Introduction
1. “Off-Grid Solar Market Trends Report 2018” (Washington, DC: International Finance Corporation), January 2018.
2. Ilya A. Strebulaev and Will Gornall, “How Much Does Venture Capital Drive the U.S. Economy?” Stanford Graduate School of Business, October 21, 2015, https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/how-much-does-venture-capital-drive-us-economy.
3. Tim Kane, “The Importance of Startups in Job Creation and Job Destruction,” Kauffman Foundation Research Series, July 2010, https://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/firm-formation-and-growth-series/the-importance-of-startups-in-job-creation-and-job-destruction.
4. Keith Collister, “Harvard’s Josh Lerner Asks Why Bother with Venture Capital?” Jamaica Observer, September 12, 2014, http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/business/Harvard-s-Josh-Lerner-asks-why-bother-with-venture-capital-_17535881.
5. Enrique Dans, “Hey! We Live in the Age of Innovation: Who Needs Rules?” Forbes, December 6, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2017/12/06/hey-we-live-in-the-age-of-innovation-who-needs-rules/#2538c451246c.
6. George Avalos, “‘Immense Growth’ Makes the Bay Area the World’s 19th-Largest Economy, If It Were a Nation,” Mercury News, July 10, 2018, https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/07/10/immense-growth-makes-bay-area-worlds-19th-largest-economy-google-facebook-apple-adobe/.
7. “San Francisco Bay Area Startups,” 2019, https://angel.co/san-francisco-bay-area; and Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton, “Tech Is (Still) Concentrating in the Bay Area: An Update on America’s Winner-Take-Most Economic Phenomenon,” Brookings Institution, December 17, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/12/17/tech-is-still-concentrating-in-the-bay-area-an-update-on-americas-winner-take-most-economic-phenomenon/.
8. Adam Satariano, “The World’s First Ambassador to the Tech Industry,” New York Times, September 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/03/technology/denmark-tech-ambassador.html.
9. Leigh Buchanan, “Study: U.S. Businesses No Longer Dominate in Venture Capital Funding,” Inc., October 5, 2018, https://www.inc.com/leigh-buchanan/american-businesses-no-longer-dominate-venture-capital.html.
10. “Number of Mobile Subscribers Worldwide Hits 5 Billion,” GMSA Newsroom, June 13, 2017, https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/press-release/number-mobile-subscribers-worldwide-hits-5-billion/.
11. “Number of Worldwide Social Network Users from 2010 to 2021 (in Billions),” Statista, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/.
12. Richard Florida and Ian Hathaway, “Rise of the Global Startup City: Startup Revolution Report,” Center for American Entrepreneurship, 2019, http://startupsusa.org/global-startup-cities/.
13. Lise He, “How Many Startups Are There in China?” Quora, November 27, 2018, https://www.quora.com/How-many-startups-are-there-in-China.
14. “Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2017,” Startup Genome, April 2018, https://startupgenome.com/all-reports.
15. “How Many Startups Are There?” Get2Growth, http://get2growth.com/how-many-startups/.
16. “Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2017,” Startup Genome, https://startupgenome.com/all-reports.
17. Anne S. Habiby and Deirdre M. Coyle Jr., “The High-Intensity Entrepreneur,” Harvard Business Review, September 2010, https://hbr.org/2010/09/the-high-intensity-entrepreneur.
18. “The Global Unicorn Club: Current Private Companies Valued at $1B+,” CB Insights, 2019, https://www.cbinsights.com/research-unicorn-companies.
19. Mansoor Iqbal, “Uber Revenue and Usage Statistics (2018) [2019],” Business of Apps, February 2019 [updated May 10, 2019], http://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/; Trefis.com, “Number of Rides Uber Gave Worldwide from 2016 to 2019 (in Billions),” Statista, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/946298/uber-ridership-worldwide/; Jane Zhang, “Didi by the Numbers: Ride-Hailing Firm Covered More Miles in 2018 Than 5 Earth-to-Neptune Round-Trips,” South China Morning Post, January 23, 2019, https://www.scmp.com/tech/start-ups/article/2181542/didi-numbers-ride-hailing-firm-covered-more-miles-2018-5-earth; Xinhua, “DiDi completes 7.43b Rides in 2017,” ChinaDaily.com, September 2018, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201801/09/WS5a541c98a31008cf16da5e76.html; Fanny Potkin, “Indonesia’s Go-Jek Close to Profits in All Segments, Except Transport: CEO,” Reuters, August 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-indonesia-gojek-interview/indonesias-go-jek-close-to-profits-in-all-segments-except-transport-ceo-idUSKBN1L20SI; Marina Pasquali, “Key Figures on Taxi and Car Sharing App 99 in Brazil as of 2018,” Statista, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/882180/brazil-key-figures-taxi-car-sharing-app-99/; and Robin Wauters, “Cabify Hits 13 Million Customers Globally, Raises $160 Million from Rakuten and Others at $1.4 Billion Valuation,” techeu, January 22, 2018, https://tech.eu/brief/cabify-hits-13-million-customers-globally-raises-160-million-rakuten-others-1–4-billion-valuation/.
20. J. Clement, “Number of PayPal’s Total Active Registered User Accounts from 1st Quarter 2010 to 4th Quarter 2018 (in Millions),” Statista, July 26, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/218493/paypals-total-active-registered-accounts-from-2010/; and Trefis, “Is Paytm Worth $20 Billion?” Forbes, December 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/12/03/is-paytm-worth-20-billion/#3327d9834439.
21. Olivia Solon, “Tech’s Terrible Year: How the World Turned on Silicon Valley in 2017,” Observer, December 23, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/22/tech-year-in-review-2017.
22. Susan Wu, “It’s Time for Innovators to Take Responsibility for Their Creations,” Wired, December 25, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/its-time-for-innovators-to-take-responsibility-for-their-creations.
23. Daniel Weisfield, “Peter Thiel at Yale: We Wanted Flying Cars, Instead We Got 140 Characters,” Yale School of Management, April 27, 2013, https://som.yale.edu/blog/peter-thiel-at-yale-we-wanted-flying-cars-instead-we-got-140-characters.
