Next week I will be in Istanbul for the first-ever meeting of our entire product team, April 10-12.  I will meet 18 guys from 9 countries, many of them for the first time.  Then, I will be in Singapore April 14-15, Ho Chi Minh City April 17-18, and Hanoi April 22-23.  If you want to meet in any of these locations, send a note to info@assembla.com.

We’ll be excited to meet each other.  But, the big demand seems to be for Assembla T-shirts.  I still save tattered insignia clothing from my past jobs and gigs.  Those are hard-won threads that bring back memories of the colleagues who shared them.  The surprise was that my kids wanted Assembla T-shirts.  I could win the Nobel prize and they wouldn’t spend ten seconds asking about it at dinner, but T-shirts are apparently worth something.

We will do some roadmapping and decide what goes into the product.  So, get your requests in at feedback.assembla.com.

Istanbul has good food, and great works of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires.  It is located at the crossroads of Europe and Asia.  But, the main attraction is Turkey’s accommodating visa policies that allow most of our guys to go with no advance notice.  I think it is not a coincidence that Turkey has recently been the fastest growing economy in Europe and the Middle East.

This should be a lesson to American politicians.  If you want more jobs in the US, open the borders.  There are plenty of people who would like to come to the land of the free and work with us.  They would pay taxes, save money, and push up the price of housing, reversing many of America’s recent economic problems.  Oppressive visa and immigration rules are keeping those jobs, and even visitors, in other countries, which is almost a pure economic loss.

Actually, our two team members from Vietnam have since moved to the US.  I hope to do more recruiting and keep the talent flowing.  Vietnam has more Assembla users per-capita than any other country in east Asia or south Asia except Singapore.  I hope to meet some customers and some startups in Singapore. Istanbul is under-represented, with about the same population as Moscow, and only 1/10th the users.  Maybe we can turn that around.