Matt Bowles: My guest today is Ivy Xu. She is a location independent entrepreneur, full time digital nomad and the co-founder of BETA Camp, an educational startup which has helped over 250 teenagers build startups and raise over $150,000 in seed funding. Originally from Canada, Ivy has traveled to over 40 countries and is the co-founder of the Asian Fe Female Nomads Facebook community which has organically grown to over 900 members. Ivy is also the founder of Wander Woman Dao, a venture studio Dao building products to empower more women and non-binary wanderers to be location independent and financially free. And she will be launching her first NFT project later this year.
Ivy, welcome to the show.
Ivy Xu: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.
Matt Bowles: I am so excited to have you here. Let’s just start off by setting the scene because we are actually in the same country. Unfortunately, we’re not in the same city and we’re not in person for this interview. But we have agreed to make this a wine night. So, let’s talk about where we are and what we’re drinking. I am in Medellin; Colombia and I have just opened a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon from Chile with where are you Ivy and what are you drinking?
Ivy Xu: I’m in Bogota, Colombia and I just missed you by one day in Medellin. We were introduced the day before I was flying out and by the time you messaged me, I was literally boarding a plane. So really unfortunate. But here I am one hour flight away from you and I am drinking also a Cabernet Sauvignon and I have no idea where it’s from. Unfortunately, I’m staying at a co-living space full of digital nomads. My first experience and the bar just offered me red or White. And I was like, red, please. And on the menu, it said Katsov. And I was like, okay, that’s fine with me.
Matt Bowles: I’ll take it. I love that. That’s awesome. Yes, we just missed each other by a day, which was crazy. But that’s what happens in this nomad life when you’re zigzagging around the world. But super glad we could hook it up virtually. I would love to start, though, by going all the way back. Ivy, can you talk a little bit about where you grew up and your cultural background? And also, as you were growing up, can you talk about the role of competitive figure skating in your life?
Ivy Xu: Yeah, sure. So, I am ethnically Chinese. I was born in Beijing, my mom’s from Shanghai, my dad’s from Beijing. Very much like a city type of family. And, and I moved to Canada when I was 4 years old. Grew up in Ottawa, Canada. I think a few things did really influence my upbringing, so figure skating being one of them, as well as I think a Chinese heritage, because I actually went back to China every single summer. But I picked up figure skating when I was young and started doing competitive figure skating when I was 11. Diversity skating in my time in university. And I, I think playing any kind of competitive sport just makes you, number one, very competitive. You get a lot of discipline and what hard work feels like and you know how much hard work needs to be put in for like a three-minute program that you get to compete maybe three times a year. But then I was on the ice like 20 hours a week. You need to off ice training, mental training. There’s a lot of artistry, but also a lot of endurance. But I think that’s the mindset that I hold in like figure skating and in my life right now. Like, I always tell myself, like, am I trying my best? And what that means because to me there’s no plan B, it’s just plan A.
Matt Bowles: When you think back as a kid, when you were going to China every summer and then coming back and living in Canada, when you think back on that, what impact did that have on you and how did that shape your identity?
Ivy Xu: Yeah, I’m very lucky to have gone back every year since I was 8 years old. After my parents divorced, my dad moved back to China. So, I got to see China change, even though I didn’t pay too much attention to it, you know, as an 8-year-old or 12-year-old. But it was still noticeable after like a decade of like what I remember China to be when going, when I was 8. So, the first thing is seeing how fast I think an ecosystem and a city can change. I think that’s the one fascination I have about the world and why I love to travel now is to see, like, what stage are different cities at? Because every country and city go through cycles. And being able to kind of witness that is really interesting. And then secondly, on a cultural perspective, I went back and took like an SAT prep course in China, which is a really weird thing to do because people that are not that good at English, but they’re very good at test taking.
And my parents decided they were going to send me there to learn how to write tests. So, I went back for an STD prep course. I’ve done internships there. And because I interacted with peers and not just adults. And like my grandma, it was like in North America, almost being Chinese, speaking Chinese, listening to fobby music, you know, from China was like, not cool. And I grew up with people making fun of the way that my lunch was. Cause it wasn’t a sandwich. And I switched to sandwiches for a week. And then I was like, no, mom, I really like my fried rice a lot better, so please keep giving me my fried rice. But every time I went back to China, I realized that I’m like, wow. Not being able to speak good Chinese was uncool. You know, like, I couldn’t make sense of the humor that they were talking about because I didn’t watch the same shows that they watched. And I didn’t understand a lot of the references. I couldn’t write fast enough what was on the blackboard. And people made fun of me. And I’m like, wow. It’s actually very different that what’s cool somewhere could be not cool somewhere else. And it’s all up to perception. And I think that really helped me grow into who I am and think about what it means and, like, what I want to take away from both cultures.
Matt Bowles: So, Ivy, I have been to Hong Kong and I have been to Macau. I have not yet been to mainland China. I’ve transferred through the airport in Beijing. I have not been outside of the airport. It is tippy top of my list in terms of places that I. I want to go. And I feel like it deserves an enormous amount of my time because of how huge it is and how much amazing stuff is there. But I wanted to ask you, for me and for other listeners that have not spent time in mainland China, what for you as an adult going back, have been some of the top highlights. Some of the things you really love most about China and what sort of tips or recommendations do you have for people that want to go and spend time in China? Where should they go? Where should they see?
Ivy Xu: Yeah, it should definitely be on top of your list. My most recent trip was a three-month trip in 2019. And lucky me, I got to do that before the pandemic hit. And what I always did as a kid was actually visit the major cities. So, in China there’s different tiers of cities and it’s used as a business term, government term. Everyone knows that these are just the language that people use. Tier 1 being the wealthiest and largest cities, that’s Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Guangzhou being the Cantonese major hub in China. And then there’s tier two cities. And honestly like if you look at like New York, San Francisco, they’re like a tier three city in China, like the size of it and like how developed it is, the GDP of it, et cetera, like okay, maybe New York GDP is pretty high in Silicon Valley, but like the people and how people live there is like a tier 3 city. So, you can’t even imagine what like tier 1 cities and even some tier 2 cities are really like
Dating in Beijing, if you date like five subway stops away, it’s basically a long distance. It’s really hard to get around. I mean, there’s so many different business centers and like downtown centers. I’m seeing that too in like the rest of Asia and Latin America. But what I would recommend like someone going there for the first time is to experience these different tiers of cities because everything about them is super different and businesses handle them differently. And the most unique thing about I think Chinese tech scene is that they actually niche down to very specific because they’re like billions of people there.