24. Biz Carson, “Silicon Valley Startups Are Obsessed with Developing Tech to Replace Their Moms” May 10, 2015, https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-tech-startups-replacing-mom-2015-5; Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan, “The Internet of ‘Stuff Your Mom Won’t Do for You Anymore,’” hbr.org, July 26, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/07/the-internet-of-stuff-your-mom-wont-do-for-you-anymore; Emily Chang, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley (New York: Portfolio, 2018).
25. “List of Automobile Manufacturers in Michigan,” Wikipedia, May 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacturers_of_Michigan.
26. Glenn Counts, Steve Ronson, and Kurt Spenser, “Detroit: The New Motor City,” Ethics of Development in a Global Environment (EDGE), July 1999, https://web.stanford.edu/class/e297c/poverty_prejudice/citypoverty/hdetroit.htm.
27. General Motors, “General Motors Production By Plant,” https://media.gm.com/content/dam/Media/gmcom/investor/2012/Production-by-Plant-December-2012-NA.pdf.
28. Michelle Robertson, “So Many People Are Leaving the Bay Area, a U-Haul Shortage Is Jacking Up Prices,” SFGATE, February 15, 2018, https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/U-Haul-San-Francisco-Bay-Area-prices-shortage-12617855.php.
29. “Off-Grid Solar Market Trends Report 2018”; James Chen, “What Are Frontier Markets?” Investopedia, March 26, 2018 [updated October 15, 2019], https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/frontier-market.asp; and Early Growth Financial Services, “What Is Frontier Tech?” 2018, https://earlygrowthfinancialservices.com/what-is-frontier-tech/.
30. Brad Feld, Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2012).
31. China has developed its own startup ecosystem. While it shares many similarities with Silicon Valley, it is also different in a variety of important ways. The Chinese government has mobilized a range of resources to kick-start the ecosystem, through investments in ecosystem, physical space, venture capital funding, and the like. Local regulations have made it harder, and in some cases impossible, for foreign technology companies to access the market, creating room for local players to thrive. The domestic market dwarfs that of every other country except the United States, giving room to scale large companies in a single market. This book covers parts of the Chinese ecosystem, although China’s model is unique and often hard to replicate in other markets, and thus many parts will be out of scope.
32. Deal Sunny, “Entrepreneurship Infographic: 46 Facts Every Entrepreneur Needs To Know About,” 2015, https://www.dealsunny.com/blog/entrepreneurship-infographic.
33. Rhett Morris and Lili Török, “Fostering Productive Entrepreneurship Communities,” Endeavor Insight, October 2018, https://endeavor.org/content/uploads/2015/06/Fostering-Productive-Entrepreneurship-Communities.pdf.
34. Fabio Sergio, “The Human Side of Inclusion,” MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth, January 20, 2015, https://mastercardcenter.org/insights/human-side-inclusion/.
35. American University, “New Study Reveals the Worldwide Reach of Social Entrepreneurship,” Science X Network, June 1, 2016, https://phys.org/news/2016-06-reveals-worldwide-social-entrepreneurship.html; and Jay Boulkin, “Social Enterprise: Statistics from Around The World,” Social Good Stuff, 2017, http://socialgoodstuff.com/2016/08/statistics-from-around-the-world/.
36. “Startup Activity Swings Upward for Third Consecutive Year,” Kauffman Foundation, May 8, 2017, https://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/2017/05/startup-activity-swings-upward-for-third-consecutive-year-annual-kauffman-index-reports.
Chapter 1
1. Author interview with Timbo Drayson, November 30, 2017.
2. Marissa Drouillard, “Addressing Voids: How Digital Start-Ups in Kenya Create Market Infrastructure,” Digital Kenya, 2018, http://digitalkenyabook.com/.
3. Caitlin F. Dolkart, “Nairobi by Numbers: The Emergency Facts,” Flare Emergency Services by Capsule, December 13, 2017, http://blog.capsule.co.ke/faqs/.
4. Interview, Drayson, 2017.
5. Marissa Drouillard, “Conversation #4: Finding the Right Problem to Solve,” in Bitange Ndemo and Tim Weiss, eds., Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
6. “OkHi Launches Mobile App for Businesses to Share Their Locations with Clients,” aptantech, December 22, 2017, http://aptantech.com/2017/12/okhi-launches-mobile-app-for-businesses-to-share-their-locations-with-clients/.
7. Soylent is a popular meal replacement beverage, with a following among software engineers, to promote efficiency.
8. Bruce Broussard and John Sculley, “It’s Time to Disrupt the $3 Trillion Healthcare Industry,” Forbes, November 29, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/sciencebiz/2016/11/16/its-time-to-disrupt-the-3-trillion-healthcare-industry/#72d4fdd718b3; Meeri Kim, “Silicon Valley’s Attempt to Disrupt Education,” Learning & Development blog, November 11, 2016, http://bold.expert/silicon-valleys-attempt-to-disrupt-education/; Maya Kosoff, “The ‘WTF’ Plan to Disrupt Politics Is Everything That’s Wrong with Silicon Valley,” Vanity Fair, July 5, 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/the-wtf-plan-to-disrupt-politics-is-everything-thats-wrong-with-silicon-valley’; and Eric He, “How Silicon Valley Is Inventing the Future of Cars,” July 28, 2017, https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2017/07/28/how-silicon-valley-is-inventing-the-future-of-cars.
9. Chance Barnett, “The Disruption of Venture Capital,” startupgrind, June 27, 2016, https://medium.com/startup-grind/the-disruption-of-venture-capital-df32c8916f9b; Dan Primack, “A Disruptor Shakes Up Angel Investing,” Fortune, November 13, 2014, http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/angellist-ceo-naval-ravikant-disruptor/; and Jurica Dujmovic, “Startup Accelerators Are Aiming to Disrupt These Industries,” MarketWatch, June 22, 2017, http://www.marketwatch.com/story/startup-accelerators-are-aiming-to-disrupt-these-industries-2017-06-22.
10.. “Proof of Concept,” Season 1, Episode 7, Silicon Valley, directed by Mike Judge, written by Mike Judge, John Altschuler, Dave Krinsky, and Clay Tarver, June 2014, HBO.
11. Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor, and Rory McDonald, “What Is Disruptive Innovation?” Harvard Business Review, December 2015, hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation.
12. Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2016).
13. Jill Lepore, “The Disruption Machine: What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong,” New Yorker, June 23, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine.
