How Global Networks Are Reshaping Startup Success

**Angela Strange** (0:00)
Anyone international, whether you're building primarily in your home country to start, but that you have global ambitions, you're a Borderless Founder.

**Gabriel Vasquez** (0:07)
They tend to have a chip on their folder. 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.

**Angela Strange** (0:17)
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 as 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.

**Elena Burger** (0:43)
10 years from now, what do you hope to see in the global topology of startups everywhere in the world?

**Angela Strange** (0:51)
I think...

**SPEAKER_4** (0:53)
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 Burger sits down with Angela Strange and Gabriel Vasquez to unpack what they call the Borderless Founder, and why AI is accelerating this 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.

**Elena Burger** (1:42)
Welcome back to the A16z podcast. Today, we're here with Angela Strange and Gabriel Vasquez, two of the architects of A16z global investing strategy. 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 situated in Silicon Valley.
What makes borderless founders interesting and what is the story of international investing?

**Angela Strange** (2:17)
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 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. At that same time, my brother had just joined New Bank down in Brazil, and I remember him saying that David had said, yeah, you could compete to be the fifth financial services for every customer in the US, or you could go to a wide open market with five fat happy banks that only serve 20 percent of the population. Yes, it's much more difficult to get things going because you've got to get license, you've got to build all the infrastructure, but there's just these wide, wide open markets.
That is what initially got me interested in looking at Latin America and the first check I ever wrote at a16z was actually into Santiago Suarez, the CEO of Adi, 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 I got a WhatsApp from Gabriel, who had joined a16z totally on a different team. He's like, hey, you haven't met me yet, but I just 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.

**Elena Burger** (3:53)
And at the time, Gabriel, were these all FinTech founders or were they like working in every single industry under the sun?

**Gabriel Vasquez** (4:01)
Every single industry, but historically in Latam, you see more FinTech founders than you see in other regions. But the premise was, at the time that I did the mapping and paying Angela, there were only 30 unicorns in Latin America. So the thesis was like, you can 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. So there was this opportunity to kind of bring them all together. And we ended up doing that. We created a WhatsApp group with Angela, with Mark Andreessen, Alex Rampel, and a bunch of other people at the firm.