Having lived across Seoul, Gapyeong, Osaka, Kyoto, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago, I have always had my eyes open for arbitrage opportunities. What are arbitrage opportunities? Something as simple as not forgetting to take kimchi on my flight back to school already tells you everything you need to know.
In Korea, kimchi is cheap, abundant, and high quality. In the U.S., it's marked up and diluted. Ask any international student from South Korea, and they will all agree that no matter what city you're in the United States, the food is lackluster compared to anything Seoul or Tokyo has to offer. It's not just cuisine. Despite how much capital is focused in the few cities in the United States, and how predominantly wealthy the country is, 4 in 10 Americans have never stepped outside the United States, and 1 in 9 never leave their home state. We always think opportunity is in America. But we rarely think of the tremendous resources the 194 other countries have to offer.
An amazing example of a company that successfully executes this value delivery is Naadam. Naadam sources high-quality cashmere from Mongolia and sells it at a middle-market price, ranging from $150–$600. They have successfully placed themselves above Uniqlo, Zara, and H&M — the cheap cashmere providers — while providing an affordable alternative to the hyper-luxury cashmere brands like Loro Piana or Brunello Cucinelli — all by figuring out that no large company in fact still monopolizes the Mongolian cashmere supply chain.
Naadam's core bet was cashmere arbitrage: source directly from Mongolian herders and cut out traditional luxury markups. To think of it, Naadam performed on one of the key business ideas that didn't "have" to be born in 2013. An American cashmere brand signing exclusive contracts with Mongolian herders could've happened 30 years ago. And yet it happened just a decade ago, simply because most Americans never have the opportunity to see these gaps.
In reality, our entire living is comprised of arbitraged products. Almost every single product that you see on Amazon is drop-shipped by individual sellers from Chinese factories or platforms. The exact same chair that sells for $150 on Amazon can be found for 1/10th of its price on Taobao. Yet very few people other than the sellers themselves realize this gigantic arbitrage opportunity, and we take it as given. Very few end consumers put in the additional effort of downloading a Chinese e-commerce app, running a translator, and finding a supplier to get it to your doorstep.
The opportunities are endless, and the emergence of South Asian and African economies will lead to endless more. Cultural arbitrage is currently being realized in New York's fine dining space — where restaurants like COQODAQ (which I personally guarantee would never survive over a week in the culinary battlefields of affluent neighborhoods in Seoul) can sell Korean chicken nuggets with caviar at $60 because they're branded as "authentic" and "elevated."
This is where Edward Said's Orientalism comes in — the Western tendency to view the East through a romanticized, exoticized lens. For an arbitrageur, this isn't just a sociological critique; it's a profit margin. When you package a mundane staple from the East and present it to a Western audience as an "exotic experience," you are monetizing the distance between reality and the Western imagination.
The mistake of the current era is treating AI as the final destination — a product to be sold in a subscription box. In reality, the next billion-dollar company will treat AI as the ultimate information asymmetry machine. While the world is distracted by AI's ability to write poetry, the true contrarian will use it to bridge the gap between a Mongolian herder and a New York boutique. They will use LLMs to negotiate with suppliers in Mandarin, computer vision to spot quality discrepancies in a factory in Addis Ababa, and predictive logistics to move "suitcase kimchi" at a global scale.
The next unicorn won't be a software company; it will be a global trade empire with a software soul. It will look at a $60 chicken nugget in Manhattan, see the $2 street food in Seoul, and build the automated, invisible bridge that captures the $58 in between.