Several people were injured in the attack, and multiple local, state and federal agencies descended on the scene to investigate.

Nelly Korda made a push on the weekend at Erin Hills, but her quest for a first US Women's Open came up just short as Maja Stark took home the trophy.

• Mike Holp, now 38, left Austin in 2019 due to the high cost of living.
• He bought a one-way ticket to Asia and eventually settled in Koh Samui, Thailand.
• Island life is slower and much more affordable; his monthly expenses rarely exceed $1,800.

Seven years ago, Mike Holp was riding through the streets of Austin as a food delivery worker, earning between $15 and $20 an hour.

He lived just outside downtown in a shared rental with three roommates. Even with a computer science degree, the tough competition made it hard for him to get the tech job he'd hoped for.

"Basically, the only thing that I could find to do to pay expenses was to deliver food on my bike," Mike Holp, now 38, a digital creator, told Business Insider.

Each day blurred into the next as he worked long hours just to cover rent, only to repeat the same grind the following month. It was a relentless cycle, and the lifestyle started to wear him down.

He felt disillusioned, and the rising cost of living wasn't helping his situation.

"At that point, I was like 'What am I doing all this for? Just to get by?'" Holp said.

His life in Austin didn't feel sustainable, and he knew he had to get out.

In 2019, with money saved from delivering food and working real estate photography gigs on the side, Holp bought a one-way ticket to Asia.

Finding home in Thailand

After a brief stint in Bali and then Singapore, Holp decided to make Thailand his next stop.

He spent time living in different parts of Thailand, including Chiang Mai — where he met his now-fiancée, Mary. She was on vacation at that time but was based in both Bangkok and Koh Samui for work.

Wanting to be closer to her, Holp decided to move to Samui because he preferred its slower pace over the bustle of the Thai capital.

House-hunting was fairly easy: He found their first home on Facebook Marketplace. It was a one-bedroom house located in Lamai, a laid-back area along the southeastern coast of the island. Rent was 9,000 Thai baht a month.

After three years in that house, it was time for a change. His fianceé had left her previous job and now works at a school, and they wanted to live close by. They're still in Lamai, but in a bigger one-bedroom property that costs 20,000 Thai baht, or about $600, each month.

"It's a modern village-style home. It's on a raised platform, about 12 feet off the ground, so if there's any flooding, we don't have to worry about that," Holp said.

Although Holp has learned a little bit of Thai, the good thing about Samui, being a tourist destination, is that many locals can speak and understand basic English, he said.

It was also fairly easy for him to connect with new people.

"There's a large Facebook group called Koh Samui Expats — they've got about 40,000 people in there," Holp said. "And I'm actually a moderator in that group, so that helps to meet people."

Escaping the rat race

Holp says his life in Samui is "completely different" from that in Austin.

He starts his mornings by dropping off his fiancée at work. After that, it's time for a walk along the beach and a quick workout session at an outdoor gym situated on a tiny islet linked to the Samui mainland by a wooden bridge.

Post-workout, it's time for a coffee at a nearby café before he heads home to start work for the day. Apart from creating content for his own social pages, Holp also runs a photography business and a consulting business that helps others relocate to Thailand.

"I have a flexible schedule," he said. "It's just a much more carefree, relaxed lifestyle compared to Austin."

The fact that he's no longer in the rat race also means he has the time and energy to spend on his hobbies, such as exploring the island on his bike and meeting with friends.

The lower cost of living in Thailand helps, he said.

"It frees up my time so that I can focus on passion projects like the YouTube channel, and I don't have to worry about just paying rent all the time and stressing out," he said.

Holp says he and his fiancée typically spend between 50,000 and 60,000 Thai baht, or about $1,500 and $1,800, a month.

"We sometimes cook at home, but the meals are usually very affordable here, so going out to eat is very easy," Holp said.

Their weekly grocery run costs about 2,000 Thai baht, and it's also fairly easy to find international brands and products at the larger stores, he said.

"Even going to the grocery store, you can get 30 eggs for 5 bucks," he added.

Holp estimates a comparable lifestyle for two in Austin would cost about five times as much.

A single person needs to earn at least $101,587 annually to live comfortably in Austin, per a 2025 SmartAsset analysis based on data from MIT's Living Wage Calculator.

The average rent in Austin was $2,000, per the latest May data from Zillow Rentals.

Not missing the lifestyle in the US

Holp says he loves the warm weather and the friendliness of the locals. He also feels very safe living in Samui.

"I don't even really have to worry about locking the door, whereas back in Austin, I probably have to worry about how somebody might break in and rob me," he said.