So, if you manage to actually capture a really small niche of people, you would be like a unicorn. I was actually in Shanghai where I met with this European guy who was building a social graph type of startup. And he said if every Shanghai small business use my product that’s within a five-kilometer radius from my office, I would be a unicorn. And I’m like, wow, that is so, so crazy, right? So, because these companies would be targeting like they would be like a tier 4 city, young mom between the age of like 18 to 25 who makes this income, they would be super, super specific. And therefore, like the people that you meet and the experiences that you have in each tier city will be super different. So obviously visit like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, just those three big tech hubs are really different. Beijing’s very tech heavy and government heavy. Shanghai is more finance and retail fashion heavy.
And Shenzhen is way more diverse than Beijing or Shanghai because it was a special like innovation zone that got a lot of different government support and is very welcoming to people all around the country. But versus Beijing and Shanghai are like Chinese royalty, where like you would be riding a train in Beijing and it would pass by the train station or a bunch of like, you can tell they’re from the tier three, four cities coming in and you just see the Beijing people raise their heads and their nose turns up a little bit higher. But yeah, go to the tier two cities to compare. Hangzhou, which is where the Alibaba head office is, is actually a tier 2 city. Go there and then go to some of the factory towns that will be tier 3 and tier 4 cities. And like people’s aspirations are even different there.
Matt Bowles: So, let me ask you this, a question that I get from nomads about mainland China as a nomad destination for non-Chinese folks. How is the Internet situation? Because I know there’s a number of platforms that are basically not usable on mainland China, right. So, for nomads from outside of China, if they needed to work and they were going to go for a few months like you did, what do you recommend? Is that viable? And if so, what are the dynamics their people need to be aware of?
Ivy Xu: Yeah. So, first of all, like your phone plan, if your phone is from the States or from like somewhere outside of China, nothing is actually banned on it. So just buy like a really good roaming plan and you’ll be able to access Facebook, Instagram, whatever else they ban. So that’s for your phone. So, first of all, you could go on all of those apps that apparently on the media it says that you’re banned. But I also think it’s a great experience for you to try out all these Chinese apps because you’ll be very surprised on how usable they are and also how much you can do on them. And it just makes Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat all look like they’re very outdated in terms of like Internet. All of China has very good Internet. Obviously, there’s different hubs and centers, so there’s always like international schools. And so, there’s like actually government approved VPNs, so they’re totally usable. My dad uses it, my little brother uses it, my little brother goes to international school in Shenzhen. And then there’s also like office buildings that are more like international companies where like their Wi-Fi is fully like you can use and do whatever on. So, I did not work from a co working space at that time. I pretty much just use VPNs. But I’m sure that like there’s WeWorks, etc. That will allow foreigners to work on things that maybe China bans.
Matt Bowles: Awesome. So, if folks want to go like for three months and just post up in China and hit some of those cities and just work from, there should be no problem. They do a little bit of research in advance, but you can definitely navigate it and have a smooth working experience.
Ivy Xu: Yeah, definitely. The big cities for sure.
Matt Bowles: Okay.
Ivy Xu: My husband was working for an American startup, but that was totally fine even without a VPN. It depends on what you need. And my mom also works remotely in China, so I think Slack is not banned. It’s more the social media apps. Like it’s more information control which you can access anyway through your phone.
Matt Bowles: Awesome. Well, one of the other things that you have done, Ivy, that I have not done is you’ve done the running of the bull in Pamplona, Spain. Now, Spain is a place that I try to go probably every year. I aim to swing through Spain and spend some time there because it’s one of my favorite countries. But I have not yet been to Pamplona. So, for people that are not even familiar with this, they don’t know what the running of the bull is. Can you explain what it is and then I would love to hear your experience.
Ivy Xu: Spain is trying to ban bullfighting and to be fair, when I went to run with the bulls, I did not know that the bulls that were chasing me were going to die that night in the stadium in bullfights. Okay. When I went to a first bullfight, I was very surprised that they killed bulls. I was 20 or 19, 20 at the time on my study abroad exchange in Europe. And so, San Fermin is the festival in July where they really kick off a huge one week or two-week long bullfighting festival. And on the opening ceremony everyone just throws sangria around. Like you can buy these two-euro buckets of sangria and people are just throwing sangria off the balconies and people really party. And then on the first night where there’s a bullfight, amongst all other nights that morning they release all the bulls and there’s like an 800 meter within town in the old town with cobble streets and very narrow streets that the bulls are going to run into the bullring from their pens which are like 400 meters away.
And the city fences these off but there’s a lot of tourists and also probably not many locals, but people from all across Spain, too, come in and crawl through the barriers. And you don’t really know where this route is, but you know when you have to crawl through a barrier, but you also don’t know how far you are from the pen and how far you are from the bullring. But then there’s like a gunshot, and then the bulls are released from their pens, and they have nowhere to go except for straight into the bull ring because it’s fenced off and there’s narrow streets, and you’re just kind of in there hoping that a bull doesn’t, like, run into you. So, you just kind of run. And then some people just stand to the side to see the bulls pass, which is what I did. When I heard them, I was like, oh, my gosh, I’m so scared. And I just went to the side. My friend ended up running into the bullring. But that’s what it was. It was a huge adrenaline rush. People die during it. And the morning that I did it, I think four people got hospitalized because bulls might fall when they turn a corner. The grad is very slippery with sangria, with urine, with other alcohol, and it smells really bad. People slip all the time, and they might get kind of crushed against the wall.
Matt Bowles: Wow. So, Ivy, I want to get a little bit of your career trajectory that sort of led up to your location independence and your nomadic lifestyle. Can you talk a little bit about your transition from jobs to freelancing to entrepreneurship and sort of how your professional trajectory unfolded?
Ivy Xu: I worked in Silicon Valley for a few years, and most recently at Wish, a really big e commerce platform. When I was there, it was the number one downloaded shopping app in the world. I led all business development and merchant acquisition in regions outside of China. And so, when I was wanting to leave Wish, I had offers from Facebook, Marketplace, Instagram shopping. You know, my boss went to Google Shopping, and there was a lot of options, but I knew that I wanted to take some time and live in a camper van in Australia or New Zealand. I think that was like this dream where I thought it was just freedom. Freedom to be able to go wherever I want and have a new backyard every day. I was going to get inspiration there, and that’s how I was going to launch my first startup, because my goal was, I was going to be an entrepreneur by the time I was 26, and I just turned 25, and I was like, okay, I need to go.
