listed the skill set: Knowing where your team is, building relationships, holding one-on-one meetings, holding people accountable for their goals, and setting a consistent cadence.

Host Ed Elson asked: Was Field really bad at all of those management principles?

"Oh, for sure," Field said. "I think I was bad at all of it."

It didn't help that Figma had pressure from venture capitalists to get a product to market, he said. Figma was founded in 2012, but didn't start shipping a beta product to customers until 2015. General availability took another year, and it wasn't till 2017 that a paid plan was available.

"Don't do what we did," Field said. "Please don't take away that you should take five years to launch a company. You'll be dead."

What helped, he said, was hiring his first manager, Sho Kuwamoto, who started as Figma's director of engineering. "I learned a ton from him," Field said.

Field is one of many founders-turned-CEOs who have had to learn how to manage a team.

Dustin Moskovitz cofounded two large, publicly traded companies: Facebook and Asana. He led the latter as CEO for over a decade. In October, he described being a manager as "quite exhausting," stating that he'd intended to be "more of an independent or Head of Engineering."

In May, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said that all founders should be micromanagers until they had 30 employees — but that he took it too far, micromanaging until he had 50.

"At this point, I also have learned that most of my job is culture carrier, mascot, and just making some of the kind of tough philosophical decisions," von Ahn said.

On the podcast, Field struck an optimistic tone about the ability of great founders to become great managers.

"The good news is if you're a first-time manager, it's all very learnable," he said. "It'll feel like muscle memory eventually."

• I spent nine months traveling the world, and although I had a great time, I wouldn't do it again.
• Because I was on a tight budget, I often found myself turning down cool experiences to save money.
• I also struggled to make genuine friendships and missed having a space to call my own.

When I was working remotely in 2021, my boyfriend and I packed up and traveled to 22 countries across Europe and Latin America.

Although these were some of the best days of my life, I quickly learned that a lot of the videos I saw on social media that glorified full-time travel didn't always showcase the downfalls of the lifestyle.

More and more people are becoming digital nomads — countries like Italy have even implemented specific visas for remote workers. However, during my nine months abroad, I learned that the lifestyle isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Here's why I wouldn't travel full time again.

I kept looking for places and experiences that felt like home

While traveling full time, I found myself constantly looking for places and experiences that felt like home.

In some ways, it was cool to feel like a local in a new city. However, when I returned home and took shorter vacations, I started to value the places I was visiting for their differences rather than trying to find some semblance of home.

Nowadays, I like having a home base. Shorter trips help me to break up the monotony of life without sacrificing the comfort of home.

It felt like I was constantly thinking about money

When I was traveling full-time, I was on a strict budget. I either drained my wallet or ate cheap food to maintain some sort of financial security while on the road.

I talked myself out of going to every museum I wanted to and purchased cheap meals for dinner instead of indulging in local cuisine that might have been out of my budget.

The moments I would slip up on my spending were when I forgot this wasn't a never-ending vacation, but rather, my new everyday life.

During the first two weeks of our trip, I wanted to go to all of the must-try restaurants in Paris. However, I soon realized that came at the cost of establishing a strict daily budget for the remainder of our three weeks there.

Of course, it was worth it in the end to save money so I could travel for nine months. However, now that I take a few shorter trips a year, I have more flexibility to make them everything I want them to be.

My friendships at home changed, and the new ones I made were fleeting

I think what travelers yearn for the most is community. When I was traveling, it was really hard to find the same quality of friends I have at home.

When I did meet friends abroad, it was often short-lived. I found that many people traveling full time were only in a city for a few days. Even when I did find someone I connected with, it was hard to maintain a long-distance friendship.

Traveling full time also took a lot out of my friendships at home, as it seemed like they learned to live without me.

When I returned home, it felt like we didn't have as much in common as we used to. It took me months to get my friendships back to where they were before I left.

I missed having a space to call my own

While traveling, I stayed in 25 different places across nine months. Although seeing so many new places was cool, I missed having a space to call my own.

After spending so many nights in beds that weren't my own, it was an indescribable feeling to come back home. In fact, when I got back, I was able to create a space that took inspiration from the places I'd been.

I think traveling is something everyone should prioritize, but there are ways to see the world that don't involve doing it full time.

Nowadays, I plan to take at least four international trips a year, ranging from one to two weeks. This allows me to live a travel-filled life without giving up the comforts of home, career, and relationships.

This story was originally published on April 26, 2024, and most recently updated on December 9, 2025.