Brian Casel: [00:00:00] Hey, it's Open Threads. I'm Brian Casel. It's my podcast. Welcome to it. Back on the show today is Laura Roeder. We are continuing our conversation. You know, it's funny. I've been following Laura for many years now through her work on Paperbell most recently and you know, when she was running Edgar and everything else.

But I did not realize that Laura no longer lived in the States. She lives in the UK in Brighton. Um, that was news to me, even though she's actually been there for four years. So we had a really good conversation. This is, uh, not so much about business, a little bit about, you know, what it's like to be an entrepreneur living, living there compared to America, but it was mostly just about life in the UK and making the move in the transition from the U S to the UK and some differences in lifestyle differences in, uh, raising kids in, in Europe compared [00:01:00] to, uh, America.

Yeah, kind of a fun episode. I learned a lot. It's, uh, I always find it really interesting, especially with fellow Americans who move abroad. It's really amazing and unique freedom that we have in what we get to do, you know, running businesses online and, and all that, all that kind of fun stuff. So, let's talk to Laura.

Laura, welcome back to the show. And we had a really great conversation about like the business side of things last time. I've been following you for all these years. I only recently realized that you're in the UK. I didn't even know that.

Laura Roeder: Well, you know, we know each other through the internet. So

Brian Casel: Yeah, the internet is just like one place, right?

Yeah. I mean, when did you guys make the move?

Laura Roeder: Yeah, so I've been living in the UK for four years now. Actually, I moved in like March or April, so it is like pretty exactly four years. Oh, wow.

Brian Casel: Okay. Where were you in the States before that?

Laura Roeder: So I have lived mostly [00:02:00] in LA, in Venice beach. And then I was in Austin, which is actually my hometown.

I was in Austin for about a year before we moved to Brighton, which is where we are now, which is just South of London in England. Unfortunately, I left Austin before everyone I know moved there right now. Everyone lives there, but they didn't. It was just me and Noah Kagan. Before that, you were there before Austin was cool, right?

But the good news is I bought two houses. So that was a good move.

Brian Casel: Okay. Very cool. And you have kids, right?

Laura Roeder: Yes. I have a three year old, almost four year old and a seven year old.

Brian Casel: Okay, cool. So it was just the seven year old when you guys made the,

Laura Roeder: yeah, I was actually pregnant with my daughter when we moved.

Yeah.

Brian Casel: Very cool. Was the plan to move there like longterm sort of settled down forever in the UK or was it like a temporary, let's see how this goes. Like, what were you guys thinking?

Laura Roeder: Yeah, so my husband Chris is from Brighton, so his mom's here, and he has a [00:03:00] brother that's here, and our nephew, so we have a pretty good, and like, lots of cousins and stuff with kids, so we have a pretty good base here, and we had been trying to figure out where we wanted to live, so my seven year old was born in L.

A., I, I love L. A. personally, I know there's a lot of L. A. haters out there, I love L. A., I loved living in L. A., But L. A. with a kid with no family around was hard. Like, my one very best friend in L. A. when my son was born lived an hour away. And anyone with kids knows, like, putting a newborn in the car for an hour is, like, not a cute situation.

When you're stuck on the freeway and they're just, like, screaming their head off.

Brian Casel: I know it all too well.

Laura Roeder: Yeah. So it's a bad time. So we're like, okay, this does not seem to be. the place with kids. So we're like, okay, next we'll try Austin because my parents are there and I'm from there. And as everyone thinks now, Austin can be a fun place to live, [00:04:00] but we, we're not loving Austin and We had always known that we'd do some amount of time in Brighton.

My husband's really close to his mom, and it was always in the cards that we'll live in England at some point. So we weren't loving Austin. I was pregnant with my daughter, and the pregnancy felt like, okay, this will be the good, I can have her in Brighton. She can be born there, and that can be a good transition.

And yeah, it's like once we got here, we just loved it. Sometimes a place just clicks, and you're like, okay. This is the place for us. I mean, I love not living in America. Uh, and Brighton is, we're just an hour south of London, so you can still go to London for events and theater and stuff like that. But Brighton is pretty small.

What I love is if I meet someone in Brighton, I can walk to their house. It's dense, it's not that big, it's on the seafront, but it's big enough that there's still tons of like shops and restaurants and stuff like that. It's known as like creative [00:05:00] place.