And so, at that time, my husband actually got fired from his job now husband, then boyfriend of six months. And we decided that, okay, let’s just go on the road. And so, the first thing that I did was just reach out to people whose accounts that I managed at Wish. There were sellers that I brought on and helped them succeed. And some people that I used to work with so landed some consulting gigs in the e commerce space. So, I was either helping people succeed on Wish or I was helping them build e commerce platforms themselves, such as in a gaming app. Maybe they want to give rewards that are physical products to people who win different points, like how do they set that up, how do they get the right sellers, how do they reduce the prices? So, I did some consulting and work in that space.
After that I started trying to launch my companies and there was a lot of failed projects. We tried to do things in E-commerce, something called Boba Bullet. We tried to sell like you know, instead of hot chocolate bombs, we want to do like a Boba bomb. But then we couldn’t figure out the recipe like my husband and I, so that didn’t work out. And then we tried to do some like sustainable packaging design so like you can design it on a computer and then we’ll send you like a bunch of like boxes that you can fold. There are companies that do this and we wanted to do it more sustainably. But then that was just really, really hard I think to capture an audience. And I remember being in Bali in the co working spaces there and trying to work on this. But anyway, I just kind of gave up on that.
And then what ended up happening was I had an article that went viral years ago about getting a job in San Francisco. While you’re non-technical, so six things that I wish I had known while job hunting in San Francisco, it still ranks really well on Google. It was written in like 2016 and even then, in 2019 I was still getting messages every week or two many messages about people that wanted to do the same and wanted my help. And when I came back from this one-year trip for Christmas, I was like, I have to do something. Nothing’s really working out for me and I don’t want to do e commerce consulting anymore. And so, I ended up buying this course from a friend of a friend who was teaching coaches to new coaches to monetize and become coaches. And so, I ended up career coaching where after two weeks of sending out my market research survey, I had like 120 people interested in a free coaching call which I then turned into a sales call. And then I landed really easily, like 10 to 15 one on one clients.
But obviously like also one on one client coaching, similar to e commerce consulting, like trading time for money. I immediately didn’t like it anymore. And so, when I finished with these 15 clients, I turned this into a group coaching program. And I ended up doing that for a little bit where I recorded some lessons and then did some group coaching calls, reducing like 15 hours with 15 clients to like two hours a week. All the clients on a group coaching call. But then the pandemic hit and I didn’t feel comfortable with doing that anymore. And that’s where BETA Camp was launched. And I would say that if I didn’t do a lot of the things that I had done before, like career coaching and being able to charge a lot of money for an online service, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to charge a lot for an online camp. Like charge for what it’s worth in terms of value. And then in between that, I also tried to build an online course hosting platform for dance teachers and music teachers, like things that need feedback. But then we realized that you had to build everything that like teachable and kajabi has in order to like add in these other features. So that didn’t really work out, but that ended up being BETA Camp’s Student portal.
Matt Bowles: Can you explain what BETA Camp is and talk a little bit about how the initial idea came about?
Ivy Xu: The idea of BETA Camp came from my younger sister, who was 15 at the time, and she was just very lost in her journey of finding what her passion is and what to study post-secondary. So, the original idea was actually to take my sister to go and visit some friends so that she could shadow and look at all the different possibilities there were out there for her. But the pandemic hit and that was not possible. And I’m sure she didn’t want to listen to people talk about their jobs on Zoom, like no one wanted to do that. And so, BETA Camp ended up becoming this thing where we help kids build their first startup. And through the means of doing that, they learn what they need to do at each stage of building a startup and therefore all the different roles within a company so then they can discover what they really like doing and what they don’t like doing. And then they get to interact with real people working in those roles and it becomes relevant for them to listen to what these people do because it applies directly to their startup.
Matt Bowles: Can you talk a little bit about BETA Camp when you rolled it out initially, sort of the pilot for that and then from there, how you scaled it and built systems and processes and what Beta Camp looks like today.
Ivy Xu: Yeah. We first conceived of the idea of BETA Camp. So, my co-founder has been my best friend since we were about 11 years old. We went to middle school together, high school. We did the same program in college. We were roommates. And then she just finished her MBA program and had a summer off. And she’s like, okay, my mom is a grade three teacher. Parents of grade three kids are going crazy because kids are at home and they need something to do. And she said, why don’t we launch something together where we provide like fun activities for grade 30 kids, like 7- to 11-year-olds kind of thing. And I’m like, do we really want to spend the summer like entertaining like 7- to 11-year-olds on Zoom? And I was like, we have no competitive advantage here. Why don’t we build it for high school kids? Because my sister was in high school at the time. I knew that this was going to be a problem.
And at least my mom had connections to know her friends like my sister’s friend’s parents. We have some kind of outlet for this and we have an advantage where these kids who were going to go to summer schools and summer programs, they were all canceled. And personally, I’ve been through incubators and summer programs. We can build something similar online. So, the first thing that we did was we launched a website and put out a poster with a QR code to join our WeChat group because we wanted my mom to first share it. And that was it. Like, we messaged some friends who went to Stanford and Harvard and worked at Apple and Google were like, if we do this, if we end up running a summer program, will you just come and sit on a panel and like talk to these students? And they said yes. So, we’re like, great. Our camp counselors are from Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Google, Ikea, whatever, like all these different brands on our website. And that was like the main key highlight. We’re like, okay, you’re going to learn how to build a startup from these people. And that was about it.
And then we ended up sending this website and like QR code and everything around. And within four days we had 180 parents in the WeChat group being like, okay, when’s the info session? And this was like end of May, Memorial Day, like weekend. That’s when I built the website. And at that time, U.S. parents, their kids were out of school within two weeks. Like, we only had about four weeks max to like collect payments. So, we had to go through marketing and launch and like collect payments, build the entire program and do it in July and August. Honestly, the first iteration was just coming out of my mind of like what it took to like build a startup. We made a six-week program. Six weeks was just pulled because it was the intersection time between summers for us kids and Canadian kids. And we’re like, okay, six weeks is fine. I did an incubator program when I was 19 in university. Kind of based it off of like all the different steps that it took to launch a startup.
And so, we just had an outline. Once we actually started having kids in, we got 70 applications in round one and 50 applications for round two. So, we had about 120 applications. Ended up onboarding 72 kids when they paid. We started working on the curriculum and at that time we got the first two weeks before we started. And then we built the third week of the first week, the fourth week and the second week. And we got a lot of feedback from the kids. And because I had my little sister, we could test the entire curriculum on her first on what’s boring, what’s not. We got feedback after every session. But since then, it hasn’t evolved too much in the sense of what happens week over week. What has evolved is people think like some things are really boring. We add in activities, we add in cheat sheets to help kids take in information better. It’s not me doing the startup guidance anymore. We hire people, do startup guidance and small changes. I think like that as we master, like how do we scale this program? Like, at what point do we need expert people to come in? The head of innovation, IKEA, does our design thinking workshop, but there’s only one of them.