14. To analyze this, my colleagues and I identified the largest emerging market startups—those that have scaled the fastest or raised the most money according to industry sources and have partnered with leading investors. The Silicon Valley sample set was based on publicly available lists of unicorns.
15. For one thing, in Silicon Valley, the definition of disruption increasingly has been stretched, pulled, and fitted to represent any case in which an innovation is used or an incumbent has faltered. My definition of creators could also be stretched or defined alternatively. For our purposes here, I have focused on the creation of formal products or services to address acute pain points. This definition largely excludes the informal economy, which constitutes a huge segment of emerging-market economies. Moreover, I have focused on creation of new markets or formalization of informal markets and have excluded cases where current offerings are present even if highly dysfunctional. For example, Bridge International Academies is a startup that manages a network of low-cost private schools across East Africa; its product is better, cheaper, and in some cases life changing, but under my set of definitions it would not be categorized as a creator. Second, even after finalizing the aforementioned definitions, characterizing innovations as either creators or disruptors is still more art than science. One could argue that Fetchr (a startup you will meet later in the book that is creating a last-mile delivery supply chain in the Middle East), which I deem a creator, is not creating a new industry but only disrupting a fragmented, informal, disaggregated industry that doesn’t serve e-commerce needs. Conversely, one could argue that WeWork, excluded from the creators list, has built an entirely new category of commercial real estate (rather than disrupting existing managed space). And for some segments, companies can be creators in some markets and disruptors in others (e.g., Uber arguably created a new transportation segment in the United States with its shared taxis via UberPool and yet is disrupting taxis with UberX). See also Christensen, Raynor, and McDonald, “What Is Disruptive Innovation?”
16. Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, Leora Klapper, Dorothe Singer, Saniya Ansar, and Jake Hess, “The Global Findex Database World Bank,” http://bit.ly/3a5TOzX.
17. Lisa Johnson, “Four Crucial Insights for the Future of Financial Inclusion,” Accion, July 25, 2018, https://www.accion.org/4-crucial-insights-future-financial-inclusion.
18. James Manyika, Susan Lund, Marc Singer, Olivia White, and Chris Berry, “Digital Finance for All: Powering Inclusive Growth in Emerging Economies,” McKinsey Global Institute, September 2016, https://mck.co/2TqAQOq.
19. Nick Hughes and Susie Lonie, “M-PESA: Mobile Money for the ‘Unbanked’ Turning Cellphones into 24-Hour Tellers in Kenya,” Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization 2, no. 1–2 (2007), doi:10.1162/itgg.2007.2.1–2.63.
20. Safaricom Limited, “Celebrating 10 Years of Changing Lives,” 2017, https://www.safaricom.co.ke/mpesa_timeline/.
21. Joshua Masinde, “Kenya’s M-Pesa Platform Is So Successful Regulators Worry It Could Disrupt the Economy,” Quartz Africa, December 28, 2016, https://qz.com/873525/safaricoms-m-pesa-has-kenyas-government-worried-what-happens-in-the-event-of-a-crash/.
22. Francesco Pasti, “State of the Industry Report of Mobile Money,” GSMA, 2018, https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2018-State-of-the-Industry-Report-on-Mobile-Money.pdf; and Hughes and Lonie, “M-PESA: Mobile Money for the ‘Unbanked.’”
23. Tavneet Suri and William Jack, “The Long-Run Poverty and Gender Impacts of Mobile Money,” Science, December 9, 2016, science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6317/1288.full.
24. Hughes and Lonie, “M-PESA: Mobile Money for the ‘Unbanked’”; and “State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money,” GSMA, 2018, https://www.gsma.com/r/state-of-the-industry-report/.
25. Bitange Ndemo, “Inside a Policymaker’s Mind: An Entrepreneurial Approach to Policy Development and Implementation,” in Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making, eds. Bitange Ndemo and Tim Weiss (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 356.
26. William Boulding and Markus Christen, “First-Mover Disadvantage,” Harvard Business Review, October 2001, https://hbr.org/2001/10/first-mover-disadvantage. The researchers conducted a survey of more than 350 consumer businesses and 850 industrial businesses. They determined pioneers often had sales advantages but faced longer-term cost disadvantages.
27. Fernando Suarez and Gianvito Lanzolla, “The Half-Truth of First-Mover Advantage,” Harvard Business Review, August 2014, https://hbr.org/2005/04/the-half-truth-of-first-mover-advantage.
28. Hughes and Lonie, “M-PESA: Mobile Money for the ‘Unbanked.’”
29. Ndemo, “Inside a Policymaker’s Mind.”
30. Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (London: Virgin Books, 2015).
31. Ibid.
32. Peter Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536.
33. “Tanzania’s Mobile Money Revolution,” Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), March 2015, http://www.cgap.org/research/infographic/tanzanias-mobile-money-revolution.
34. Ryan Craggs, “Where Uber Is Banned Around the World,” Condé Nast Traveler, April 20, 2017, https://www.cntraveler.com/story/where-uber-is-banned-around-the-world.
35. “Safaricom Bets Future on Mobile Payments Mpesa,” Financial Times, May 3, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/5eba36aa-6d7b-11e9–80c7–60ee53e6681d?shareType=nongift.
36. Of course, data privacy and fair use of personal data are key considerations. This is a rapidly evolving conversation in the field, and standards are quickly being put in place. I believe that when done responsibly, these models are strong net positives to increasing access to affordable financial services to those who previously did not enjoy them.
37. “OkHi Launches Mobile App for Businesses to Share Their Locations with Clients,” aptantech, December 22, 2017, http://aptantech.com/2017/12/okhi-launches-mobile-app-for-businesses-to-share-their-locations-with-clients/.
Chapter 2
1. These rates likely underestimate the cost of credit, given expensive overdraft fees. “Bank Lending Rate,” Trading Economics, 2019, https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/bank-lending-rate.
2. Ibid.
3. Neil Patel, “How Mint Grew to 1.5 Million Users and Sold for $170 Million in Just 2 Years,” Neil Patel Blog, https://neilpatel.com/blog/how-mint-grew/.
4. “Credit and Loan Reporting Systems in Brazil,” Western Hemisphere Credit and Loan Reporting Initiative, Centre For Latin American Monetary Studies, March 2005, http://www.whcri.org/PDF/report_brazil.pdf.
5. Author interview with Ben Gleason, August 3, 2018.
6. Ibid.
7. Author interview with Inanc Balci, November 3, 2018.
8. “Our Achievements,” Jumia Group, 2019, https://group.jumia.com/.
