Written by Matthew Fisher

I was sitting in the now barren living room of my former startup house, which like me, had been abandoned by the co-founders of my former startup. Unlike the house, I was abandoned for good reason. I hadn’t been productive enough. I was left with a couple dozen thousand dollars. I took half of it, and bought call options for NVIDIA at nearly 3x what its valuation was at the time of ~$200 to nearly $600. I figured, if I was out of my ground breaking Generative AI startup, just on the eve of the revolution, I might as well get rich off having predicted this all the way back in 2019, even if through high risk gambling.

My best friend, Jackson, was in the living room with me. We were figuring out what I should do next. I had moved to silicon valley this time around about a year prior, and in that entire year, I had been single the entire time. Some statistics: I am 5`9, I had a BMI of around 30, I had a full head of hair, I was skinny fat, maybe somewhat wide shoulders, I was mildly (perhaps mostly benignly) manic depressive and for any partner who dated me long enough, it showed. I also had a really high IQ and good career by world and american standards (like almost everyone in Silicon Valley). Nonetheless, I had received zero dating interest in my entire year in the valley. To be fair, this was about par for the course for me anywhere in the US. The only people interested were women significantly lower class than I, and by distributions of attractiveness of men and women, usually uglier than I was as well. My previous girlfriends I had left behind over the previous decade had been from Japan, Japan, and Costa Rica respectively. Probably worth pointing out ethnically I am British though often mistaken for looking Jewish and/or Austrian (not many Austrian jews these days of course).

I had fallen deeply in love with Silicon Valley, as many curious brilliant people who move here do. I often explain American cities this way: If you’re extremely smart you move to SF, if you’re extremely attractive you move to LA, if you’re not quite smart enough to be smart in SF, nor quite hot enough to be hot in LA, you move to NYC to be merely very smart and very attractive. Why would an optimistic and voraciously curious nerd not want to live in the bay? Well, I felt that if I stayed here, I would simply die alone. Not only did spending a life without sex (in the most asexual city in the world by my estimation) seem unpalatable, spending a life without the love of a woman, or a family, sounded like a life barely worth living. So Jackson and I decided to fly to Japan for an indefinite amount of time, until I found a partner to move back to the bay with.

In Japan I didn’t touch a computer for 2 nearly months, except to binge watch anime as part of my immersive Japanese learning. I would often go whole weeks not speaking nor reading anything not in Japanese, much to the admiration and inconvenience of my travel partner Jackson. Despite all this, I found myself with shockingly little dating attention in my two months there. One night, at 2am, sitting in an internet cafe room in Shinjuku, the seediest part of town, I switched my bumble to travel mode, and chose nearby countries, and saw the women in each. My profile portrayed me as a smart nerdy guy with a good career and anti-normie personality. I was just being myself. In most countries, I got very little interest with this pitch. What shocked me is when I switched to Vietnam, and later, Singapore (and much later, Beijing), I got insanely more interest. It seemed there were places where women wanted to date guys like me (we will discuss my model for why later). What’s more, these women were not only much more successful and intelligent seeming than the sparse few women I would match in any US city, they were also skinnier, and by my estimation, more attractive. Their messages also were much more kind, much less skeptical, much more optimistic.

Jackson and I had already had plans to visit ICLR in Rwanda, so after we went there, and Dubai, Jackson decided to go home, and I decided to visit Vietnam. Within only a week, I had found the love of my life.

Ngan had attended undergrad in the US doing computer science at University of Minnesota. For four years she lived with her aunt, uncle (who had escaped from Vietnam on a boat at a young age after the way), and cousin, driving a $1000 car without heating through the Minnesota winters where it would break down on the side of the road nearly once a month.

She is a shy person. She didn’t date anyone in her four years there, she had never had plans to. When it was time to go back to Vietnam, she applied for, and began working at, the fastest growing startup in the country. She began dating one of her classmates from her high school (one of the best in Vietnam, where she had been her class Valedictorian). She, like many women, especially smart ones, really valued a partner who was an intellectual equal. Her former classmate was maybe one of the only men who had stayed in Vietnam, the rest had left the country, as smart men in developing countries often do, to find better career opportunities. He had not been a good student, and was proving to not be a great businessman. His brother was attending Harvard, he was back in Vietnam living with his parents. Ngan tried this for two years, but eventually the discrepancy in their life choices were insurmountable. She desperately wanted to find a man both as smart and ambitious as her, but nearly all the men in Vietnam like that left by the time they were old enough.

In her two years on Bumble, she had swiped right on two people, I was the third. She is a patient, careful, and romantic person. When she saw my profile, she thought it was a dream. A smart, curious, anti-normie guy who had ambitious career goals. So few and far between came through Vietnam, even amongst the tourists.

When Ngan came back to SF, one thing she couldn’t believe was how many men in SF who had all these great traits were also single. Frankly, I had started to wonder why myself.

In the rationalist community there is often a distinction drawn between gears level models and black boxes. (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/B7P97C27rvHPz3s9B/gears-in-understanding). It is one thing to simply be able to know which countries or regions you are more likely to find people you like, or to predict where more men or women will be single, it is a higher caliber thing to know what the underlying mechanisms are that achieve this.

What Ngan and I are working on at Love Labs is the culmination of our gears level models of why men in the bay are single, and why we can make many of them not so.

If you are a single man in the Bay, and like me, don’t want to leave the bay, but also don’t want to resign yourself to a life without a partner and family, we think we can help you! Sign up, fill out our personality tests, and come on a vacation with us to meet 15 women, one of whom could be the love of your life.