The New Geography of Startups

Anyone international—whether you're building primarily in your home country to start but have global ambitions—is a borderless founder.

They tend to have a chip on their shoulder. There's a desire to become the benchmark and prove something to the world: regardless of where they were born, they can still achieve greatness.

Unlike in the US, where you can get everything as a service at every layer of the stack, in many other markets, including Latin America, you just can't do that. There's no fraud-as-a-service or KYC-as-a-service, so you end up having to build everything. That requires much deeper local-market knowledge, but it's very helpful to be able to borrow from around the world.

There's this interesting dichotomy in that this technology is very democratic. It distributes the ability to get it anywhere in the world and opens up other markets, but it also concentrates the epicenter of where things are moving the fastest in the Bay Area.

10 years from now, what do you hope to see in the global topology of startups everywhere in the world?

1. Who Borderless Founders Are & the Origins of a16z's Global Strategy

Welcome back to the a16z podcast. Today we're here with Angela Strange and Gabriel Vasquez, two of the architects of a16z's global investing strategy. On the day that we're publishing this podcast, we're also running a piece on this idea of borderless founders and who borderless founders are. Just to get to our first question, venture has historically been really, really situated in Silicon Valley. What makes borderless founders interesting, and what is the story of international investing?

I remember when, very early in my career at a16z, I was investing primarily in financial services, or fintech, and one of the first articles I wrote was about how to get distribution in financial services. It can be very difficult. You need to find a consumer at exactly the right moment in time, when they're ready to change from their incumbent services. There's just a lot of inertia.

Yeah.

At that same time, my brother had just joined Nubank down in Brazil. I remember him saying that David Vélez had said, “Yeah, you could compete to be the fifth financial services provider for every customer in the US. Or you could go to a wide-open market with 5 fat, happy banks that only serve 20% of the population.”

It's much more difficult to get things going because you've got to get licensed and build all the infrastructure, but there are these wide-open markets. That initially got me interested in looking at Latin America. The first check I ever wrote at a16z was actually into Santiago Suarez, the CEO of Addi, which now serves a quarter of the Colombian population for banking and payments. That kickstarted our international strategy, which initially focused on—

LatAm.

Not long after, I remember getting a WhatsApp message from Gabriel, who had joined a16z on a totally different team. He said, “Hey, you haven't met me yet, but I see this huge opportunity in Latin America. I've gone and met 25 of the most important CEOs. I've got them all in a WhatsApp group. We should probably do something here.”

Gabriel, were these all fintech founders, or were they working in every industry under the sun?

Every single industry, but historically in LatAm, you see more fintech founders than you see in other regions. That was the premise. At the time that I did the mapping and pinged Angela, there were only 30 unicorns in Latin America.

No.

The thesis was that you could put them all in one room and get them to connect, because the Brazilian unicorn founders weren't talking to the Colombian unicorn founders or the Mexican unicorn founders. There was an opportunity to bring them all together.

We ended up doing that. We created a WhatsApp group with Angela, Marc Andreessen, Alex Rampell, and a bunch of other people at the firm, and we put them all together. One of the interesting things was that they were discussing topics about the region, but they also started exchanging deal flow.

In the group, they were all prolific angel investors. That gave us a great opportunity not only to see early deals, but also to participate in that community and help them out.

What did the early people in this community have, do you think, that a Silicon Valley founder wouldn't have? What kinds of insights or opportunities did they have?

Some of this relates to what we're doing now. Some of the best founders there grew up in their home markets, spent some time in the US, and then came back.

I'll use Santi from Addi, for instance. He grew up in Colombia, went to Yale, spent time at a bunch of financial services companies, both large and small, in the US, and then came back home. It's a combination: he saw the models that worked in the US, but deeply understood his home market. He was then able to start Addi.

He recruited one of his childhood best friends, who was very technical. The other thing you have to know is that, unlike in the US, where you can get everything as a service at every layer of the stack, in many other markets, including Latin America, you just can't do that. There's no fraud-as-a-service or KYC-as-a-service, so you end up having to build everything. That requires much deeper local-market knowledge, but it's very helpful to be able to borrow from around the world.

Yeah, yeah. It sounds like this finds its origins in a WhatsApp group, and now it's suddenly an entire strategy that you two are really leading at the firm. What was the moment for you when you thought, “Okay, this needs to evolve past what we're doing right now”?