Brian Casel: Yeah, super cool. We did like around the country Airbnb thing.

We had our first, our second, we were pregnant, like on our way back. We were like, all right, now we're gonna have number two. Let's like book it back to Connecticut. But we toying with the idea of like settling somewhere else. Maybe Austin, maybe Colorado. We just came back here because my parents are here and having like the local babysitter is so huge.

Laura Roeder: Yeah. Once you have kids, you understand why everyone just like moves back near their parents once they have kids. Yeah, exactly.

Brian Casel: Like before that, it's like get as far away as possible, but you know what? It's actually pretty convenient. Good idea. Yeah. All right. So tell me about not living in America. I mean, what was it about?

Maybe you realize this after you guys settled in the UK, but like, what are the things that come to mind there?

Laura Roeder: So, I think England is Europe lite, so England is not as European as, I don't know, France or Spain or Italy, like more, in some ways more similar to America culturally, but there's just lots of little things, like, I mean, one is [00:06:00] walking culture.

I actually don't have my driver's license, which is A little embarrassing. I need to get my driver's license, but you have to take a driving test. So I'm very intimidated by the whole thing. So I keep putting it off.

Brian Casel: The opposite side of the road.

Laura Roeder: I mean, forget it. Yeah. So we have a car and sometimes we use it on the weekend to go to the countryside, but you don't need a car for your day to day life here.

Just like, I remember I was listening to a Huberman podcast. It's like this health podcast. So it's a popular podcast where he talks about all this like health biohacking stuff, and he was talking about how important it is to get sunlight in your eyes in the morning. And at first I was like, okay, he means like, as soon as you wake up, you need to go like right outside.

And then I realized that he just meant generally in the morning. And I thought like, who doesn't get sun in their eyes in the morning? Like, why does he need to tell people that? That seems weird. And I realized, oh, it's because. You go from your house, you walk two feet to your car, maybe you don't even go outside, right, if your car is in a garage.

And then you, like, drive to the kids school, you jump out, like, you drive to the office. It's so easy in [00:07:00] America to be inside all day that you have to have a podcast to tell people, like, like, get your face out of fresh air, like, once a day. So, just walking to school, walking to my office, walking to the grocery store.

is so much more common in the UK, and I do think it's a much less consumerist society. Again, it's not like people are living in some utopia where no one has any things, but just things like having much smaller houses.

Brian Casel: No, I totally see that, and Feel it like every day in America, obviously everything just seems like so unhealthy here too.

I'm always like in awe of everyone who like, lives like completely health conscious lives in America. I feel like it's so difficult between like, you go to a restaurant and like everything on the menu is like a massive pile of food or like the commercials or the junk food and all that kind of stuff.

Laura Roeder: Right. To not be overweight in America, you have to be like, I'm really gonna devote my life to this. Whereas, because if you live in a way where there's no walking, it's like, okay, well, I'm gonna have to set [00:08:00] aside dedicated time to go to the gym just to make sure I'm not sitting all day. Yeah, and I'm gonna have to be really careful about The packaged foods I eat.

I mean, when you start reading about it, there's just so many crazy things. Like all the ingredients that are banned in Europe, then America is like, no, that seems okay, but it's known to give you cancer. And it's crazy because the food companies make a different version. It's a lot of the same. Companies that make the Lay's potato chips or whatever.

It's like the same company manufactures a version of the potato chips without all that stuff that they sell in Europe. So, you know, if they wanted to, they could sell you the same one in America, but they don't have to.

Brian Casel: So they don't, yeah, crazy. I was going to ask like about this might be super boring, but like the process of moving abroad.

I mean, I guess your husband is a citizen there dual citizen and like getting the visa and everything was like, I mean, you don't need a visa.

Laura Roeder: Oh, you are so wrong. It is so hard. So yeah, I had no idea about this before. A lot of people think that you just like marry someone from another country and then you can just go to their country.

That is 0 percent how it [00:09:00] works. It works at all. I thought that too. So one, so if you marry someone from the UK, you can apply to be a British citizen. It's an extremely expensive process. It's an extremely long process. The way it's designed is actually to have you living in separate countries. Like we ended up traveling, so we didn't have to do that.

But it's like, what? So it's designed that one person has to be there already because the person who's the sponsor has to prove that they can provide an income for the other person. Which is also crazy. So like if one of you were a stay at home parent, like women often are, right? Like so if the mom was the British one and you had a baby and the guy was the income earner, that wouldn't work.