He hasn't been back to the US in five years, not even to visit. There isn't much that he misses anyway.

"There's a big car culture in the US. I do kind of miss driving a car around here. I just use the motorbike for everything since it's really easy to get around the little roads and stuff," he said.

"But I can't think of much that I really miss about the US other than my family, obviously, and friends. That's about it," he added.

Do you have a story to share about relocating to a new country? Contact this reporter at [email protected].

• Brad Barrett retired from full-time work at 35 and started a financial independence podcast.
• He sees retirees making four common mistakes.
• Barrett emphasized the importance of planning post-retirement life beyond just financial goals.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Brad Barrett, who hosts the ChooseFI podcast. Business Insider has verified his professional history.

My journey to financial independence, or FI, started when I got my first job.

I began my career at one of the big accounting firms. I was fortunate enough to live at home with my parents, and I tried to save around 90% of my income when a lot of my friends began getting apartments alone or buying fancy cars. I've always been a bit frugal and never cared much about impressing other people. I saw saving and making sacrifices, like moving to Virginia instead of living in New York City, as a service to the life I wanted in the future.

I retired from my full-time job in 2015, when I was 35. I then began a travel and reward points website and later launched ChooseFI, which has been downloaded 70 million times since 2017.

FIRE, or Financial Independence Retire Early, is a cute acronym, and we used it a lot in the early days. But it doesn't matter whether you are working full time, part time, or are completely retired. It's all about financial independence — reaching a point where we can control the only thing that matters in life, which is our time.

From the countless questions I get from listeners or those who read our newsletter, there are four common mistakes I see early retirees make that keep them unsatisfied post-FI:

1. They're retiring from something

One broad category of mistakes I see involves people simply not having ideas of what they want to do in their post-work life. In the 2013-2017 timeframe, FI was about getting to a number as quickly as possible, and little else mattered. It's getting better, but there needs to be a mindset shift to: "I'm not running away from a job, but I'm running toward a life that I want to live."

If it were just about reaching a number on a spreadsheet for me, and then I woke up the next day expecting it to be the greatest life ever, I would've been really disappointed.

2. They don't experiment enough

I suggest people don't have an arbitrary number of hobbies for post-retirement. Instead, they should experiment and keep an open mind.

You could make plans to travel around the world on a sailboat for the rest of your life, and within a month, you could get seasick and have to stop. But that's not failure — it's just an experiment.

Retirement can be decades long. You may be really active in the early years post-work and do things like climb mountains and walk the Camino, but you maybe can't do that at 85.

This is a mistake I also made in my journey. I got very busy with raising two young daughters, and I didn't experiment enough. I didn't do a great job of leaning into what I love, including small things like watching soccer, and I'm trying to fix that now.

3. They don't take pride in being FI

Lots of people have a hard time talking about hitting FI because there is a degree of others' not understanding or jealousy. I've seen people avoid talking about it completely or making up some type of job, like "I'm consulting from home."

Honesty is really important, and there should be a significant sense of pride attached to being FI. Just being able to say, "Hey, I worked hard at this. I saved for the most important thing to me, which was my own time freedom."

There's a way to communicate that with empathy, and it may lead to other people also taking an interest in FI. If you're volunteering at Habitat for Humanity on a Tuesday at 10 a.m., and people ask you why you aren't working, you can talk about it.

4. They wait too long to quit

The "one more year" syndrome is a mistake I still see. It's when people delay quitting their jobs or moving onto something new because they're worried their retirement nest egg isn't big enough. Most of the time, it's more than enough, and people are being too conservative.

People don't understand the finite nature of their lives. If we are really lucky, we get eight or nine decades on this planet, and even fewer with good health.

Every day that you work longer than you have to is a day that you're not doing something with the only resource you can't get back — your time.

• Southeast Asian tech startups are increasingly targeting the US market for growth and opportunity.
• Traditionally, startups from the area focused locally, but AI is driving a shift to the US.
• Founders are finding that a physical presence in the US has become a necessity as business grows.

Yoeven Khemlani knew he wanted to build a product for engineers like him.

The Singaporean's friends told him they were spending tons of time maintaining code, web scraping, and translating their work for different markets. In July 2024, he launched JigsawStack, a company to create small models that could automate those tasks. One country — not his own — quickly became the source of his customers.

"We saw a huge uptake of users and realized a lot of the early-stage customers that we got were from the US," Khemlani said.

JigsawStack, which raised $1.5 million in pre-seed rounds from the venture capital firm Antler's Southeast Asia fund in October and February, is part of a growing group of Southeast Asian startups building products for US-based customers, rather than those in their backyard.