It was interesting. We had very active communities across regions, and then really what happened was AI. There's this interesting dichotomy in that this technology is very democratic. It distributes the ability to get it anywhere in the world and opens up other markets, but it also concentrates the epicenter of where things are moving the fastest in the Bay Area.

Instead of Brazilian and Colombian founders wanting us to come down to Brazil and Colombia and connect, they all wanted to come to the Bay Area and get integrated a lot faster.

2. What International Founders Bring to the Bay Area

Mm-hmm. When that happens, what kinds of problems, challenges, or opportunities are they negotiating? You're an international founder, you come to the Bay Area, and maybe you do have some connections—you know some investors, customers, or other founders. What are the challenges? What are you bringing with you from your home country to the Bay Area, and what kinds of learnings are you gleaning?

One of the things that we noticed about these groups is that if you're, for example, from Brazil, you end up mapping the top talent in Silicon Valley from Brazil. We started seeing this trend happening in pretty much every country. You can extrapolate it to Europe or Asia, and it's pretty much the same: Where are the smartest people from my country? They're going to understand where I come from.

What you bring is less about the local knowledge, because now you're going to play on the global stage, and more about the connectivity that you can have with somebody you don't know. The fact that they're in Silicon Valley matters. Angela and I discuss this a lot: it's this culture of giving. People help you a lot, even before they know you, but there's a closer affinity if you're from that same country because people can see themselves through that journey.

That led us to organize what started as a small community: these Borderless Dinners. We called them Borderless Dinners because, at the beginning, they were very focused—we focused only on Latin Americans.

We mapped out the most successful founders from Latin America, and every time we had people coming to visit, we would create a dinner for them. There would be 20 or 30 people at these dinners, and they would get to see what the journey of a person from Latin America who had succeeded in Silicon Valley looked like.

A big part of this strategy was Guillermo Rauch from Vercel. He's a person who has obviously succeeded and done really well in Silicon Valley, but he was very excited to meet people from Latin America and help them on that journey. We also had Pedro Franceschi, the founder of Brex, do this. We had a lot of other founders who came along.

The other interesting thing is that the group has also matured. People who were early attendees of the group have now graduated into unicorn founders, and now they're speakers. We can give the example of Victor Cardenas from Slash, or Orios [?] from Factory. It's created this amazing connectivity.

Yeah. It's interesting. The very relatable American version of this is if you think of some of the schools: the alumni networks around the top schools are incredibly powerful. I might argue that international, country-specific diasporas are even more powerful.

3. 10 Years From Now: The Global Topology of Startups

They just often lacked that organization. Now lots of these diasporas are also organizing, right? We're not the only people that help here. But I think what we saw was this opportunity: if you came from a country and landed in the U.S., you figured out how to get your visa and where to live, made yourself into the network, got your customers, and had this desire to pay it forward. But there wasn't really an easy way to do that in the same way that you can just go back and speak at your college.

Yeah.

Right.

4. Borderless vs Immigrant vs International Founder

And so we were like, “Hey, what if we made an easy way to go back and speak at your college, but your college is all of the smartest kids who graduated from college, dropped out of high school, or found their way into these different programs, who really want to build global companies?” The power of that is really exciting when you get in the room.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes a ton of sense. I think for someone who's listening to this and wondering, maybe, what is the difference between a borderless founder and an immigrant founder, or a borderless founder and somebody who just happens to be an international person who's coming and starting a company in the United States? How do you help them understand how we define, or how we understand, what a borderless founder is?

I like to take the most inclusive view ever, which is just anybody who's trying to build a global company. Americans technically could be borderless founders, but they tend to be connected here anyway. Anyone international, whether you're building primarily in your home country to start but have global ambitions, is a borderless founder.

Yeah.

And I think there's something unique about these people as well. Not all of them, but they tend to have a chip on their shoulder. They either grew up in a country that was overlooked.

My story is that I grew up in El Salvador, a small country. When you come to the U.S., nobody says, “Hey, I met this other great guy who came from El Salvador.” You're creating the benchmark on your own. A lot of these people either grew up in places like that.

We have backed a German founder who grew up in a really, really small town in Germany. Germany is obviously well known, and everybody has respect for the country, but the fact that he came from this small town makes him think, “I'm going to make the most out of this opportunity.” Even in the U.S., we've seen people who grew up in small rural areas, and that's what drives them.