They'd be like, nope, too bad for you. Like mom's going to get a job and has to show the W2 earnings. And that's if you're from like a quote unquote good country that they like. There are lots of countries that they're just like, nope, we don't like the likes of you. We're not going to let you come or like, God forbid you have some criminal history.

Like if you sold marijuana when you were 20, like good [00:10:00] luck being able to immigrate to another country ever. It's very hard and it's very complicated. And yeah, as an American, I think we just often don't have any concept of it.

Brian Casel: It's true. I mean, the number of people around here, I mean, myself included sometimes during like the Trump years, it's like, Oh, we're going to get out of here.

Like, forget this place. It'd be so easy to just move to Canada or move to the U. K. or something like that, like, a lot harder than you think.

Laura Roeder: Yeah, and there's really only a path to immigration if you don't happen to marry someone from that country. The way people do it are like to go to university there, and then sometimes there's a path to stay there, or If you have a ton of money, like several hundred thousand, you can invest in that country.

I mean, now like Portugal is really innovating right now. Portugal is saying we want entrepreneurs to have visas in Portugal, which I think is really smart. And hopefully we'll see more countries doing that. For example. There's no path for me to help my parents move to the UK. If my parents were, wanted to move to the UK, they would just have to do it as an investor.

They would have to have the money to be able to [00:11:00] do it. And the investors, just because they're my parents and I'm not a UK citizen yet. I always confuse resident and citizen. I don't have my UK passport. I am here legally. I don't have my UK passport yet. You can't apply for that until you've been here for five years.

But yeah, once I'm a full everything, there's still no pass for me to bring my parents over.

Brian Casel: So, uh, you guys are basically like settled and like planning to stay there, like long term kids growing up through the school system there and everything. Yeah. Very cool. What's that been like for the kids growing up in the UK?

Laura Roeder: Well, they have British accents, of course, which is very adorable. So my son is seven, so he's in what's called year two here, because they start a little earlier, like he's basically in first grade.

So I haven't had an American elementary school experience to compare it to. But the education seems better here, just as far as your standard public school. Also, just little things, like in America, schools have starting really early in the morning. Does your kid's school do that?

Brian Casel: They're in kindergarten and then second grade and they're going to school [00:12:00] around the bus picks them up at like 7 40 a.

m Yeah, yeah, it's pretty early.

Laura Roeder: So 740 so so many kids in America don't get enough sleep It's just like literally impossible. The math doesn't work out I mean, maybe when they're little they can but not if they're older and they have to be at the bus at 740 Like if you get up at 7, it's like a mad dash and imagine

Brian Casel: it is crazy with kids sleeping though I mean, they're like sleeping by 8 30 p. m. So they're getting like 11, almost 12 hours of sleep sometimes, but like crazy, but like the schedule, what else about like kids? Well, I guess they're really like, they have like UK accents. I was going to ask about like being a foreigner in a country as a child, right? Like I've had a friend who moved to France, but like the kids were, they just, grew up part of their lives in America, anything like that sort of like come into play with like growing up.

Laura Roeder: Well, my kids are not foreigners. I am. Yeah, exactly. Right. But they don't really have any identity like that, especially of course, with the language being the same. So they're not, of course, having to learn a new language or speak a new language. I did realize the other day that they'll have British [00:13:00] accents as adults, which kind of blew my mind.

Like I'm used to it now. Then I was imagining my daughter being like 25 and I'm like, Oh, she's just going to be like a full blown English person. Which does seem a little bit funny to me, but I mean, the language thing makes it so much easier. This is another thing Americans just don't realize, like, learning another language to the level where you can have friends in that language is literally like a 10 year process.

There's a huge difference between being able to go to a shop, And have friends that you're, like, making jokes and cultural references. I mean, even here, a lot of things are called different things. And just little things, especially at school, they're like, Oh, we're having a tombola. What is a tombola? And then they said, Oh, you bring a bottle.

And I was like, of alcohol? I actually am still not sure. Because you bring a bottle of, I think it can be, like, shower gel or something. And then you, like, win a bottle. But I'm like, can it be alcohol? Or is that in poor taste? I don't know. But there's just a lot of little things [00:14:00] like that, like I'll have to text someone and be like, explain to me how this works.