9. Author interview with David Vélez, July 24, 2018.
10. “Nubank Valuation Jumps to $10 Billion on $400 Million Mega Round,” Finextra, July 29, 2019, https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/34174/nubank-valuation-jumps-to-10-billion-on-400-million-mega-round.
11. Author interview with Ben Gleason, August 3, 2018.
12. Author interview with Saed Nashef, September 26, 2018.
13. “List of Fetcher’s 3 Funding Rounds from 8 Investors,” Crunchbase, 2019, https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organizations/num_funding_rounds/scout-technologies.
14. Marco Kusumawijaya, “Jakarta at 30 Million: My City Is Choking and Sinking—It Needs a New Plan B,” Guardian, November 21, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/nov/21/jakarta-indonesia-30-million-sinking-future; “Urban Expansion in East Asia—Indonesia,” World Bank, January 26, 2015, http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2015/01/26/urban-expansion-in-east-asia-indonesia; “Jakarta Population 2018,” populationof2018.com, 2019, http://populationof2018.com/jakarta-population-2018.html; and Resty Woro Yuniar, “End of the Road for Southeast Asia’s Bike Taxis?” South China Morning Post, October 1, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/2112922/end-road-indonesias-motorbikes.
15. Safrin La Batu, “Police Want Brakes Put on Car Ownership,” Jakarta Post, February 15, 2016, http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/02/15/police-want-brakes-put-car-ownership.html.
16. Nick Van Mead, “The World’s Worst Traffic: Can Jakarta Find an Alternative to the Car?” Guardian, November 26, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/nov/23/world-worst-traffic-jakarta-alternative.
17. Author interview with Nadiem Makarim, August 5, 2018.
18. “Nadiem Makarim on ‘High Flyers,’” Bloomberg, December 20, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-12-20/full-show-nadiem-makarim-on-high-flyers-10–14-video; and Ambika Chopra, “From Call Centre to the Country’s First Unicorn: How Go-Jek Is Becoming a Way of Living in Indonesia,” Inc42 Media, December 03, 2016, https://inc42.com/indonesia/indonesian-startup-ecosystem-go-jek/.
19. “Nadiem Makarim on ‘High Flyers,’” Bloomberg.
20. Avantika Chilkoti, “Opening the Throttle in Indonesia,” Financial Times, December 22, 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/d774419c-8a0f-11e5–9f8c-a8d619fa707c.
21. Author interview with Nadiem Makarim, August 5, 2018.
22. Madeleine Karlsson, Gaia Penteriani, Helen Croxson, Alexandra Stanek, Robin Miller, Darshana Pema, and Fadzai Chitiyo, “Accelerating Affordable Smartphone Ownership in Emerging Markets,” GSMA, July 2017, p. 17, https://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/accelerating-affordable-smartphone-ownership-emerging-markets-2017.pdf.
23. Adding payments as a product or service could be considered a vertical stack integration. However, as Nadiem Makarim built the platform, the financial services offering was much broader than payments, with the ambition of offering savings and lending products as well. Therefore, it can more appropriately be considered part of the horizontal stack.
24. “Number of Monthly Active WeChat Users from 4th Quarter 2011 to 2nd Quarter 2019 (in Millions),” Statista, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/255778/number-of-active-wechat-messenger-accounts/; and Xinhua, “China’s Alipay Now Has over 900m Users Worldwide,” China Daily, November 2018, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201811/30/WS5c00a1d3a310eff30328c073.html.
25. Judith Balea, “Go-Jek Buys 3 Fintech Firms to Conquer Indonesia Payments,” Tech in Asia, December 14, 2017, https://www.techinasia.com/go-jek-acquisition-kartuku-mapan-midtrans.
26. Author interview with Nadiem Makarim, 2018.
27. “Go-Jek Acquires Three Indonesian Fintech Startups,” Digital News Asia, December 15, 2017, https://www.digitalnewsasia.com/business/indonesia’s-go-jek-acquires-three-local-fintech-startups.
28. “Gojek,” Crunchbase, 2019, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/go-jek#section-overview.
29. Author interview with Nadiem Makarim, 2018.
30. Author interview with Vijay Shekhar Sharma, September 17, 2019; and “Paytm Valuation Rose 25% to $15 Billion in Latest Round, Says Vijay Shekhar Sharma,” Business Today, August 22, 2019, https://www.businesstoday.in/current/corporate/paytm-valuation-rose-25-pc-to-usd-15-billion/story/374415.html.
31. Mohit Mittal, “WeChat—The One App That Rules Them All,” Harvard Business School Digital Initiative, October 18, 2019, https://digital.hbs.edu/innovation-disruption/wechat%E2%80%8A-%E2%80%8Athe-one-app-rules/.
32. Dennis Schaal, “Oral History of Online Travel: Ctrip’s Different Path to China’s Consumers,” Skift, June 6, 2016, https://skift.com/2016/06/06/oral-history-of-online-travel-ctrips-different-path-to-chinas-consumers/.
33. “Ctrip.com International, Ltd. (CTRP),” Yahoo Finance, 2019, https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CTRP/; and “Most Innovative Companies: Ctrip,” Fast Company, 2019, https://www.fastcompany.com/company/ctrip.
34. Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, https://on.wsj.com/3aa0ZHm.
1. Friday Phiri, “Zoona—Innovative Mobile Finance,” CTA, June 9, 2017, http://spore.cta.int/en/dossiers/article/zoona-innovative-mobile-finance.html (accessed March 1, 2018).
2. Graham Van der Made, “Zoona Raises $15-million in Series B Funding Round, 4Di Capital On-Board,” Ventureburn, August 18, 2016, http://ventureburn.com/2016/08/zoona-raises-15-million-series-b-funding-round-4di-capital-board/.
3. “The Causes and Consequences of China’s Market Crash,” Economist, August 24, 2015, https://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21662092-china-sneezing-rest-world-rightly-nervous-causes-and-consequences-chinas.
4. Grieve Chelwa, “The Charts behind Zambia’s Struggling Economy and a Controversial IMF Loan,” Quartz Africa, November 23, 2015, https://qz.com/557335/the-charts-behind-zambias-flailing-economy-and-a-controversial-imf-loan/.