I think it's the desire to become the benchmark and prove something to the world: regardless of where they were born, they can still achieve greatness. I think that's the mindset these people have who want to go and create—dominate globally.

Yeah. I like what you were saying earlier, Angela, about how it does function almost like an alumni network in a college or something like that. How do founders find both the a16z Borderless Founder community and other communities? And how do we find them, even?

Yeah, I think it's interesting. There's an interesting history of countries doing this, and part of the reason I became so passionate about working on this with Gabriel is that I'm from Ottawa, Canada, originally. It's not far from Silicon Valley, but it was also a country where lots of companies were started but very few got to scale.

About 15 years ago, a group of us and several other Canadians in the Bay Area started an organization called C100. What it was was 100 Canadians in the Bay Area who had founded very large companies or who were in influential positions where they could help. It was creating a forum for them to give back and help Canadian companies scale.

It was really 2 things. First, helping them find design partners. Obviously, the startups would have to be good enough to land the contract, but we would open the door. Second, helping them find executives who would help them scale, because I think one of the tougher things about getting ecosystems going is that you can have very smart people and land your customers, but then when you look around for the sales leader who's going to take you from $50 million to $500 million, you probably have to find them in another market until your market gets a little bit more mature.

With the Canadian network, there are now lots of unicorns around the globe started by Canadians. Shopify is a big one, but OpenEvidence's founder was Canadian. These markets start to grow, and it means those diasporas become easier to break into and easier to find.

Those networks are also starting to get easier to find in our current network. There are these lighthouse founders who tend to be in those networks, and they really want to pay it forward. The smartest founders are able to network their way into it. But I also think—and this is very much credit to Gabriel—that he makes multiple flights to multiple countries around the globe. Just being on the ground to find the next generation of talent before it's obvious is very key.

I actually have a follow-up question there. Are there places that are where Canada was 15 years ago now? Or has AI, and just the promise and allure of Silicon Valley, made that narrative proliferate a lot faster now?

Yeah, I think the maturity of markets is very relative. For example, some of the markets we spend the most time in are the U.K., Sweden, and Israel. Israel is very well known for this because, historically, on a per-capita basis, these countries have produced a lot of companies. What we've seen is that AI has enabled that to grow exponentially in some cases.

But there are other countries where, because of the dynamics in that country, you still don't see the same flourishing. This is where we see a lot of these founders actually moving to Silicon Valley.

It's an interesting tension that you see at times, because in these local ecosystems that are fruitful and are creating a lot of companies, people feel very prideful. They're like, “We want to make Sweden great. We want to make the U.K. an independent ecosystem.” Versus some other ecosystems that might be a little bit earlier: they feel like the best next step for them is to create an ecosystem, and driving all the motion is going to take a lot of time.

There are a lot of founders, to be fair, who want to dedicate their life to building that ecosystem in their own countries. Sometimes we see this kind of father figure in these earlier ecosystems who built a really, really hard business, and all these AI-native founders go to them first. They're kind of this lighthouse, and then they illuminate what Silicon Valley is to them and direct the path of who they should connect with. So it really depends on how mature the ecosystem is, but there's definitely a lot of difference per country.

I think the really interesting thing that's happening now is that any ecosystem benefits from its diaspora building amazing companies anywhere in the world. The interesting thing that's happening now—we see this with Tako, a company we're investors in, which does payroll and HR workflows across Brazil—is that its bigger mission is really cutting down bureaucracy in Brazil.

One of its founders was previously a founder of Rappi and teamed up with another founder, Fernando. This is his second company, and they've been able to recruit Brazilians back from the U.S. who grew up in Brazil. They understand these bureaucratic problems. They think that now, with the right talent, the right AI, and the right companies, they can really help their country.

5. The Three Native Advantages: Talent, Brand & Customers

Yeah. Yeah. That's super cool. That actually leads into the next question. I want to talk about the piece you wrote, and you talk about these 3 native advantages that borderless founders have. As you said, they have talent and access to talent through these really deep local talent networks, and can even call people back from living internationally. They have brand, and then they have a really strong customer base that they can sell into as well.

I'd love to hear you talk about brand and customers, because we've already touched on talent and what you're seeing from these kinds of founders there.

