Infrastructure

The Miracle on the Han

I usually read up on a country's history on the plane before I land.^[1] On the way to Seoul, I read about the Korean War, how the front line moved from the north to the south, then back up to the north, then settled roughly in the middle, leaving most of the peninsula in ruins. Cities flattened. Industry destroyed. By 1953, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world.

Then I landed in Seoul.

The disconnect was hard to process. Glass towers, immaculate subways, neon stretching to the horizon. A city that, by every reasonable measure, shouldn't exist yet, at least not at this scale, not this fast. Turns out others have noticed. They call it the Miracle on the Han.

How does a country go from rubble to this in a single lifetime? I don't have a clean answer, and I'm not going to pretend I do. Lee Kuan Yew wrote a whole book about Singapore's version of the same question, From Third World to First, and even that's just one country's story. But traveling through these places makes you feel the question in a way that reading about it doesn't. You walk through a subway station in Seoul and think: someone decided this. Someone built this. And not that long ago, none of it was here.

That trip flipped a switch for me. I started paying attention to the things that make a city work: the roads, the rails, the power, the water, the networks running underneath everything. Maybe it's the mechanical engineer in me, having spent years around civil engineers in school. But until Korea, infrastructure had been invisible to me, the way it tends to be when you've only lived in places where it just works.

What its absence costs

A few years later, I spent two months on an overland tour through East and southern Africa, from Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania all the way down to Namibia and South Africa. Outside the major cities, and outside some of the southern countries, the basics I'd taken for granted my whole life were not guaranteed. Reliable electricity. Clean running water. Sewers. Roads that didn't fall apart in the rainy season.

Even where there was power, load shedding was routine. We once spent hours stuck at a border crossing waiting for the electricity to come back so officials could process our visas.

The ripple effects compound in ways that are hard to see from a distance. No electricity means no refrigeration, which means food spoils and medicine can't be stored. No running water means relying on streams that may be contaminated, and without sewers, that contamination spreads. Cholera isn't an abstract historical disease in places where these systems are missing. It's a present-day risk linked directly to the absence of infrastructure most of the world considers basic.

The asymmetry shows up in smaller ways too. As tourists, we took malaria pills daily, a routine inconvenience, a few dollars a day. For the people living there, malaria isn't something you medicate against on a trip. It's a part of life you cope with, season after season, year after year. The same mosquito, the same disease, two completely different relationships to it.

Korea showed me what infrastructure enables. Africa showed me what its absence costs.

The same technology, two different worlds

Somewhere between those two trips, I started noticing something that reframed how I thought about technology itself.

I walked into a UPS store in Victoria Falls and the whole building was full of Starlink deliveries. Dozens of them, stacked floor to ceiling, waiting to go out to villages and towns across the region.

In the developed world, Starlink is a nice-to-have. Faster wifi on a plane, better connectivity when you're camping. In rural East Africa, it's something else entirely. It's how communities schedule water deliveries. How families stay in touch. How people reach emergency services. The same product, the same hardware, doing fundamentally different work depending on where it lands.

Solar is the same story. In places with reliable grids, rooftop panels are an environmental statement or a hedge against utility prices. In places without grids, they're the thing that lets a clinic refrigerate vaccines.

The same technology can be a luxury in one part of the world, and a life changer in another.

What it enables

Once you start seeing infrastructure, you see it everywhere, including in the places where it's working so well that most people stop noticing it.

In China and Japan, the rail systems have created a kind of mobility that's hard to fully appreciate until you've used it. Fast, frequent, affordable trains shrink distances. Cities can grow larger because a wider radius can reach work in a reasonable time. Housing costs drop further from the center because the commute is no longer a punishment. People walk more, drive less, and end up healthier almost as a side effect of how the system was designed.

China felt like a glimpse of the future in another way. Busy streets, oddly quiet, because most of the cars and scooters were electric. I'd seen the stats, but experiencing it is different. The bet on EVs and solar is showing up in the texture of daily life.

Singapore is the version of this that fascinates me most, because it's a story about constraints. The country is smaller than New York City. There's nowhere to sprawl, nowhere to absorb growth. So they've had to innovate around density, sustainability, and livability in ways that other places haven't been forced to. It's the same question the Korean War landed on me, but answered differently: when you have no room to fail, what do you build?

What I watch for now

I'll be transparent: there's a lot about infrastructure I don't know. I've spent most of my career building software in the Bay Area, and for a long time the physical systems underneath everything were a blind spot for me. Software is eating the world, the line goes, but the world depends on infrastructure to run.

That blind spot is one I've started trying to close, in small ways. Whatever you think of Elon Musk, the through-line of his companies started to make more sense to me after these trips: solar, batteries, EVs, satellite communications, robotics, the physical systems beneath the software layer. A robot is hardware and software working together. A Starlink terminal is a satellite, a ground station, and a software stack working together. None of it is just code. I came back with a different appreciation for people who build in atoms, not just bits. I've started looking at hardware startups as an angel investor, partly out of curiosity and partly because I think the software world undervalues this work. And somewhere down the line, I'd like to do something, even something small, about the disparity I saw between places where infrastructure works and places where it doesn't. I don't know what that looks like yet. But I aspire to it, even when I don't always know how.

Now when I travel, I keep an eye on the everyday things. The reliability of the power. The condition of the roads. Whether the tap water is safe. Whether the trains run on time, and whether they run at all. These details tell you more about a place than any guidebook will.

And every so often, in a city that didn't exist a generation ago, you feel that question again. Someone decided this. Someone built this. It's one of the most quietly astonishing things you can witness, and it makes the world feel both more fragile and more possible than it did before.