5. “XE Currency Charts: USD to ZMW,” XE, nd [updated frequently], http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=ZMW&view=5Y.
6. Cromwell Schubarth, “These 500 Startups’ Pitches Stood Out on Day Dave McClure Dressed as a Unicorn,” Silicon Valley Tech Flash, August 12, 2015, http://bit.ly/35V9CSu.
7. Aileen Lee, “Welcome to the Unicorn Club: Learning from Billion-Dollar Startups,” TechCrunch, November 2, 2013, https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/02/welcome-to-the-unicorn-club/.
8. Ibid.
9. Lora Kolodny, “One of Tech’s Most Successful Investors Says Silicon Valley’s Unicorns Need to ‘Grow Up,’” CNBC, November 17, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/17/bill-gurley-unicorns-need-to-grow-up.html.
10. Sarah Frier and Eric Newcomer, “The Fuzzy, Insane Math That’s Creating So Many Billion-Dollar Tech Companies,” Bloomberg, March 17, 2015, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/the-fuzzy-insane-math-that-s-creating-so-many-billion-dollar-tech-companies; and “$1B+ Market Map: The World’s 326 Unicorn Companies in One Infographic,” CB Insights, March 14, 2019 [updated periodically], https://www.cbinsights.com/research/unicorn-startup-market-map/.
11. “The Haka is a traditional war cry and dance that is seen as a challenge from the Maori people, and describes the ancestors and events from the history of the tribe. Performed by the national side before every kick-off, the dance involves the stamping of feet, slapping of hands on the body and several facial contortions involving the tongue and eyes. It generally begins with the words: ‘Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora!’, which means: ‘I die! I die! I live! I live!’ . . . The Haka is also performed across the country at funerals, weddings and in certain school presentations and celebrations,” from Jordan Davies and Sam Street, “Who Leads the Haka, Is It Always the Same Song, and Why Do New Zealand Rugby Perform It Before Every Match?” Sun, August18, 2018 [updated October 19, 2019], https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/3816859/haka-new-zealand-all-blacks-australia-bledisloe-cup/.
12. Paul Graham, “Startup = Growth,” Paulgraham.com, September 2012, http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html.
13. Paul Graham, “Wealth,” Paulgraham.com, May 2014, http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html.
14. Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies (New York: Currency, 2018), p. 27.
15. Kevin Muldoon, “The Top Ten Resilient Animals on Earth,” Kevinmuldoon.com, May 9, 2013, https://www.kevinmuldoon.com/resilient-animals-earth/.
16. “Magic Leap: Funding Rounds,” Crunchbase, https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organizations/funding_total/magic-leap; and Jonathan Shieber, “Magic Leap Is Real and It’s a Janky Marvel,” October 9, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/09/magic-leap-is-real-and-its-a-janky-marvel/.
17. Joshua Franklin and Diptendu Lahiri, “Ride-Hailing Firm Lyft Launches IPO Road Show in Uber’s Shadow,” Reuters, March 18, 2019, https://reut.rs/2NncUrm; Lyft, Inc., Form S-1 Registration Statement, nd, http://bit.ly/36Vuz0W; and Faiz Siddiqui, “Uber Reports a $1 Billion Loss in First Quarterly Earnings after IPO,” Washington Post, May 30, 2019, https://wapo.st/2FPnvqX.
18. Erin Griffith, “More Start-Ups Have an Unfamiliar Message for Venture Capitalists: Get Lost,” New York Times, January 11, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/technology/start-ups-rejecting-venture-capital.html.
19. The Midas list is the industry ranking, led by Forbes and TrueBridge Capital Partners, ranking the industry’s top deal makers (see https://www.forbes.com/midas/); and “King Midas and His Touch,” Greeka, accessed November 9, 2019 https://www.greeka.com/greece-myths/king-midas/.
20. Alexandra Ludka, “Meet the New Facebook Millionaires,” ABC News, May 16, 2012, https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/facebook-millionaires/story?id=15499090.
21. Julie Bort, “Twitter’s IPO Created 1,600 New Millionaires and a $2.2 Billion Tax Bill, Analyst Says,” Business Insider, November 11, 2013, http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-ipo-created-1600-millionaires-2013-11.
22. Eric Kutcher, Olivia Nottebohm, and Kara Sprague, “Grow Fast or Die Slow,” McKinsey & Company, April 2014, https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/high-tech/our-insights/grow-fast-or-die-slow.
23. Griffith, “More Start-Ups Have an Unfamiliar Message for Venture Capitalists: Get Lost.”
24. Yoree Koh and Rolfe Winkler, “Venture Capitalist Sounds Alarm on Startup Investing,” Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/venture-capitalist-sounds-alarm-on-silicon-valley-risk-1410740054.
25. “Venture Pulse Q417,” KPMG Enterprise, January 16, 2018, https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/xx/pdf/2018/01/venture-pulse-report-q4–17.pdf.
26. Brazil’s population is estimated to be about 209 million for 2017: $575 million/209 million = $2.75/per capita; and $8.5 billion/4.7 million Silicon Valley area residents = $1,809.
27. “PitchBook—NVCA Venture Monitor,” pitchbook.com, April 9, 2018, https://pitchbook.com/news/reports/1q-2018-pitchbook-nvca-venture-monitor.
28. Edward J. Egan, Anne Dayton, and Diana Carranza, “The Top 100 U.S. Startup Cities in 2016,” James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy of Rice University, December 2017, https://www.bakerinstitute.org/media/files/files/38132e23/mcnair-pub-rankinguscities-122117.pdf.
29. “Startup Burn Accelerates After Series A Funding,” CB Insights, November 7, 2014, https://www.cbinsights.com/research/days-between-funding-rounds/.
30. “PitchBook—NVCA Venture Monitor.” The US West Coast represents 60 percent of deal value (investments) and 40 percent of deal amount. The rest of the United States is the opposite. A similar dynamic is playing out in emerging markets.
31. Endeavor, Endeavor OPEN survey results, 2018.
32. “Global Restructuring & Insolvency Guide 2016,” Baker McKenzie, 2016, p. 236, http://bit.ly/3a5Ug17.
33. James B. Stewart, “A Fearless Culture Fuels U.S. Tech Giants,” New York Times, June 18, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/business/the-american-way-of-tech-and-europes.html.