Yeah. In terms of brand, an example that's in our portfolio is ElevenLabs. This is a company that started out of Europe, in the U.K., but it has Polish founders.

And one of the things that has happened is that, for Poland, ElevenLabs has become such an important name for them to be represented by. There’s a founder we know who calls this the “AI Olympics”: every country wants to have its own candidates winning medals, right? For Poland, ElevenLabs has become that candidate.

The Polish government just invested in ElevenLabs and is going to do a bunch of initiatives with them. We see this motion happen quite often. In Sweden, we’ve seen a lot of this happen, where the Swedish government has supported Lovable and Legora. When this happens, it gives you such a jump-start in validation with all the large enterprise companies that are part of your country—and not even just your country, but countries ancillary to it—because everybody sees the support of the government and they’re like, “Okay, wow, that’s a stamp of validation. I want to really work with them.” So that’s on the branding side.

Some of the things that are not very obvious when you invest internationally—I think, on the other point, on customers, we’ve had several examples of our companies at very early stages where there is just a design partnership that eventually converts into a multimillion-dollar contract. They start working with the largest enterprises in their countries. We invested in a company called Factor Labs, and they started working with the largest conglomerate in all of Latin America, which is owned by the Slim family. That introduction led them to other types of workflows that they could tackle, so they could expand within that corporation.

We also see this playing out from what Angela was describing before. If I’m a founder, let’s say born in Spain, like in the case of Supersonic, who’s the smartest person who went to my university, and what are they doing now? In their case, it was someone who used to be the CRO of Salesforce and is now the COO. They connected with him, and Salesforce actually became their first design partner and eventually converted into a customer. These advantages are not very obvious. When you haven’t studied them quite well, they might seem random, but it’s all connected to the same root.

The other way that brand can help is, as I mentioned, these global companies need to recruit global talent. I’ll use Addi as an example. Addi scaled very quickly, and then the question is: How do you find a credit officer who can do billions of dollars of GMV? The best credit people tend to come from Capital One. How do you attract somebody from Capital One in Virginia to want to work down in Bogotá? You become the hottest company in Colombia.

So, versus joining one of 50 companies that kind of look the same in the US, why don’t you join the winner, whose brand is very clear? As you’re trying to attract international talent, that can be very interesting.

The other element of brand is that you can build relationships with the government, to Gab’s point. Jeeves has done a lot with the central bank in Brazil. They’re helping corporations move money internationally via stablecoins, so they’re starting to get that reputation with enterprises as being the most trusted, compliant, speedy way to do that. As a result, they attract more talent, and that starts to compound on top of each other.

Yeah. This compounding loop is really interesting. It’s something we talk a lot about at the firm. I think Mark kind of first introduced this idea of preferential attachment: if you signal very early that you can attract the best talent and the best customers, and you really get that attention and that flywheel going, the next incremental person and the next incremental customer become that much easier to attract.

6. Do Borderless Founders Have an Edge in Silicon Valley?

Do you think that really strong borderless founders, or international founders—assuming the company is strong and they’re a great startup—have an easier time of this in some way, or maybe a more differentiated time of this in some way?

I think, in some ways, you could argue all of a16z was founded to accelerate our founders’ preferential attachment. How do you get that flywheel moving as quickly as possible? I would argue borderless founders have more levers at their disposal to get that going.

This is the fiercest talent market I’ve seen in my career, both as an investor and as an operator. They have insight and access to differentiated pools. We have an AI insurance company in Brazil. You might think, “Oh, the best talent is at the top, most well-known universities there.” Actually, for AI talent, it’s at a university that you haven’t heard of. How do you find it? You go to the scholarship programs that scour the country for the best students and get them there, and it’s actually these robotics competitions.

If you’re a company that gets 10 incredibly smart people really early, the 11th person you might be trying to recruit from the US—someone who has 100 other offers—meets your team and is like, “Holy—how did they get people that are that good there?” That starts the talent flywheel.

On the customer side, anytime you want to land a large customer, the first question they’re going to ask is, “Who else is using you that’s in my industry, at my size?” There are lots of opportunities in the US to sell into banks and insurance companies. Nobody wants to be the first bank or the first insurance company, but via a borderless founder network, you can get a large bank and a large insurance company in another country much more quickly, and that will very much accelerate your thing in the US. You just have these levers to make things move faster.