For these software startups, the US's rising isolationism isn't threatening their customer base — yet. But sweeping tariffs on China may push up the cost of hardware they need to import into the US, such as servers.

"Traditionally, Southeast Asian startups honed in on local or regional markets to solve unique, homegrown challenges," said Jussi Salovaara, a cofounder of Antler who leads investments in Asia.

The ride-hailing apps Grab and GoJek — two of the region's best-known startups, now publicly listed — are examples of how founders in the early 2010s built for local needs.

"However, as the ecosystem matures, founders are now setting their sights on the US, encouraged by a blend of opportunity and necessity," Salovaara said, adding that he'd seen more of these US-focused startups in the past three years in Southeast Asia.

Southeast Asia is growing, but it doesn't have the US's firepower

Southeast Asia, a group of 11 countries east of the Indian subcontinent and south of China, has seen skyrocketing economic growth over the past decade. Since 2015, the region's GDP has climbed more than 62% to $4.12 trillion, boosted by a growing middle and upper class.

Between 2015 and 2021, the number of venture capital deals within the region more than tripled to 1,800, PitchBook data shows. Activity peaked in 2021 — a similar pattern to startup funding globally.

Despite the region's growth, more Southeast Asia startups are choosing to focus on building products for the US, not for those around them. Founders and business experts note that the American market is more concentrated, more mature, and less price sensitive, all of which make it an attractive playing ground for new entrants.

Plus, the US is leading in artificial intelligence, the major driver of today's global tech industry.

"We're in an AI-first world where currently the US is at the epicenter of driving groundbreaking advancements," said Shailendra Singh, a managing director with Peak XV, the VC firm previously known as Sequoia Capital India & Southeast Asia.

"This," he added, "is why we put in a lot of focus and effort on building global go-to-market operating teams in the US."

And American businesses are happy to have them.

"SEA startups are often positioned to offer high-quality, cost-competitive solutions that can undercut US-based alternatives, making them appealing to American businesses in need of cost-effective innovation," Antler's Salovaara said.

To be sure, the model isn't unique to Southeast Asia.

Nataliya Wright, an entrepreneurship professor at Columbia Business School, researched startups founded from 2000 to 2015 for a forthcoming paper on scaling. She found that software startups from small countries in Europe, for instance, typically focused on the US from the get-go. Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Vietnam, however, are considered midsize markets, with populations in the tens of millions. Startups from midsize markets tended to start with a local focus, assuming there would be enough customers.

"A US orientation," Wright told Business Insider, "would suggest a departure from that model."

11 unique markets

Working only within the region is tough. Southeast Asia is home to a huge diversity of languages, business practices, and household incomes.

"You're spending five times more because you're entering five different markets," Khemlani, the JigsawStack founder, said about working in the region.

The US and tech hubs like San Francisco allow startups to find an abundance of customers in one place, or at least in one country.

"We don't have the resources to do two streams of marketing," Khemlani said.

Having some American customers is good for fundraising, too, said Wright, the Columbia Business School professor.

This is because of a bias called "foreign discounting" — VCs based in startup hubs such as Silicon Valley overlook or undervalue startups founded elsewhere, Wright said. When foreign startups show they have US customers, it helps cancel out that bias and could give them a leg up in future fundraising rounds.

VCs say founders from the region have advantages.

Singh, the Peak XV managing director, said Indian and Southeast Asian startups often have an underdog mindset.

"They feel a startup in Silicon Valley is more polished and has better access to capital and talent, so they want to overcompensate by working harder, learning faster, and often they're understated and very hungry for success," he said.

Hotbed for innovation

Realfast is a Singaporean Peak XV-backed startup that builds AI agents for IT systems. Its cofounder, Sidu Ponnappa, has found that the US is the deepest market for its product.

"Everything from deal velocity to deal size operates at a completely different level in the US," Ponnappa said. "Can you do the same thing for other markets? Yes, but it's always lower margin."

Guan Dian, who heads the Asia Pacific operations of Patsnap, a software maker for research and development projects that's backed by Vertex Ventures, said the company's founders always thought the US would be a priority market.

While the startup has customers in 50 countries, more than half of its 5,000 customers are in the US.

She said the company refined its branding to emphasize AI-powered features for industries such as biotech and advanced manufacturing, which dominate US patent filings.

Cost consciousness among Southeast Asian customers is another reason founders are reaching abroad.

"Southeast Asia is a little bit more price sensitive, and we tend to get a bit more into negotiation," Khemlani said.

Cheaper labor means local customers try low-tech solutions or building themselves first, but that's starting to change as AI models get more complex and expensive, Khemlani said.

'Should we move our headquarters to America?'