34. Author interview with Mike Evans, February 21, 2019.
35. Connie Loizos, “A Quick Look at How Series A and Seed Rounds Have Ballooned in Recent Years, Fueled by Top Investors,” April 25, 2019, https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/25/a-quick-look-at-how-fast-series-a-and-seed-rounds-have-ballooned-in-recent-years-fueled-by-top-investors/.
36. “Overview: Door Dash,” Crunchbase, 2019, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/doordash.
37. Author interview with Mike Evans, 2019.
38. “Grubhub Reports Record Fourth-Quarter Results,” Grubhub, February 8, 2018, https://investors.grubhub.com/investors/press-releases/press-release-details/2018/Grubhub-Reports-Record-Fourth-Quarter-Results/default.aspx.
39. “Grubhub Stock Profile,” Google Finance, as of August 9, 2019, http://bit.ly/3adaB3R.
40. Author interview with Mike Evans, 2019.
41. Author interview with Monica Brand Engel, May 9, 2019, in-person.
42. “2018 Chicago VC Ecosystem,” Chicago Venture Summit, 2018, https://files.pitchbook.com/website/files/pdf/2018_Chicago_Venture_Ecosystem_AHH.pdf.
43. Neil Patel, “90% of Startups Fail: Here’s What You Need to Know About the 10%,” Forbes, January 16, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/01/16/90-of-startups-will-fail-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-10/#60caed7b6679; and Erin Griffith, “Why Startups Fail, According to Their Founders,” Fortune, September 25, 2014, http://fortune.com/2014/09/25/why-startups-fail-according-to-their-founders/.
44. Anne S. Habiby and Deirdre M. Coyle Jr., “The High-Intensity Entrepreneur,” Harvard Business Review, September 2010, https://hbr.org/2010/09/the-high-intensity-entrepreneur.
45. Author interview with Troy Henikoff, March 12, 2019.
46. Author interview with Jason Fried, April 10, 2019.
47. “State of Salaries Report,” Hired, 2018, https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2018; and “Compensation Research,” PayScale, nd, https://www.payscale.com/data.
48. Maya Kosoff, “The Era of Silicon Valley Giving Away Free Stuff Is Coming to an End,” Vanity Fair, May 18, 2016, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/05/the-era-of-silicon-valley-giving-away-free-stuff-is-coming-to-an-end.
49. Sarah Kessler, “Meal-Kit Customers Dine and Dash,” Fast Company, October 20, 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3064792/meal-kit-customers-dine-and-dash.
50. Kosoff, “The Era of Silicon Valley Giving Away Free Stuff Is Coming to an End.”
51. David Mehegan, “Dan Ariely: Learning to Ward Off Those Bad Decisions,” New York Times, March 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/health/19iht-ariel.1.11252785.html.
52. Author interview with Mike Evans, 2019.
53. Author interview with Keith Davies, October 25, 2018.
54. Author interview with Ryan Smith, March 27, 2019.
55. “Overview of Qualtrics,” Crunchbase, 2019, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/qualtrics#section-overview.
56. Tim O’Reilly, “The Fundamental Problem with Silicon Valley’s Favorite Growth Strategy,” Quartz, February 5, 2019, https://qz.com/1540608/the-problem-with-silicon-valleys-obsession-with-blitzscaling-growth/.
57. Hiten Shah, “How an Anti-Growth Mentality Helped Basecamp Grow to Over 2 Million Customers,” FYI, 2019, https://usefyi.com/basecamp-history/.
58. Author interview with Keith Davies, 2018.
59. Omidyar Network [Arjuna Costa], “This Investor Shares How to Weather a Crisis and Come Out Stronger,” Omidyar Network Blog, October 14, 2016, https://www.omidyar.com/blog/investor-shares-how-weather-crisis-and-come-out-stronger.
60. Author interview with Sujay Tyle, December 10, 2018.
61. James de Villiers, “Meet the 24-Year-Old American Prodigy Set to Disrupt SA’s Used Car Industry—Within the Next Two Years,” Business Insider South Africa, July 1, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.co.za/24-year-old-sujay-tyle-largest-second-hand-car-dealer-south-africa-naspers-frontier-car-group-2018-6.
62. “Frontier Car Group,” Crunchbase, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/frontier-cars-group#section-overview.
63. Author interview with Ella Gudwin, December 19, 2018.
64. Tarun Khanna and Krishna G. Palepu, “Why Focused Strategies May Be Wrong for Emerging Markets,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 1997, https://hbr.org/1997/07/why-focused-strategies-may-be-wrong-for-emerging-markets.
65. Ibid.
66. Eskor John, “Developing Strategies to Harness the Power of Parallel Entrepreneurship in Africa,” in Bitange Ndemo and Tim Weiss, eds., Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
67. Internal analysis of leading startups across Sub-Saharan Africa, India, Latin America, and Silicon Valley.
68. Dana Olsen, “US Venture Capital Activity So Far This Year in 15 Charts,” Pitch-Book, July 18, 2018, https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/us-venture-capital-activity-so-far-this-year-in-15-charts.
69. Author interview with Ryan Smith, 2019.
70. Author interview with Achmad Zaky, June 18, 2019.
71. Author interview with Mike Evans, 2019.
72. Paul Martino “It’s Not You, It’s the Post-Seed Gap,” TechCrunch, December 13, 2016, https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/13/its-not-you-its-the-post-seed-gap/.
73. https://www.zebrasunite.com/.
Chapter 4
1. “Steve Jobs: Biography,” Biography.com, April 27, 2017 [updated August 21, 2019], https://www.biography.com/business-figure/steve-jobs; Darren Marble, “Jeff Bezos Quit His Job at 30 to Launch Amazon—Here Are the 3 Simple Strategies He Used to Do It,” Inc., March 27, 2018, https://www.inc.com/darren-marble/jeff-bezos-quit-his-job-at-30-to-launch-amazon-heres-how-to-know-if-its-right-time-for-your-big-move.html; Tom Huddleston Jr., “What Microsoft Billionaire Bill Gates Was Doing at 20 Years Old,” CNBC, March 29, 2018 [updated April 9, 2018], https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/29/what-microsoft-billionaire-bill-gates-was-doing-at-20-years-old.html; and Evan Tarver, “Mark Zuckerberg Success Story: Net Worth, Education and Influence,” Investopedia, July 30, 2018, https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/081315/mark-zuckerberg-success-story-net-worth-education-top-quotes.asp.
