For a16z, AI provides international founders a bonus

Andreessen Horowitz has made headlines for its American dynamism thesis, but a U.S. passport is no requirement. According to Gabriel Vasquez, a partner focusing on AI apps and the firm’s global investment strategy, “44% of our investments in the Apps Fund One and Two have an international founder.” 

Together with general partner Angela Strange, Vasquez is the driving force behind a16z’s Borderless Founder network, an initiative to support immigrant and international founders. Their premise is that great companies could be born anywhere, but they now believe foreign entrepreneurs actually have an edge over their American peers.

The U.S. has always attracted foreign founders; but in the current AI-dominated cycle, a16z acknowledges that their roots are more helpful than they used to be. “There is now an advantage to having one foot in your home country, and one foot in Silicon Valley,” Strange and Vasquez wrote in a post to which TechCrunch had early access. 

Talking to TechCrunch exclusively, Vasquez broke down how this advantage has become significant enough for a16z to “spend more than one million air miles” in order to go after international dealflow — rather than expecting each and every team to move to the U.S. 

This expectation didn’t come out of nowhere, especially for enterprise startups, where there’s been a marked shift in buying patterns from those based outside the U.S. “The buyers from countries outside the U.S. were not moving rapidly, and their willingness to pay was very low,” Vasquez said of the old pattern.

But this has changed dramatically “in the last three to five years,” with startups now able to secure major companies worldwide as customers, even in less cutting-edge markets.

When a16z started hearing from international seed-stage startups working with Fortune 500 companies, “we thought this might be an exception, but it was clearly a trend,” Vasquez said. Examples now abound of international AI startups signing major clients early on — but Vasquez is also right that it was rarely the case even a few years ago.

In Europe, in particular, it used to be that corporations would only engage with startups through open innovation programs and accelerators, but rarely with their main checkbook. Turning them into paid customers was hard enough that France launched a dedicated initiative, “I Choose French Tech.” But according to Vasquez, AI has been the driver in making this shift a reality.

That’s because AI made legacy players realize they would have to buy third-party solutions to remain competitive — even in areas where human labor is still affordable, like Latin America, Vasquez said. “Software never really picked up in the region, because you were competing with cheap labor.” But now that AI agents are “always on” and increasingly accurate, they have become commonplace in customer service and more.

Others could go after these opportunities, too. “There’s so much appetite at the enterprise level for companies all around the world to consume AI, but American [startups] don’t have the speed yet to go serve the entire market from day zero, so they obviously prioritize U.S. companies,” Vasquez said. 

This leaves the door open for a local founder to sell an AI solution to companies in their country, while splitting their time between home and the U.S. “The concept of headquarters is something that is changing a lot; it’s just more fluid,” Vasquez said, noting that even governments seem to take a similar view. 

Case in point: Poland recently took a stake in a16z portfolio company ElevenLabs. The voice AI startup only has a subsidiary in the country, and not its headquarters, but its customers include InPost and LOT Polish Airlines, and its founders are Piotr Dąbkowski and Mateusz Staniszewski — two examples of Polish talent in AI, also strongly present at OpenAI.

From Vasquez’s point of view, access to talent is a key differentiator. “Right now, recruiting in Silicon Valley is the hardest thing, because you’re competing with Anthropic and OpenAI that have raised billions and billions of dollars for the best talent.” But international founders are often tapping into the talent pool that exists in many places outside of the U.S.

Talent clusters are also the reason why Vasquez has been spending a lot of time on a plane — often in Stockholm — in search of the next unicorn. Some of the top AI scaleups are European academic spinouts, and VCs are going after them. In a sense, the story goes the other way around; to quote Dealroom founder Yoram Wijngaarde: “European talent remains one of America’s biggest startup advantages.”