Yeah. And even to Angela’s point, we’ve also seen cases of really hot companies in Silicon Valley, like Cognition, where their early go-to-market was actually Brazil. It represented a really high share of their revenue early on because these companies, or these enterprises, really desire to adopt AI as quickly as possible, and they don’t have as many providers to do that. In the case of Cognition, they built a really strong network in Brazil to do that.

Interesting. So, by that point, does that mean that you can also pursue a borderless-founder, or borderless, strategy just by selling into markets that might not necessarily see—

Yeah. I think the best way to think about it is that there’s the bridge to Silicon Valley, and that same bridge can be used in the opposite direction as well.

Yeah. And that’s the way that we try to position it: borderless founders come to Silicon Valley, but they obviously have global ambitions. They might have a strong network if they’re from Germany, but they probably have no knowledge about Brazil or Japan, and those are things that we can be very helpful with to help them dominate.

Yeah. You know, interestingly, we started this by connecting diasporas amongst themselves, and now almost the bigger power is the intra-diaspora. The German company’s first design partner was the largest Spanish conglomerate. That’s amazing, but it’s something that’s not super intuitive and would not have happened otherwise.

7. How a16z Approaches a New Country or Geography

I think something that is very unique about us, and I feel pretty confident about what we’ve built here, is that there’s probably no other investor that can do that for you—to cross-pollinate across different ecosystems, countries, and geographies, basically from the get-go.

Yeah. At the beginning of the conversation, Gabriel, you mentioned that your first market map of Latin American unicorns was 30 companies or something. Now, when you go about approaching a new geography or a new country, how do you even start doing that? What is that process like?

Yeah. We have this term that we use called local luminaries. It goes back to what we alluded to before, but these are people who are highly respected in the local ecosystem and have built companies. The scale of the company and the success of the company doesn’t really matter. They’re people who try really hard to make their ecosystem valid.

In the case of Sweden, we met the founders of Voi, Fredrik Hjelm and Adam Jafer. Looking from the outside, you wouldn’t think that because what they built was a company very similar to Lime, a scooter company, they would be in the middle of the AI boom in Sweden. But if you look at all the angel investments that Fredrik made, he’s pretty much in all the relevant companies that came out of Sweden.

And the reason why is because he’s very well connected with the younger groups of founders, but also with the experienced ones. He tries to bring them all together and make a case for Sweden—why Sweden should be part of this, going back to the analogy of the AI Olympics.

And you kind of see this persona across every different market that we mapped out. So our first job is: How do we understand who these people are? How do we help these people? There are clearly multiple ways that we can help them, and one of them is just validating their message.

Right. When you've been an evangelizer and then you get some sort of validation from a firm like us, that helps you a lot to prove your point. So they get closer to us. We start working with them, doing events, helping their companies recruit, and that gives us access to the best people within their network.

And I think the second step is, once you've mapped out these people, you map out the equivalent of the rising stars—or who these luminaries are in Silicon Valley from that country, right? One of these rising stars in Sweden is Gabriel Petersson, right? He was a high school dropout from Sweden, came to the U.S. with no education, got a job at Midjourney, then became one of the youngest researchers at OpenAI, and now he's started a company. But every time there's a Swedish founder who wants to move to Silicon Valley, they want to get in touch with him.

Mhm.

Right. So if you build this network where you map out who they are when they're in Sweden, and then when they move to Silicon Valley, you help them connect with successful people from their country, you're pretty much in the flow. Yeah, yeah.

And that's how we build each ecosystem. The joke a lot of people usually tell us is, “Hey, Gabe, you're so well known in Sweden, or in Germany, or in Brazil.” And the joke I tell them is that in every country, I make them feel like it's the only country that I look at, because we try to drill down to a very, very local level on these luminaries and this ecosystem.

I think the other thing, sort of phase 3, as ecosystems get a little bit more mature, is the executives at the rising next set. One of the things that makes it so powerful is that it's really mission-driven: They saw how hard it was, and so you then see heads of sales, founding engineers who have a little bit of liquidity and now very much want to pay it forward to that next generation of founders.

We've got a global scout program where we recruit the best of the rising stars at the companies to be part of it, too, and that helps create the ecosystem.

Yeah.

And the last part that I'll point to is that when we find enough density, we actually even do events just for that community. About a year ago, we did one with Angela and Ben Horowitz, where he was a speaker, and we brought the best Nordic founders all to Silicon Valley for a week. Then we hosted them at our event. So when we see that density, we try to do very local events to help out those ecosystems.