2. The data points in this chapter on the number of founders who attended undergraduate and graduate universities outside their home countries; gained strategy consulting, investment banking, and management and technical expertise at global companies; worked at well-known tech startups; founded companies at a given age; participated in startup accelerators; are members of global entrepreneurship organizations; and have returned to their home countries after spending time in Silicon Valley and other influential startup centers, was gathered from public sources including LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Bloomberg, and news articles. In cases where the founder’s exact birthdate was not available, I made an educated guess based on undergraduate and graduate school graduation dates. In the case of Latin America’s founders, data on age or graduation dates was available for forty-seven of the forty-nine founders.
3. Alice Haine, “Generation Start-up: Funding Was ‘Petrifying’ in the Early Days, Says Fetchr Founder,” National, September 4, 2017, https://www.thenational.ae/business/economy/generation-start-up-funding-was-petrifying-in-the-early-days-says-fetchr-founder-1.625104.
4. “Accelerating Status in Emerging Markets: Insights from 43 Programs,” Global Accelerator Learning Initiative, May 2017, http://bit.ly/2TpERCW.
5. Analysis via publicly available data.
6. I refer to the founders of Grab, Garena, Lazada, Gojek, Tokopedia, Traveloka, and Bukalapak. The statistic was derived by finding the total number of co-founders for whom information about education or previous work experience was publicly available. For the purposes of the data, international experience was defined by our team as five or more years of studying or working outside one’s home country. According to our data on Latin America, thirty-three of the forty-seven co-founders had international experience.
7. This statistic was derived by finding the number of selected startups across the five frontier markets for which information about joining an accelerator was publicly available. The global accelerators used in the calculation include 1,776 ventures, Fabrica de Startups, Girl Affect Accelerator, Google Launchpad, GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator, New Economy Accelerator, Rocket Internet, Runway Incubator, Spring Accelerator, and USAID. Of the sample, fourteen of the sixty-four startups participated in a global accelerator program.
8. Alex Lazarow, “The Innovation Supply Chain: How Ideas Traverse Continents and Transform Economies,” TechCrunch, November 27, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/27/the-innovation-supply-chain-how-ideas-traverse-continents-and-transform-economies/.
9. Alexandre Lazarow and Nicolas du Cray, “Where East Meets West: Consumer Fintech at a Crossroads,” LinkedIn Publishing, December 18, 2018, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/where-east-meets-west-consumer-fintech-crossroads-lazarow-cfa/.
10. “Get more Uber When You Use Uber,” accessed November 6, 2019, https://www.uber.com/c/uber-credit-card/.
11. Dara Khosrowshahi, “An Operating System for Everyday Life,” Uber Newsroom, September 27, 2019, https://www.uber.com/newsroom/everyday-life-os/?from=timeline&isappinstalled=0.
12. Author interview with JF Gauthier, August 28, 2018.
13. Rhett Morris and Lili Török, “Fostering Productive Entrepreneurship Communities,” Endeavor Insight, October 2018, https://endeavor.org/content/uploads/2015/06/Fostering-Productive-Entrepreneurship-Communities.pdf.
14. T. E. Narasimhan and Swati Garg, “Booming Biz of Online Marriages,” Business Standard, January 20, 2013, https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/booming-biz-of-online-marriages-111122200022_1.html.
15. “India’s BharatMatrimony Ushers in New Era of Arranged Marriages,” BBC News, May 4, 2011, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-13144028.
16. Author interview with Murugavel Janakiraman, December 13, 2018.
17. Narasimhan and Garg, “Booming Biz of Online Marriages.”
18. Anisha Baghudana, “From Bharatmatrimony to Bharatmatrimon(e)y!” The HBS Case Method, March 09, 2015, https://hbs.me/2FLJ7EG; “Overview: Matrimony.com,” Crunchbase, 2019, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/matrimony-com#section-ipo-stock-price; and author interview with Murugavel Janakiraman, December 13, 2018.
19. Author nterview with Mudassir Sheikha, December 17, 2018.
20. Ainsley Harris, “Bros Dominate VC, Where 91% of Decision-Makers Are Male,” Fast Company, March 7, 2018, https://www.fastcompany.com/40540948/91-of-decision-makers-at-u-s-venture-capital-firms-are-men.
21. Gené Teare, “In 2017, Only 17% of Startups Have a Female Founder,” Tech-Crunch, April 19, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/19/in-2017-only-17-of-startups-have-a-female-founder/.
22. Mary Ann Azevedo, “Untapped Opportunity: Minority Founders Still Being Overlooked,” February 27, 2019, https://news.crunchbase.com/news/untapped-opportunity-minority-founders-still-being-overlooked/.
23. Collin West and Gopinath Sundaramurthy, “Startups With At Least 1 Female Founder Hire 2.5x More Women,” October 17, 2019, https://www.kauffmanfellows.org/journal_posts/female_founders_hire_more_women.
24. Christopher M. Schroeder, “A Different Story from the Middle East: Entrepreneurs Building an Arab Tech Economy,” MIT Technology Review, August 3, 2017, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608468/a-different-story-from-the-middle-east-entrepreneurs-building-an-arab-tech-economy/.
25. Ibid.
26. Iain Thomas, “The Next Hemingway Is Flipping Burgers,” Huffington Post, August 13, 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/iain-s-thomas/the-next-hemingway-is-fl_ib_7982800.html.
27. Lin-Manuel Miranda, “Yorktown (The World Upside Down),” from the musical Hamilton, Original Broadway Cast Recording, July 8, 2016.
28. Dinah Wisenberg Brin, “Immigrants Form 25% of New U.S. Businesses, Driving Entrepreneurship in ‘Gateway’ States,” July 31, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/dinahwisenberg/2018/07/31/immigrant-entrepreneurs-form-25-of-new-u-s-business-researchers/#4cf713ac713b.
29. Morris and Török, “Fostering Productive Entrepreneurship Communities.”
30. Vivek Wadhwa, “Silicon Valley Can’t Be Copied,” MIT Technology Review, July 3, 2013, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/516506/silicon-valley-cant-be-copied/; and Wisenberg Brin, “Immigrants Form 25% of New U.S. Businesses.”
31. Stuart Anderson, “Immigrants and Billion-Dollar Companies,” National Foundation for American Policy, October 2018, http://bit.ly/2tjqchF.
