@FinanceYF5: 1/ Keeping one foot in your home country and one foot in Silicon Valley is becoming a unique advantage for entrepreneurs. Over half of the billion-dollar companies in the US were founded or co-founded by immigrants; in early investments by a16z Apps, 44% have international founders. Why is a multinational background becoming a moat?

1/ Keeping one foot in your home country while stepping into Silicon Valley is becoming a unique advantage for entrepreneurs.
Over half of America’s billion-dollar companies were founded or co-founded by immigrants; among early investments by a16z Apps, 44% had international founders.
Why is a cross-border background turning into a competitive moat?

2/ Startup growth relies on “priority connections”:
Early customers build credibility, credibility attracts talent and capital, which then further amplifies borderless founders’ brand, revenue, and resources.
Borderless founders enjoy three advantages: familiarity with local clients, ability to build a home brand, and spotting top engineers earlier than the market.

3/ These advantages are already yielding concrete results:
Pit leveraged its local reputation to bring H&M and Stena Metall on as its first customers; Supersonik secured Salesforce through its Spanish entrepreneur network; ElevenLabs attracted investment from the Polish government and sparked global attention.
Talent, customers, and brand recognition can all be accumulated across borders simultaneously.

4/ a16z’s approach is to first identify the most influential founders and operators in each country, then have them mentor the next generation.
Through small dinners, mature founders, potential founders, and early talent are brought to the same table.
This “pay-it-forward” relationship gradually builds a transnational startup network.

5/ Cross-border relationships can’t be built solely online—consistent physical presence locally matters more.
Gabriel Vasquez flew between New York and Stockholm nine times in one year; over the past five years, Borderless Founder dinners have connected over 600 founders and early core employees.
Many relationships begin long before a company becomes well-known.

6/ When clients, brand recognition, and talent begin to connect across borders, the growth snowball starts rolling.
AI and remote work are compressing geographic distance, so entrepreneurs no longer have to choose between their home network and the U.S. market.
The strongest founders leverage advantages from both sides. Your background itself is the moat.

Read the original:
How can you conduct world-class AI research without a large language model lab’s budget?
Harvey shared its “Moneyball” strategy:
Domain experts guide synthetic data to build a legal evaluation set; simultaneously partner with multiple new labs, complete post-training internally, and via model routing, automatic switching, and SLA, provide stable service to 60 countries.
The core isn’t throwing more money at it, but allocating limited budgets to the most critical areas.