The arbitrage of having seen it before.

The most underrated career advantage available to a young operator is not talent, credentials, or network. It is having seen a proven playbook in one market before it arrives in another. In a developed market, everything you know, everyone around you also knows. In an emerging market, ordinary knowledge from elsewhere is temporarily extraordinary, and the person carrying it gets to do work far above their seniority. The window closes as the market catches up, which is exactly why you take it early.

I learned this at twenty-five, by accident, at an airline in Riyadh.

A summer internship in a market with gaps

In 2009 I was at INSEAD, straight out of the financial crisis, and the campus job boards were thin. Among the odd postings was a summer internship at a young low-cost airline in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I knew nothing about Saudi Arabia. I applied because it sounded like the world, and seeing the world was the reason I had gone to business school in the first place. That internship became two years running revenue management at flynas, and it became the start of a seventeen-year relationship with the Kingdom. But the mechanism I want to describe is smaller and more transferable than the arc.

The airline was early. Lightly structured, everyone wearing several hats, everything still being figured out. And within weeks I noticed something that changed how I understood my own position. There were tools and techniques that were completely standard in Mexico, in the US, in Canada, that simply had not arrived in the Saudi market yet. I had seen Google advertising work at home. It was not yet part of the playbook around me. So we tried it, and I got to launch the first Google Ads campaigns for an airline in Saudi Arabia. I would like to claim the whole Middle East, but I do not want to stretch the claim.

The second one was even less glamorous. We had a database used to send SMS notifications when flights were cancelled or rescheduled. Operational plumbing, nothing more. It occurred to me that the same pipe could carry marketing. I wrote SQL queries to find travellers who flew a given route frequently and sent them promotions for that route, by text message. No platform, no vendor, no budget line. A query and an existing pipe.

Why the mechanism works

The insight is not that emerging markets are behind. It is that knowledge diffuses unevenly, and a person who moves between markets is a diffusion channel with a salary. The formula I would give my younger self: I know how this works elsewhere, I can adapt it here, and that adaptation is a genuine edge, for a while. Adaptation is the operative word. Nothing I brought to that airline worked as a straight copy. The channel, the language, the customer, the seasonality around Ramadan and Hajj all forced modification, and the modification is where the actual skill develops. Anyone can carry a playbook. The operator is the one who can translate it.

This is also, quietly, the real argument for an international career, better than any of the usual ones about broadening horizons. Every market you genuinely work in, not visit, loads you with playbooks that will be arbitrage somewhere else. The mobile operator practices of one country, the logistics norms of another, the customer service standards of a third. The person who has operated in three markets is carrying inventory the person who optimised one market simply does not have. And the compounding is real: the credibility I earned running those small experiments at twenty-five became the reason harder problems were handed to me, which became the operating record that carried the next fifteen years, including the education the Arab Spring provided two years later.

The window is the point

Two honest caveats. The arbitrage decays. Saudi Arabia today is not the 2009 market I landed in; in several categories, from government digital services to fintech, it now runs ahead of the developed markets it once imported from, and today's newcomer will find the gaps in different places, often in operating depth rather than tools. And the arbitrage only converts if you stay long enough to translate it. The visitor who flies in with best practice and flies out is a consultant. The operator who stays, adapts it, and eats the consequences is the one the market ends up trusting, which in a relationship-driven economy is the entire game.

But the underlying advice holds in any decade. If you are early in your career and choosing between a market where you will be ordinary and a market where your ordinary knowledge is scarce, the second one pays you twice: once in responsibility you would wait a decade for elsewhere, and once in the translation skill you keep forever. The full conversation where this came up is below. I am happy to talk if you are weighing a move like that.