Founders don't want to fully decamp to the US, though, thanks to the ease of doing business in places such as Singapore. For startups including Multiplier, an HR platform backed by Tiger Global and Peak XV, Singapore's strong geopolitical relations with virtually every country are a big advantage over the US.

"We do business with China and Taiwan, we do business with India and Pakistan, we do business with America and China," said Sagar Khatri, Multiplier's CEO and cofounder.

"We've evaluated time and time again: Should we move our headquarters to America? And the answer has always been no," Khatri said.

The founders who spoke with BI also touted Singapore's tax policy — it doesn't tax capital gains — and government grants for tech companies.

Some startups are splitting their people, moving one cofounder to the US while the other stays in Southeast Asia.

For JigsawStack, being in the US is essential for networking. Khemlani, the founder, spent six months in the US last year and moved permanently this year to scale the startup.

"You can't sell to the US when you're not there," he said. "Just going for an event or a hackathon in the US makes such a big difference in your sales."

The February 2023 train derailment in Ohio is drawing increased scrutiny of the Biden administration.

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State and local law enforcement from Boulder, Colorado, and the FBI are responding to a Sunday afternoon attack that left multiple people with burns near the site of a demonstration calling for the release of Hamas-held hostages in Gaza.

The big picture: FBI chief Kash Patel on X called the incident a "targeted terror attack," though Boulder Police Chief Steve Redfearn said at a Sunday afternoon briefing that police were not treating the incident as terrorism at this stage. He confirmed that a suspect was in custody.

---

The latest: Six victims, ages 67 to 88, had been taken to local hospitals after witnesses reported a suspect had "used a makeshift flame thrower and threw an incendiary device into the crowd," FBI Denver Special Agent in Charge Mark Michalek said at a Sunday evening briefing.

• At least one patient was in critical condition, Redfearn said at the briefing.
• The suspect was heard to yell "free Palestine" during the attack, Michalek said.
• The suspect has been identified as 45-year-old Mohamed Sabry Soliman.

Details: Run For Their Lives, which organized the walk in support of the hostages, said in a statement the group met at 1pm local time to walk the length of the Pearl Street Mall and back when the incident happened.

• "This is not a protest; it is a peaceful walk to show solidarity with the hostages and their families, and a plea for their release," the group said.
• Authorities said they were called to the incident at 13th and Pearl streets at 1:26pm MT.
• Witnesses said someone had thrown Molotov cocktails at people and Redfearn confirmed that police received reports that individuals had been "set on fire."
• Police arrived on the scene and found multiple victims with injuries, some of which Redfearn said he believed were life-threatening.
• President Trump has been briefed on the situation, a White House official told Axios.

What we're watching: "This act of terror is being investigated as an act of ideologically motivated violence based on the early information, the evidence, and witness accounts," FBI deputy director Dan Bongino said on X.

• Redfearn told reporters asking whether the attack was connected to the march to free Hamas' hostages it was too early to speculate on a motive.
• "If that motive was a group was targeted, we will absolutely step up and ensure that additional security, additional presence," he said at the briefing.

Zoom in: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard wrote on X that the Office of the DNI's National Counterterrorism Center was "working with the FBI and local law enforcement on the ground investigating the targeted terror attack against a weekly meeting of Jewish community members.

• Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on X the DHS is monitoring the situation and working with interagency partners, including the FBI.
• Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in an emailed statement that from "what we know, this attack appears to be a hate crime given the group that was targeted," and he offered support from the attorney general's office.

What they're saying: Boulder's Jewish Community Center in a statement said they're "heartbroken to learn that an incendiary device was thrown at walkers at the Run for Their Lives walk on Pearl Street as they were raising awareness for the hostages still held in Gaza."

• Israel's Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, in a statement on the incident said: "Terrorism against Jews does not stop at the Gaza border — it is already burning the streets" of the U.S.
• "Today, in Boulder, Colorado, Jewish people marched with a moral and humane demand: to return the hostages. In response, the Jewish protesters were brutally attacked," he added.
• "Make no mistake — this is not a political protest, this is terrorism. The time for statements is over. It is time for concrete action to be taken against the instigators."

Zoom out: Colorado Gov. Jared Polis noted in another statement on X that the U.S. Jewish community was already reeling from the fatal shootings of two Israeli Embassy staff in D.C. last month.

• It "is unfathomable that the Jewish community is facing another terror attack here in Boulder, on the eve of the holiday of Shavuot no less," the governor said.

Editor's note: This a breaking news story. Please check back for updates.

Max Verstappen was at the center of yet another controversy, this time after colliding with George Russell during the final laps of the Spanish GP.