So even if we have like 50 students versus 200 students, like how do we scale that up? And so, we built out templates and curriculum, like workspaces for kids to actually be able to do it themselves and hire facilitators that are alumni to come in and make sure things run smoothly. So, things like that, like tweak what could make the program better. But just from those six weeks, kids really launch great startups. Like most teams monetize. We had 12 or 13 teams in that first summer. 80% of teams made some money. And then the kids from that cohort, like one kid who was 14 at the time, 16 now in January just raised $150,000 Canadian dollars, 125k USD from on deck, which is a totally professional accelerator that I’m part of. So, it’s been a really, really great journey.
Matt Bowles: That’s amazing when you think back now, Ivy, about all of your entrepreneurial experiences, the failures as well as the successes. What tips do you have for aspiring location independent entrepreneurs in terms of finding business ideas that can be built and executed, executed remotely and any other tips for becoming an entrepreneur?
Ivy Xu: I YouTube about this and I have a YouTube video about how to find business ideas, like five ways to find business ideas. Because this is exactly what we teach these like 12- to 17-year-olds. And if they can do it, I’m sure everyone listening to this podcast can 100% do this. If the question is like, how do you find business ideas? It’s number one looking for problems in this world, like problems that you personally experience and understanding that anything where you’re like working on a laptop in an office, you can work on a laptop at a ski resort, right? So, you can do anything from like e commerce to coaching to software and apps. But as long as it’s something that you see a problem in in the world. And one way to do that is like maybe think about an audience that you’re really interested in serving and start there. If you can’t come up with something that you personally experience or just walking around with a notebook all day and I can think of like 20 problems by 10AM every morning and just not enough time to go and solve all of them.
One other way that we teach a BETA Camp to work backwards from like big problems that you want to solve in the world, like climate change or like poverty and all these things that seem really overwhelming. But working back through theory of change is the concept of what needs to happen in order for poverty to not exist anymore and keep going until you get to a concrete step of what you can do. I think there’s a lot of different ways to do ideation, but where people and these kids that I see really struggle with is you just need to start really small and you start with like a very small audience and just kick off. We all want to solve humongous things. We want to do really amazing things. Looking at what Uber’s first iteration or Airbnb’s first iteration looked like, it’s something that you can build as well. Like DoorDash, their first iteration was just a website with a number on it where you call the doordash founders. You were like, I want food from that place.
And then the doordash people literally drove, like the founders drove to that restaurant, bought it, brought it to the house and got paid like pizza delivery, right? Like anyone can build a website on Squarespace, doesn’t take coding and like put their number on it and then like be able to do that. So, like that’s what we teach our kids. Like it’s a step-by-step thing. And like you scale when you need to scale and you have too many customers calling you and now you need like a customer service team and more people to do it. And then you need software to be able to support that. But until that happens, you can do all of these things yourself. And I think it’s just really important. This is like the number one thing that we teach at Behavior. We iterate this so many times. 10,000 experiments over 10,000 hours. Because I think kids these days in school, they write business plans, they like try to make their essays perfect and they like maybe they’re art perfect, I don’t know to get their A plus right.
But I think in school and most people who want to be entrepreneurs think that they need like a perfect business plan. They need to know everything that might happen in their plans and then like what they’re going to do about it at that point. But then you can’t predict step two. If you never get to step one, like you’re at step zero, you’re not going to be able to see step two. So, it’s about tried different things. If this works, great, follow up with it. But if it doesn’t, like try something else. It’s about how fast can you iterate an experiment. I think that’s the best advice that I would give.
Matt Bowles: That’s awesome advice. And once you build a business with a location, independent infrastructure that you can run from anywhere, and you decide that you want to do the digital nomad lifestyle, you’ve now been doing this for four years. And I want to ask your advice on structuring a fulfilling nomadic lifestyle over the long term over many years. Can you talk a little bit just about for you personally, how do you for example, choose your destinations and how long to stay and while you’re there, how do you balance work and travel and socializing? And you mentioned that you are nomading with your spouse. So, for relationship partners that want to consider this together, can you give some tips for doing this with a relationship partner as well?
Ivy Xu: Yeah, first of all, there’s a totally different way of traveling now. I would say people who want to be nomadic or are just newly nomadic, you feel like you’re always running out of time and you want to hit a bunch of different spots as fast as possible to make sure you don’t miss anything and then you get really burnt out. And I started like that too. So, I think the first step, where I’m sure anyone who’s been doing it for a few years will say is that like, at least stay a month. It’s good for your wallet for like Airbnb fees, but also, it’s exhausting. Think about like, instead of a week in one place, spend a month and use the weekends, which add up to a whole week that you can spend exploring. But I think there’s a whole different way of traveling where eventually you get traveled out and you need this meaning for why you still move around.
And for me, it’s for visiting different startup hubs. I love talking to different entrepreneurs. I love listening to the unique things about a market, like what makes it the way that it is and what opportunities and challenges are unique to this place. What opportunities that are for me or like for an expat to come in and help or to arbitrage some things or what would my life be like if I lived here? Like, what would I be working on and what can I take away from this place that can better my own life and business? So that’s something that I travel for. I specifically go to different startup hubs to learn from the people there. And I learned so much from China because they move so fast. They do nine, nine, six, like work nine to nine, six days a week and they iterate really fast and they’re really on the ground hustling. They’re not afraid. In the U.S. you’re like, growth hackers are like, okay, email and ads and like, how do I do things? But like not actually talk to individual customers. But there’s something really special about people going door to door and building this brick by brick and talking to every single person, even though it’s China, because they know that in order for things to really take off, they need their initial users. People are really not afraid to do dirty work, which I found that people are really afraid to do in Silicon Valley.
So, I like going to these places to learn about trends and cycles. But then I have friends that travel to stand-up comedy hubs because she’s a product manager who does stand-up comedy and she wants to go and network with people in standup comedy. And then I also know someone, they’re both from the Asian female nomads now Asian Wonder Woman community. And she specifically goes to places to learn about how the government handles mental health. Like, what are the resources in Each place, and she was writing a book about it. And I think that in the future, nomads, as you choose different places, you’re going to start choosing places where you find people that you want to meet or have experiences that you want to have. And that’s how I choose my places in terms of my husband.
