2020: The Cambrian Explosion of Global Entrepreneurship
It took a year, to move forward 10 years, and it's now truly accelerating
About a year ago, I penned the opening thesis of this blog from the lobby of the Hoxton Hotel in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn with anticipation of the second entrepreneurial revolution being a global one. No one could have anticipated what happened next.
Who would know that just six months after that post, that we would be locked down and forced to examine how we do business in an age where we can’t physically interact the same way again. In just March of this (!) year, I sat in Mountain View, meeting with YC startups only for that day for the physical demo day to be called off, and founders hurriedly panicking to go home, not knowing if they could fly back to their home countries.
What resulted is the first virtual demo day format, which really threw both startups and investors for a loop. Within months, everyone moved onto Zoom and WhatsApp, and rounds started to be closed faster than ever. Capital which used to be landlocked found a more efficient process to make deals, the result was twofold, venture investors no longer needed to be within driving distance to do a deal, and founders who no longer were chained to where the capital was decided to live and hire where it made the most sense for themselves, their families and their employees.
We entered an era that felt too good to be true, and confusing at the same time. Wait, what.. you could live where you wanted and have capital come to you? Suddenly every part of the world with the right talent could attract high profile investors. American flagship investors like Sequoia, planted formal roots in Europe, and SE Asia/India with a hub and spoke presence driven by virtual demo days, and. networks of scouts. Y Combinator embraced the virtual demo day format, rapidly expanding batch sizes, with over 50% of startups being from outside the US.
Suddenly Silicon Valley as a mindset became a portable and popular conversation with tech becoming distributed and conversation shifting to create even more regional entrepreneurial hubs beyond SF and NYC (Miami or Austin anyone?). Zoom capitalism means Silicon Valley investors (who may no longer live in Silicon Valley), may seed more regional hubs in the US (Atlanta, Miami, Austin, Utah etc), while sitting in Zoom Valley (cute Zoom background towns like Lake Tahoe, Reno, Kauai, or Sun Valley).
Taking venture money no longer needed to be cool, when you could build a $7BN valued business with no venture capital from Prague (JetBrains, the creator of developer defaults like PyCharm, Kotlin and IntelliJ, bootstrapped to $7BN) or start a $10B+ enterprise software company, due to IPO in 2021, from Cluij-Nopoca, Romania.
In a world where capital moves to where talent is, the Cambrian explosion of Global entrepreneurship is going to look like no other time in history.
And in 2021 I’m going to map all of it, focusing on every single confusing but canonical company and individual that is contributing to the second entrepreneurial revolution.
I hope you enjoy a happy holiday season and look forward to reading about what is about to come.