Yeah, yeah. It's funny. We just released a podcast with Will Gaybrick from Stripe, and the parallels between how Stripe works and what you're describing are funny. You start really early with individuals or teams—very small companies—and then you grow with them and begin to offer more. You grow with those companies as they become large enterprises, and you're there for every single generation, or every single step of the life cycle.

It's almost like you see how these kinds of flywheels, especially as they apply to startups, have repeatable motions regardless of whether it's an international investing strategy or a payments platform. It looks very similar when you actually look at what's happening under the hood.

100%. Yeah.

And I think, too, if you think about all of us, we remember the people who helped us—

When it wasn't obvious.

Yeah.

8. Repeat Founders & Building Long-Term Relationships

And so I think in our role, you've just got to be really passionate about meeting people, paying it forward, and generally raising up your ecosystem. Some of those will become great founders that you get to invest in. Others will become broader parts of the ecosystem. But you've got to be there early.

I would love to talk about some of the repeat founders who we've identified, spoken to, and built relationships with, and how you guys think about that. It's something that we've now done a couple of times, so I'm curious.

Yeah. So it was pretty much continuing to execute on the WhatsApp strategy, funny enough. These local ecosystems had a wave—a first wave—of entrepreneurs who got to some sort of meaningful scale, let's say within the $1 billion to $5 billion range, usually, but they didn't get to see it all the way through, right?

Because it was the first time around, and because the ecosystem itself was really, really hard, there were a lot of lessons that they couldn't fully see and apply to fulfill their vision. That gets them going and thinking, “Okay, I'm going to do the next business, but this time around, I'm going to apply all the knowledge that I have, all the network that I built, and go build something even bigger, because I know I can.”

The way that we identify these people is because of their drive to be like, “Okay, this $5 billion exit or $5 billion outcome wasn't enough for me. I want to do something greater for my local ecosystem.”

The way that we build these relationships is, we track them very, very closely. We help them come to events. What these people usually want is to reactivate their network at times, right? Especially in AI, they want to get connected with the smartest engineers at Stanford. They want to be in the flow of talent, and we give them that bridge to it, right?

So we map out these people, put them in touch, and help them ideate about their ideas as well. That gains momentum when we introduce them to customers so that they can have these unbiased conversations and validate what they're thinking through. Then we're very intentional as well when it comes to putting it all together for them.

In the case—I'll give an example—we invested in Frederik G. M. He has a new company; the company's name is Pip.com. When they were coming to Silicon Valley, we put them in touch with the top executives at DoorDash, the top executives at Lyft, and the top executives from a bunch of our portfolio companies. We helped them ideate about the idea, and after they came back from that trip, they had a pretty clear vision of what they wanted to do and execute.

Then they decided to go with us because, despite having preexisting relationships—it was very obvious at that point that a lot of investors wanted to invest in them—we differentiated ourselves on the ideation side, and they decided to go with us.

Yeah. I think the other opportunity to close the gap, especially for repeat founders, is that they probably don't have a network of the smartest 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds, all in AI. These are amazing engineers who probably want to be founders, but they might want one job in between.

9. The Journey from Seed to Growth for International Founders

Sometimes these repeat founders—especially the really hungry ones going at it again—have learned so many lessons, and it is great CEO school to come work for their companies for 2, 3, or 4 years. So this kind of collaboration that we get through the networks ends up being very powerful on both sides.

If I'm a founder—an early-stage, seed-stage founder—what is my experience like as I'm coming into this ecosystem, and how do you grow with these companies from Series A to growth?

Yeah. So the first thing that we focus on is visas.

Mhm. This might not sound like a big deal, but it's the most stressful process when it comes to moving to the U.S. What is the right visa? What do I qualify for? Who's going to write a recommendation letter for me? Those are things that we help a lot of founders with. We're actually investors in a visa company, an O-1 visa company called Extraordinary.

And through Extraordinary, we partner a lot on helping these founders come to the U.S., making sure that they have the right qualifications, or helping them understand what they need to come to the U.S. as fast as possible.

The other thing is that there's a lot of hacker houses that started abroad but now have created campuses in the U.S.—to use Angela's analogy, campuses—where they offer free rooms for people to stay for a short period of time. We sponsored one called Palo House.