So, he doesn’t have that goal. He kind of just follows me based on my goals. But for him, he has a remote job. For him, it’s more about seeing different places and having these different experiences, like more of a travel kind of experience, like a traditional traveling experience. But he gets very tired easily. Like, if it was up to him, we would be in a place three months at a time. But for me, I still get a little bit of that FOMO feeling. I’m like, there’s people to meet and places to go. I need to leave. But so, it’s hard to strike that balance.
The other challenge that we have, I would say, is like, being together all the time. We always try to book a one bedroom or at least a two bedroom so that there’s space in the sense of like, we work in different spaces. And this is still something that we are figuring out. But I know that another couple who travels, they spend Sunday apart, every single Sunday, so they have a chance to miss each other, and then they have a chance to share things that only they get to experience. For us, we don’t do that yet because every like three months, we usually, like, do our own thing for like two weeks. So, for example, next week I’m flying back to Ottawa for two weeks and he’s going for his bachelor party and we’ll meet back in San Francisco in two weeks. So, I think it’s good to take breaks away from each other. Whether that’s like, frequently every week or, like, you know, go for a weekend yourself somewhere, not being afraid to do that.
Matt Bowles: Awesome. Well, you mentioned the Asian female nomad community that you founded. Can you talk a little bit about that? And what led to the founding of that? What sort of motivated you and inspired you to create that? And then how has it evolved? And what is it like today?
Ivy Xu: Sure. So Asian Female Nomads was the original name of the community. It’s now called Asian Wander Woman. So, in case listeners are looking for on Facebook, the name has changed. My friend who I met in Silicon Valley when I worked there is an expat in Singapore now in early 2021. We just really wanted to make friends online because we’ve been in the pandemic for almost a year. And yeah, it was time to, like, connect with people online. Like, before I was like, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, you do a lot of zoom calls, and then it, like, faded. And then by like, March 2021, like, a year later, I was ready to go on the zoom call high again. So, we’re like, okay, why don’t we start a Facebook community that’s really, really niche and because it’s just easier to bring people together who strongly identify with those three adjectives. And she was building community in Singapore. She moved to Singapore right at the beginning of the pandemic, so she barely made any friends. It was just to honestly make friends online.
And we started bringing in, like 200 of our own. Anyone that’s Asian and female, we, like, brought into the community. And then we just started talking about things like, how do your parents feel if you move abroad? Because, yeah, Asian parents really don’t like it when their kids are living far away. You know, Asian parents expect kids to be filial, and Asian parents also expect Asian girls to be a bit more softer or, like, take a very traditional path, get a good job, marry a good husband, have kids early. So that’s something that we talk about. We also talk about what you do when, like, someone says chino at you, when you, like, walk down the street, like, how do you react? And, like, things that, like, are very unique, I think, experience for Asian women. And as we grew this community, we also ran events around, like, investing and egg freezing and how to start a coaching business. Like, things that will empower women to be nomadic and lead these unconventional lives. And what I realized through this, the growth last December, when we were out around 5, 600 members, I happened to be in Lisbon, where I fell into the Web 3 rabbit hole.
And I looked at our group and there’s always people asking about who has side hustles. How do I start one? I want to be nomadic. I need a different income stream, et cetera. We’re running events there. We were like, having remote job boards being put out, and I was like, what if we can bring all these women together who are already online skilled? They were all mostly working in the tech industry, or half of them already nomadic. So, they definitely had the ability to, like, sustain themselves through online work in some way. What if we can bring them together and they can launch side hustles as co-founders together? And that’s where the idea of the Dao came about, where, okay, I want this community to flourish, but it needs to go beyond me and my co-founder consistently posting and hosting events, we wanted more community ownership. I want to see everyone’s equals. I really think that like we can build better things and move forward more as a community as a whole, where everyone contributes.
And that’s why from Asian female nomads we rebranded to Asian Wander Woman. Not everyone identifies nomads like some people are expats or like people who live in different places but aren’t consistently traveling. So, first of all, people identify with it more. But also, we decided to as a spin off, like it’s two separate communities, spin out Wander Woman Dao, which the goal is to bring not just Asian women, but all women and non-binary male allies, etc. To come in. And the goal is to raise a community treasury through an NFT and then use that community treasury that the community owns and decides on where it goes to be able to fund people to work remotely and build the projects that they want to see in the world. And the one standard that we have is that this should empower more people to be able to be more nomadic.
Matt Bowles: That’s amazing. Well, I want to break down some of the jargon, let’s call it, that you used in describing all of that that some folks may not be familiar with. And I want to ask if you can sort of explain a handful of different terms when you said you went down the Web 3 rabbit hole. And I know you’ve been very immersed in investing in cryptocurrency and NFTs and then the creation of this Dao and all of that. But for folks that aren’t as familiar with the space, let’s just start with this term and concept of Web 3. How do you explain Web 3 to folks that haven’t really heard that term before?
Ivy Xu: Yeah, so in order to understand Web 3, I think you really need to understand Web 1 and two first. Like, how do we get to the third iteration of the Internet or like web, right. So, the first iteration, people often see it as like static where HTML first came about. And like websites were originally built, if you remember websites that were just like pages where you couldn’t interact with it. That was Web 1. When Web 2 came around because like Web 1 couldn’t store any of your data and therefore, like, you know, things like Airbnb and Uber and like Facebook, et cetera, they couldn’t do that because it just couldn’t. Didn’t have a database behind it. It couldn’t remember who you were. You can think of Web 2 as that where like databases were built behind for you to interact with. And a lot of social media came about in order for you to publish online. But the companies owned a lot of that data between Web 1 and 2.
The reason why the evolution happened to more digital islands, which are really just data stored in a lot of different companies, and they don’t really interact with each other. Just if you post a photo on Instagram, you have to download it again or post it on LinkedIn separately. The data pieces don’t really connect, and the ownership of it is not yours. But the reason why it evolved that way is because more closed networks, where companies were able to pay people and, like, hold their data and then, like, figure out how to improve their product on their data without everyone needing to follow the same standards as in Web 1, where, like, you know, websites are all built off the same standard. They were able to grow faster. And that actually was great for us because we got a lot of different tools that we now use. And then when we. Why, like, the evolution is happening into Web 3 is because a lot of people aren’t really happy with these digital islands with, like, Facebook owning all your data, Google owning all your data.
So, they believe that the people who are starting the web3revolution believe that as individuals, we should own our own data. So instead of Facebook holding our data, it should be that we have, like, a backpack where we take our data with us as we interact with the rest of the web. But it’s not really a backpack. It’s kind of like a key where you can unlock your data and give it to whoever you want to give it to. And so that’s how I kind of describe, like, Web 1, 2, and 3, but Web 3 as a whole, like, what I mean by falling down the rabbit hole is that there’s a lot of technologies that allow Web 3 to happen, and blockchain is the most fundamental one in smart contracts, where blockchain stores all your data and you can access it through a key and give access to it to whoever you want to give access to.