I have no idea what's going on here.

Brian Casel: Totally. My wife is from the Philippines originally and then she moved here and yeah, like she says the same thing about like a lot of these like cultural references, like are you being sarcastic or is that real? Like I can't understand. And I'm from New York originally, so it's like even like things that I'm saying, like Just a New York thing that like, nobody even knows.

So I guess like last part of this is you were talking a bit about it, but like entrepreneurship, like doing what you do, running a SAS business in the UK, obviously we know a lot of people in that part of the world, but like, how is that different? That lifestyle, any thoughts of like what differences?

Laura Roeder: Yeah.

So, I mean, this is something that actually I was not expecting. That's been hard about the move is. I had such a strong network in America that I would see at conferences of entrepreneur friends. I had a lot of close friends that I've never lived in the same city as, but I would see at conferences a few times a year.

And all of the Small business SaaS space. Like I knew [00:15:00] all the founders, so it wasn't that hard. And when I moved to the UK, I did decide not to go to anything in North America because I just had to put a black and white rule on it because everything happens in North America. And it's such, I have little kids like to take the time away and then jet lag on both ends and the travel.

It's going to be really a full week for any, a two or three day conference is always going to be a full week, really with jet lag and stuff like taking away your time and travel and. So I'm like, I'm just not going to go to anything in America just so that I'm not constantly feeling like I'm missing out or behind or whatever.

I was really focused on building a network here in the UK and in Europe, which I definitely have started to now, but I didn't realize how much happens in America. I didn't realize the degree that America. Is where everything is happening. So you meet like in person meetups? Everything. So I'm bootstrapped, but obviously I knew like [00:16:00] funding Silicon Valley.

That is still hugely, hugely, I mean, there's more funding happening around the world, but that's hugely in America. But I think I thought like, okay, well, I'm not raising money. So like, it doesn't really matter where I am, but I wanted to do some mastermind, like business coaching, like something to get help with my business.

I found one in the UK. I actually love it. Thank God. It's great. I wanted to do something in person. I'm like, there's just no, there's one thing you were talking about. Oh, there's so many business coaches. Like not here. There's not, there's a few, but just the whole like ecosystem of yeah. I meetups conferences or like when I see someone with a business that I want to connect with, the odds are very, very high.

They're going to be in the U S

Brian Casel: yeah. Whenever I had friends who moved from the U S to Europe, the time difference. It always seems like that would be really difficult for me to adjust to. Although today, almost everything that I do is asynchronous, except for like podcast interviews, basically. But when I think about if I had like a large team that I had to interface every single day and they were [00:17:00] mostly in the U S time zone, that would be really difficult.

Like I have a friend who moved from Portland to Austria for like a year. And he was like, yeah, I just moved my whole workday starting from 3 PM. And then I worked till like midnight or something. And I'm just like that I'm such a morning person. I can't do that.

Laura Roeder: Well, that's what happened with Edgar. That was a big impetus to move myself out of the business totally because.

You can't work those hours when you have little kids. You can't be like, oh, sorry, I'm working from four to eight. This is the only kid hour. Good luck with your partner being like, yeah, I'll just do everything. Like most people don't want to never see their children again. So yeah, if you have little kids, you can't just shift into that evening time, which is the prime American work time.

And I'm like you also, I like to work in the morning. So it's that too, right? So you end up feeling very disconnected. Because I normally end my workday at three when my kids get off school. But to talk to you, I do one or two days a week until five. But even going until five, I still don't have any overlap with West Coast.

5 p. m. [00:18:00] here is 9 a. m. there. So they have to start at eight to have. A call with me. So it creates this constant thing where I feel like a jerk because sometimes I want to talk to someone and I'm like, I want to talk to you, but only if you can get up really early.

Brian Casel: But there's a two hour window that we gotta work on.

Yeah.

Laura Roeder: Yeah. I'm like, I have a very specific time to talk to you. So yeah, even though it's like, okay, I can still text with my friends or whatever. A time zone thing is real.

Brian Casel: Crazy. Well, at some point I'll hit a conference somewhere in Europe. Maybe we can meet there. I'm not going to see you at the U. S.

Microconf, wherever it is.

Laura Roeder: I'm never coming to the U. S., so you have to come here.

Brian Casel: Yeah. Laura, this was awesome to connect with you and hear so much of this story. Thanks for doing it. Thank you.