How Global Networks Are Reshaping Startup Success

Anyone international, whether you're building primarily in your home country to start, but that you have global ambitions, you're a borderless founder. They tend to have a chip on their shoulder. It's the desire that they want to become the benchmark and prove something to the world that 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, you just can't do that. There's no fraud as a stack, KYC is a stack. So you end up having to build everything. There's this interesting dichotomy in this technology. It's very democratic. It distributes the ability to get it anywhere in the world. It opens up other markets, but then it also concentrates the kind of epicenter of where things are moving the fastest to the Bay Area. Ten years from now, what do you hope to see in the global topology of startups everywhere in the world? I think Some of the most interesting companies in Silicon Valley today aren't really from Silicon Valley at all. Their founders may have grown up in Brazil, Sweden, Germany, Poland, or somewhere else entirely. Their engineering teams may span multiple countries, and increasingly, they're using the networks of their home markets alongside the speed and resources of Silicon Valley to build global companies. In this episode, Elena Berger sits down with Angela Strange and Gabriel Vasquez to unpack what they call the borderless founder and why AI is accelerating the shift. They discuss the hidden advantages global founders can bring in talent, customers, and distribution, the power of founder diasporas, and why the bridge between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world increasingly runs in both directions. Welcome back to the a sixteen z podcast. Today, we're here with Angela Strange and Gabriel Vasquez, two of the architects of a sixteen z's global investing strategy. So today, 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 historically has been really, really situated in Silicon Valley. So what makes borderless founders interesting, and what is the story of international investing? I remember when very early in my career at a sixteen z, I was investing primarily in financial services or or fintech. And one of the first articles I wrote was around just 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. And at that same time, my brother had just joined Nubank down in Brazil. Mhmm. And I remember him saying that David had said, yeah, you know, you could compete to be the fifth financial services for every customer in The US, or …