Matt Bowles: Can you also talk about, related to this, your journey with cryptocurrency and the evolution of decentralized finance. And of course, as an obvious disclaimer, folks, this is absolutely not investment advice. Anything related to cryptocurrency and NFTs, like any other asset class, comes with tons of risks, and any money you invest, you could lose it and all of that. So, we’re not giving any investment advice. I’m just curious about Ivy’s journey and where you’ve come out for yourself on this.
Ivy Xu: I think it’s really important to understand that when it comes to Web 3 and blockchain technology that there’s several different fields. There’s DeFi, there’s NFTs, there’s Daos, and then there’s like play to earn gaming. I think those are all the different things that people decided that they can do with cryptocurrencies and what they can do with blockchain technology. However, people who are experts in one field are not necessarily experts in another field. So, I think like my journey and this is something that I just recommend everyone do. There’s a free program online called Unit Masters and I went through that program. It’s like a six-week crypto literacy kind of course where they give you what I found most valuable were actually the assignments. So, every week there’s like two speakers that come in. There are free speakers everywhere. We’re running a Web 3 education series for Wander Woman Dao. We just had our blockchain one on one lesson today, but you need to go in and actually do the work.
And so, on week one they actually tell you the assignment is like, look up these terms and be able to explain it to someone. And one of them was Web 3. And then there’s like distributed ledger, like smart contracts. What is the scalability Trilemma. Why is blockchain innovative? Right. It’s like asking you to go out and answer these for yourself and put it into your own words. And then later on you go through what’s the difference between different blockchains? Like, why is there different blockchains? How do you move across them? Like, I think this program is really good for beginners. And I took this as a start. And then after that I started digging a bit deeper into the different fields. I decided that, you know, defi people are making a lot of money there. So that actually was the first thing that I fell into. And a community that I’m part of called Trends offered a Black Friday sale to some other members, like zero to DeFi course Cathryn Lavery. And it’s pretty good. They have a discord community too, so teaches you the basics. Like so instead of buying Ethereum, bitcoin, which are just coins, like the first thing that you can do is stake them. So yeah, I fell into defi space. I recommend looking at, there’s a YouTube video that Cathryn Lavery does which is all the different ways that you can make money off your crypto.
And so, I think there’s like staking, there’s lending there’s putting it into a liquidity pool, which means that like you put in two currencies and it’s just like a float for people to trade between the two and then you make a part of the transaction fee. So, things like that, like just, I would say get to know all the different ways and then start with like a really cheap type of coin and just get your, I guess, bearings of the DeFi space. And then if you don’t like it, that’s okay. There’s like all these different things. Like there’s people that specifically invest in NFTs and try to flip NFTs, which is a totally different game than like defi. But you can also stake NFTs because NFTs are still just technically a token, right? The same as a crypto currency, but they’re just non fungible, meaning there’s only one of them. I don’t flip NFTs, I buy NFTs to join communities that I want to be part of.
And then there’s Daos where you can go in and you can totally not understand anything about DeFi and work for a Dao and then get paid for your work. Play to earn games, allow you to play games and then earn something. Or you can buy an NFT, lend out that NFT and then make a portion of what someone does with that NFT. There’s a really popular game now called ICE Poker where in order to play poker and be at the table, you need to have an NFT and that NFT is really expensive. So, then there’s people that buy these NFTs and lend them out and then share in a portion of the poker earnings. So, my friend’s doing this, he’s a really great poker player and he’s training people to be better poker players so they could play for him so that he can make passive income off of his NFTs. So, a lot in this space I would start with trying to understand the basics. Terminology is really important. And then as you learn the terminology, you’ll also understand what there is because like it’s just so easy. It’s like Wikipedia. You click on something, you’re like, oh, what does this mean? You go somewhere else and then you have to go back to it and then it’s like a whole maze but a lot of exciting opportunities here.
Matt Bowles: So, when you explain NFTs to people that are not familiar with them, non-fungible tokens, how do you explain what an NFT is, is? And can you maybe give some examples of some NFTS that you have purchased. You were telling me about a really cool one before we started this interview that’s actually inspiring you to go to Ghana.
Ivy Xu: I explain NFTs to a specific target market, which is actually women in my community that I’m trying to get on board to Web 3 so that they can be part of the Wander Woman Dao community and then work for this Dao, right? So, an NFT is first visibly usually a piece of art, but it doesn’t need to be a piece of art. It can also hold a lot of data, like music or like a poem. In fact, the art can even be the same and then the token number is different. And so, like people buy and sell NFTs because of the utility of this NFT. Sometimes it’s just the value of the art. Just like an art collector who might collect pieces from famous artists just like that. An NFT could go up in price or increase in value, decrease in value based on how popular the artist is or how rare each piece is.
So that’s one thing. But NFTs can also provide utility in other ways. It can be a pass to a concert, it can give you access to people. You can think of it like buying a ticket to something and oftentimes it’s to a community which gives you access to the people in it and also a lot of different perks. And you can decide whether that’s worth it. But how that’s different than a normal ticket is the NFT retains in value, you actually can resell it. And as an NFT holder, you want this NFT to increase in value and therefore you want what you get with the NFT to increase in value. And that actually creates this flywheel effect where the people who buy into the community want to help the community thrive and add more value to it so that the access to it increases in value, so that what you hold then increases in value.
So, I think there’s a lot of really cool examples out there and I’ll give a few. The first one that I want to say is actually a woman led NFT that’s just for social impact. It’s called Women Rise. I hold it. And they’ve partnered with like Snapchat and they really support Malala Snapchat education plan. So, when you buy into this, like they donate a lot of money every single month from the secondary sales royalties as well as any minting, a huge percentage goes to charity. And then what they use this money to do is to advance women’s education. And their goal is to Build a metaverse school. So, a lot of this funding just generally goes towards a cause that you care about. And so, people who buy into it are also a community of people who are like minded and care about a similar cost. And you might not care if the NFT goes up or down in price if you just think of it as like a social impact project.
Then there’s the NFT that we were just talking about called the Royals NFT which was founded by someone in Ghana. And this NFT gives you access to a luxury gala, going to be in Ghana in December. And this is very much similar to like a concert ticket, an access pass, etc. And then with this ticket you also get concierge services around travel on their website. But I bought it because it’s cool piece of art and then it supports African culture and it gives me access to a cool gala.
