Let me give a few examples of decent places to launch: 1) Dubai 2) Doha 3) Maybe Manama 4) Maybe Riyadh Upsides: - "Regulatory regime" means that you talk

Let me give a few examples of decent places to launch: 1) Dubai 2) Doha 3) Maybe Manama 4) Maybe Riyadh Upsides: - "Regulatory regime" means that you talk to the royal family. This is a surprisingly sane and reasonable process. - Plenty of money to go around; people looking for things to invest into when the oil runs out - Better weather than California - Culture is more tolerant of occasional crashes - Cash-rich populations who would pay for this sort of thing The market isn't as large, but for a pilot, you don't want large. For large markets, though, I can think of a few cities in Asia which would be ideal for scaling up. As a footnote: Regulation isn't a question of low versus high. It's a question of easy versus hard. I worked in a highly-regulated field, and we did field testing in a small European country where the standards were probably higher than the US, but the process was much more streamlined. Approvals were done by talking to one expert who either gave a thumbs up, thumbs down, or told you what you needed to change. In the US, the process would have taken years of pushing paperwork, and a mechanical bureaucracy is less suited to evaluate safety than an expert. A multiyear process isn't necessarily any more robust than a fast one.