We met this company at Slush, which is a big event that happens in Finland. There were 4 really smart students from CDTM, which is one of the best programs in Germany, and they had this idea: “Hey, we want to have a house in Palo Alto, and we want to bring the smartest people that we know to stay with us in Palo Alto and help them ideate.”

So we decided to sponsor this house. Over a period of 4 months, they crowded the house too much. They received, I believe, through dinners and everybody who stayed there—it was like 1,200 people ended up staying there.

Through that, we actually ended up meeting really exceptional people that we stay in touch with.

Nice. They really were like running a small college.

A small liberal arts college.

And now they actually want to find a way to keep that alive independently. But there are so many cases of campuses from different countries. So we kind of help them connect.

In the way that they stay, and then through our Borderless communities as well. It’s like, hey, you’re here for a couple of weeks. Why didn’t you come to this dinner and meet other really smart founders and operators who just went through a similar journey?

Yeah, and I think as the founders start their companies, the next step is often that they’re very technical founders with an idea, and they’re looking for which market or which use case they should go after. One of the things that I think is particularly interesting internationally is that many countries have several powerful families that control a lot of the enterprises, and the next generation in those families is very motivated to become AI-native.

We’ve brought them into our Borderless Founder group, so if you want heads of operations and finance around the world to ideate with and talk about their problems, they’re very willing to talk to the smartest people in our community about what they should build. That can be a really interesting kind of connection, too.

10. Advice for Founders Thinking of Moving to Silicon Valley

We have had actual contracts for portfolio companies land from those initiatives.

Very cool.

So, if I’m an international founder listening to this and thinking about moving to Silicon Valley, what should I know? What should I keep in mind? Should I be thinking about just coming for 1 month or 3 months? Should I be thinking about moving altogether? What are the kinds of questions that I should be asking myself?

I think the answer varies a lot for everyone, but one thing that is very common is: definitely come and spend time in Silicon Valley. I think this is one of the things that we highly encourage because—

Even if you’re going to go back, you go back with a lot of insights. I never met somebody that came to Silicon Valley and was like, “This was such a waste of time.” Everybody goes back excited, and it helps them calibrate as well on the level of speed.

I think this is one of the things that Silicon Valley continues to be ahead of every other ecosystem: the level of speed that people operate. I think just calibrating on speed is really important. One of the things that I personally would recommend is, at the very least, 3 to 6 months, so you can kind of immerse yourself, because a couple of weeks can be—I don’t think—as influential. You have to go through the depth of the network and kind of realize that. In a couple of weeks, some people get discouraged because sometimes it’s really hard to connect with people. But I find that people who spend a little bit longer come back with the right connections, even if they decide to go back or finally decide to move here.

Yeah.

I’d say lean on your diaspora, either via us. We’ve posted about a lot of the things that we can do. It is way deeper than probably you think in the Bay Area and very much primed to help you build your company.

10 years from now, what do you hope to see as the results of this—not just in a16z and our portfolio companies, but in the global topology of startups everywhere in the world?

I think this trend is just going to continue. We actually ran the stats, and out of our apps, 40% of our investments were in international founders. Half of them were based here, and half of them were based in other countries.

And so, I think that an international mix of all nationalities builds bigger and bigger companies. I think it is great for consumers, great for enterprises, and we are just 1% scratching the surface of what we can do with AI.

Totally. I would second that. I think there’s a statistic that a lot of people in Silicon Valley used to frame a lot, which is that 90% of the returns in venture capital come from Silicon Valley companies. I think that if that share goes from 10% all the way to 20% to 30%, that’s something that I would like to see, because that builds that case.

I think the other reason I never really liked that statistic is that it doesn't fully tell the story. There are a lot of these borderless founders—many of them are based here, but a lot of the engineering team might actually be back in their home country.

And a lot of these advantages were never really told. So there are a lot of these companies that actually are claimed by two different countries.

Right? And that story was never really told. You have seen that historically, and I think it’s going to continue. But hopefully now, from this perspective, it’s like: yeah, we’re this global company that has headquarters in, at the very least, 2 different countries.

Well, Angela, Gabriel, thanks so much for joining me today. This was a ton of fun. When this episode releases, everyone will also be able to read your piece on the subject. So check it out on Substack and the a16z blog.