Matt Bowles: That’s so awesome. I as well as an owner of a Women Rise NFT and am part of that community. And it’s super, super dynamic and very, very cool. There are tons of amazing stuff that’s being done with NFTs. So, let’s talk a little bit about your upcoming NFT project. And before we do that though, I want to ask if you can clarify a little bit more about the Dao, the Wander Women Dao. First of all, let’s talk about what that stands for. A decentralized autonomous organization. Can you explain what that means as a concept and, and then what the Wander Woman Dao is all about and what the NFT project is going to be all about?
Ivy Xu: Yeah, sure. So, Daos, as you mentioned, decentralized autonomous organizations just means that not a central person or team holds a lot of the decision-making power. So, by decentralized we mean that its decentralized ownership, decentralized decision making, more transparency across the entire organization because it runs on the blockchain. So, kind of already explained that a lot of these Web 3 fields are run on blockchain. So, the reason why we wanted to create a Dao community is because we wanted it to be decentralized where everyone contributes and everyone’s incentivized to contribute because they are an owner. So going into what Wander Woman Dao is, Wander Woman Dao is a venture studio Dao.
So, venture studio, being a startup builder, we’re going to build multiple different products and services that serve female and non-binary nomads or empower more people to be financial, location and creatively independent and free. And what that really means is not only do we build products in that space. But our members can come in and work remotely and get paid for their contributions and thereby turning them nomadic and being able to work remotely and get paid. And then the Dao portion is everyone in the community shares the ownership of the organization and therefore all the different products that are built through it. So, we’re launching with a community treasury which will be fundraised through an NFT launch. What that means is we have a core team and we’re creating art that is an NFT and we’re basically selling this art as well as ownership into the Dao.
So, when someone buys this majority of the money we decided on, 75% goes into the Dao treasury. And because they put that much money into treasury, they obviously own a part of it. And each NFT will also give them a vote on what happens with that Treasury. So that’s where the decision-making power is decentralized. So, we’ll have a way where everyone in the community can submit proposals on what we do with this treasury, such as build a safe like community-based housing swap or launch a business coaching program for everyone in the scout, right. Like what do we want to spend this treasury on? Anyone can propose, anyone can lead these projects and then it’s only decided on once.
Everyone that’s an NFT holder votes on this and why it’s so special and not just like another Kickstarter or Crowdfund or like a Facebook group. How it’s different is that it runs on blockchains, so all of our transactions and the treasury is all stored there and so anyone can go and look to make sure that no one’s tampering with that Treasury. And then the smart contracts that run on this blockchain can guarantee that the majority of votes, we definitely distribute those funds over to the right projects. Because everyone is an owner. We want to incentivize, like align incentives where everyone who’s a member comes and contributes and wants to bring up the value, wants to launch more products because then someone who comes in will get more value and therefore the price of entry will technically increase and so will their assets as an investment for their NFT.
Matt Bowles: So awesome. That’s really amazing. And of course, again, just to reiterate, this is of course not investment advice and it’s not an investment offering, but we are definitely going to link this up in the show notes so that you can go learn more about it, do your own independent research, see if it’s something that you may want to learn more about, possibly even get involved with and for folks that are interested after they do their own research in the NFT project. Do you have a general ballpark range for when the NFT project will launch? And is it possible for any Maverick Show listeners that are interested to potentially get on the Allow list for the NFT project and maybe even explain what that term means?
Ivy Xu: Yeah, so I’ll first explain what it means. Usually before a NFT launches to the public, they launch to some early supporters. And there’s some big projects that it’s really, really hard to get on an allowed list, which is an early mint. So, you get first access to buying a set number, usually at a more discounted price, to reward people who have been early supporters and are sure that they want to contribute and be part of this project. And so, for us, like, we’re probably going to launch around the end of May or early June, the time to be determined, because our art is still going through iterations. I think we’re really excited about it. If you want to follow us on Twitter, we’ll definitely be sharing those.
And I think this podcast will be linking the Discord link and everyone who’s part of our Discord will get the opportunity to get on the allow list, which will be at least 0.01 eth cheaper than the public mint. So, if you know that supporting women builders and investing in yourself to learn more about Web 3, as well as building different remote businesses, our whole goal is to empower our members to build remote businesses. And it doesn’t have to be in Web 3, then this could be a great way to put your money where your mouth is and join the community first. Discords obviously free. We have a lot of channels around ideation, building an MVP, how to fundraise for builders to support each other, and then you’ll also get first access to our website, the art iterations, and we’re building in public in our Discord right now.
Matt Bowles: That’s awesome. Well, I am a member of the Discord and super excited to be part of the community. I’m also following the project on Twitter and Instagram and we’re definitely going to link up all of that in the show notes. Folks can just go to one place at themaverickshow.com, go to the show notes for this episode and there you’ll find all the social media handles the link to join the Discord community, as well as to get more information on everything that you’re up to. Let me ask you one more question, Ivy, and then we’ll move into The Lightning Round and wrap this up. When you think back on all of your travels and all of your nomadic experiences and how all of that has impacted you as a person on your journey, why do you continue to be so passionate about travel? What does travel mean to you?
Ivy Xu: I would say that travel is the best way to get back a child’s eyes or like to see a place with fresh eyes, where, I don’t know, you just get this kind of inspiration from different places. So, I travel for these startup hubs to meet entrepreneurs, to get a different way of seeing the world, right. Either through cultures or through different experiences. I’ve chatted with some people that I’ve met in my travels and I’ve asked them why they travel. Actually, the most interesting people that I’ve met on why they travel is people that I’ve met woofing. And I haven’t worked very often. Like, I was in New Zealand. I had two experiences for two weeks working on, like, a farm. But it was very memorable. And I chatted with a girl who was from Korea, and she said that I travel because the people that I meet and the things that I do, I want to see the little things that I can take into my own life. And that has really stuck with me. And I see that not just for my own life, but for the businesses that I built as well. I think that’s a great way to get a competitive advantage, being able to know all the different ways to do something and finding the right way to do it for you.
Matt Bowles: Amazing. All right, Ivy, at this point, are you ready to move in to The Lightning Round?
Ivy Xu: Let’s go.
Matt Bowles: Let’s do it.
Ivy Xu: All right.
Matt Bowles: What is one book that has significantly impacted you over the years you’d recommend people check out?
Ivy Xu: I’m going to give two books that I feel like people don’t give. One is called Flowers to Algernon, and it’s a book about mentally retarded man in his diary that he takes some kind of scientific medical pill and he becomes smarter and becomes not just a normal person, but, like, a genius. And then he degrades back to being, like a retarded person. Like, that’s the exact word they use. And it’s just so fascinating following that journey and seeing the world through each stage of his, like, intelligence journey. Many of my friends that I’ve recommended this book to have cried during it. I did not cry, but I thought it was just, like, the best type of, like, fiction that really makes you think.
The second book is called Sum. I like recommending fiction books because I think nonfiction is usually the first level of reading where you want to get knowledge. But then fiction books are the ones where like if you can get something out of it, you know, the writer did really well. So, some is a book with a bunch of short stories about what the afterlife could look like. And it’s just the author reimagining all the different ways that what happens when you die. And there’s completely fiction, it’s not religious at all. I’ll just give a little bit of an explanation of the first idea that they have. The first thing that might happen after death is instead of living life where you’re happy one moment and then a few moments you’re sad and then like you sleep for eight hours a day and then the rest of the time you’re awake. What happens after death is you experience all of the same moments that you live through in life all at once.
So, you spend five like incredibly ecstatic days and you spend like 10 days showering and you spend like years sleeping and then whatever number of weeks cutting your toenails, etc. And at the end it was just like this thought piece of wow. Then you can’t even remember what it was like when moments shuffled between each other. And it’s just a really cool thought process to think about. Wow, we’re so lucky that we don’t experience five days of excruciating bone breaking pain all at once.
Matt Bowles: Wow. All right, we are going to link those books up in the show notes. Ivy, what is one travel hack that you use that you can recommend to people?
Ivy Xu: People number one with Airbnb, you can definitely ask for how fast the Wi-Fi is before you book a place. And then also like almost all monthly stays are negotiable. So how you could do that is message the host and just say that this place is slightly out of my budget. Would you consider because I’m staying for months, like giving a little bit higher of a discount. And most of the times they say yes.
Matt Bowles: Awesome. Knowing everything that you know. Now if you could go back in time and give one piece of advice to your 18-year-old self, what would you say to 18-year-old Ivy?
Ivy Xu: I think what 18-year-old me should know is you have the ability to create the life that you want. I think at 18 I couldn’t have imagined what my life would look like 10 years at that time. And it’s because I thought at 18 my life was just like planned out for Me, I was going to go to college, university. I was going to graduate. I was going to be a consultant or something. And then I was going to live in Toronto. At that time, I didn’t even know about Silicon Valley. I think it’s just you’re always going to learn new things and ways that, like, life could be. And if someone else can do it and so, can you, awesome.
Matt Bowles: If you could have dinner with any person that’s currently alive today that you’ve never met, just you and that person, for an evening of dinner and conversation, who would you pick?
Ivy Xu: Balaji. I don’t know. I can’t pronounce his last name. I just remember his first name. Do you know who he is?
Matt Bowles: Balaji Srinivasan?
Ivy Xu: I think so. He has a new book coming out. I think that’s really fascinating. I love learning about how cities and governments and, like, state’s function. And also, very curious about crypto cities, like city Daos, where you can actually establish something and then recreate it from the ground up. I think he talks a lot about that and I’m really excited for his book to come out.
Matt Bowles: Yeah. Baladi Srinivasan will link his information up and his new book up in the show notes as well. That would be a super interesting dinner. All right, Ivy, of all the places that you have traveled up to this point, what are your top three places that you’d most recommend people should definitely visit?
Ivy Xu: Yeah, I love places that surprise me. So, number one, I loved Egypt. I think it’s so underrated. And especially the Red Sea, that’s where I learned to dive. And it was because I went snorkeling off the beach and I saw two dolphins and I managed to swim with two dolphins. I was like, okay, I have to learn how to dive here. And that ended up being a trip that we really, really extended. And then I would say Nairobi, Kenya, I think it’s the place where I found the best Chinese food outside of China, and also the best mobile payment infrastructure outside of WeChat and China as well. Just places that really, really surprised me. And it’s not just because I like Chinese food. And the payments infrastructure is really impressive, but it just was nothing like what I expected, actually. Payment infrastructure is really, really important for developing nations. And Nairobi is just like a fabulous city. And then, of course, China. I really think that if you want to see what the future looks like, go to China. And it’s just really, really hard to see it without actually going there because there’s so little news about its what people is building there and how people are living. And so, you have to experience it, I think, for yourself.
Matt Bowles: I’ve been to the other two places you recommended. I’ve spent about a year in Egypt, based in Cairo, and I’ve been to Nairobi for about a month. And yeah, I totally second that. Both incredible and special and important places have not yet been to mainland China. So, I am definitely going to hit you up, Ivy, when I’m ready to plan that trip.
Ivy Xu: Yeah.
Matt Bowles: Do I feel like I need to spend a really substantial amount of time there and with your encouragement about how easy it will be to work there, I’m definitely even more encouraged now to start thinking very seriously about setting that up. All right, final question. What are your top three bucket list destinations? These are places you have not yet been highest on your list you most want to see.
Ivy Xu: Okay, that’s easy. I’m talking about these for my honeymoon recently. Antarctica is one of them. Really want to go there. I really want to do a road trip down Chile. I’m going to call that the same trip, like a road trip down Chile to the end, and then go on that cruise for Antarctica. That’s like one trip. West Africa and South Africa haven’t been. And then northern lights in Norway, Finland. This is more than three. And then Brazil. I haven’t been to the Amazon. Yeah, India. Oh, so many places.
Matt Bowles: All right, we’ll just give you, like, a top seven. It’s all right. It’s all good.
Ivy Xu: Yeah. Yeah.
Matt Bowles: That’s amazing. Well, you and I have talked a good bit now about West Africa, which is an incredible region. I was fortunate to spend a few months there in 2019, and definitely when you’re ready to go and planning your trip to go to the gala in Ghana, definitely hit me up, and I’ll give you some tips for that because it’s a super special region and Ghana is one of my favorite countries in the world, so that’s amazing. All right, Ivy, I want you to let folks know how they can find you, follow you, connect with you, learn more about what you’re up to. How do you want people to come into your world?
Ivy Xu: World, yeah. I think the best way to find what I do is at ivyxu.com. From there, you can find all my other socials, BETA Camp, Wander Woman, Dao, and then I’m going to launch a weekly short digital postcard newsletter to kind of update everyone also about my travels and work. Just the new ideas that I come across; you can find all of that on my website for Wander Woman, Dao. I think we’re linking the discord down below and then we’re most active on Twitter.
Matt Bowles: Amazing. Everything that we have talked about in this episode will be in one place. Just go to themverickshow.com, go to the show notes for this episode and there you will find links to everything we have discussed. Ivy, this was amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Ivy Xu: Perfect. Thank you so much for having me. This is really fun.
Matt Bowles: All right, good night, everybody.