32. Author interview with Jeremy Johnson, September 5, 2018.
33. Hannah Kuchler, “Silicon Valley Ageism: ‘They Were, Like, Wow, You Use Twitter?’” Financial Times, July 30, 2017, https://on.ft.com/2None2w; and Karen Wickre, “Surviving as an Old in the Tech World,” Wired, August 2, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/surviving-as-an-old-in-the-tech-world/.
34. In this dataset, the age of venture capital–backed founders skewed younger, but at thirty-nine years, it is still meaningfully older than the stereotype. Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda, “Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship,” NBER Working Paper No. 24489, April 2018, https://www.nber.org/papers/w24489.
35. Morris and Török, “Fostering Productive Entrepreneurship Communities.”
36. Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda, “Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45,” hbr.org, July 11, 2018, https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-startup-founder-is-45; and Azoulay et al., “Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship.”
Chapter 5
1. “Gross Domestic Product, 3rd Quarter 2018 (Advance Estimate),” Bureau of Economic Analysis, press release, October 26, 2018, https://www.bea.gov/news/2018/gross-domestic-product-3rd-quarter-2018-advance-estimate.
2. Analysis based on public data.
3. Catherine Shu, “Garena Rebrands to Sea and Raises $550 Million More to Focus on Indonesian E-commerce,” TechCrunch, May 7, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/07/sea-change/.
4. Analysis based on publicly available data.
5. Sample of top startups in SSA identified based on interviews with ten Africa-focused investors. Sample includes Interswitch, OGE/Zola, Jumia Group, Fundamo, Takealot.com, Andela, AgriProtein, Twiga Foods, M-KOPA, Konga.com, Bridge International Academies, Zoona, and African Leadership University.
6. Georgeta Gheorghe, “The Story of UiPath—How Did It Become Romania’s First Unicorn?” Business Review, September 4, 2018, http://business-review.eu/news/the-story-of-uipath-how-it-became-romanias-first-unicorn-164248.
7. As the global client roster grew larger, UiPath eventually moved the sales headquarters to New York to be more proximate to its clientele, although it kept the product and technology development centered in Bucharest. Author interview with Daniel Dines, March 14, 2019.
8. “Romanian Tech Startup UiPath Raises USD 30 Mln to Develop Intelligent Software Robots,” Romania Insider, April 27, 2017, https://www.romania-insider.com/romanian-tech-startup-uipath-raises-usd-30-mln-develop-intelligent-software-robots/;and “UiPath: Our Investors,” UiPath, https://www.uipath.com/company/investors.
9. “UiPath Raises $225 Million Series C Led by CapitalG and Sequoia,” UiPath, September 18, 2018, http://bit.ly/2ToGf8Q.
10. Author interview with Daniel Dines, March 14, 2019.
11. Michael Rennie, “Born Global,” McKinsey Quarterly, No. 4, Autumn 1993, https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1–15424561/born-global.
12. This was referred to as the Uppsala model. Gary Knight and S. Cavusgil, “The Born Global Firm: A Challenge to Traditional Internationalization Theory,” Advances in International Marketing 8 (1996): 11–26.
13. Ibid. Referred to as “psychic distance.”
14. Erind Hoti, “An Overview of Success Factors of Born-Global SMEs in an Emerging Market Context,” Macrotheme Review, Winter 2015, http://bit.ly/2NGpjHh.
15. Author interview with Daniel Dines, UiPathForward 2018, interviewed by Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, theCube, YouTube, October 4, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_JDK68TQ0g.
16. Author interview with Divyank Turakhia, December 9, 2018.
17. Ibid.
18. Nicolas Colin, “The Digital World Is Not a Flat Circle: The Family Papers #001,” Salon, October 23, 2015, https://salon.thefamily.co/the-digital-world-is-not-a-flat-circle-e5a6a27bbe8.
19. Victoria Ho, “Uber Comes to Asia, Starts Trials in Singapore,” TechCrunch, January 30, 2013, https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/30/uber-starts-trials-in-singapore/; and Avery Hartmans and Paige Leskin, “The History of How Uber Became the Most Feared Startup in the World to Its Massive IPO,” Business Insider, May 18, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/ubers-history.
20. Alex Hern, “Uber Reverses Out of China with $7bn Sale to Didi Chuxing,” Guardian, August 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/01/uber-china-didi-chuxing.
21. “Cloud Growth Rate Increased Again in Q1; Amazon Maintains Market Share Dominance,” Synergy Research Group, April 27, 2018, https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/cloud-growth-rate-increased-again-q1-amazon-maintains-market-share-dominance.
22. Alex Lazarow, “Fintech Used to Be a Local Game: Today It Can Be Global,” Forbes, May 29, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexlazarow/2019/05/29/fintech-used-to-be-a-local-game-today-it-can-be-global/#30ccc4d04756.
23. Author interview with Alejandro Cantú, August 1, 2018.
24. Author interview with Fadi Ghandour, January 3, 2019.
25. Author interview with Fadi Ghandour, August 8, 2018.
26. The 2017 GDP per capita was US$936 in Tanzania, and US$750 in Rwanda, whereas it was US$1,662 in Cote d’Ivoire and US$1,641 in Ghana, per the World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/country. In 2016, the percentage of population with access to electricity grew to around 30% in Tanzania and Rwanda, while the figure was 64% in Cote d’Ivoire and 79% in Ghana.
27. “Kiva by the Numbers,” 2019, https://www.kiva.org/about.
28. Author interview with Matt Flannery, September 4, 2018.
29. Louis Pasteur, Forbes Quotes, https://www.forbes.com/quotes/6145/.
1. Isis Gaddis, Jacques Morisset, and Waly Wane, “Only 14% of Tanzanians Have Electricity: What Can Be Done?” World Bank Blogs, October 31, 2012, http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/only-14-of-tanzanians-have-electricity-what-can-be-done.
2. Financial Post, “‘A Giant Leap Backward’: Yahoo Boss Marissa Mayer Under Fire for Banning Employees from Working from Home,” February 26, 2013, https://business.financialpost.com/productive-conversations/a-giant-leap-backward-marissa-mayer-under-fire-for-banning-employees-from-working-from-home.
3. Many authors have explored the subject of distributed team models. For example, Anupam Rastogi, “Are Distributed Teams the New Cloud for Startups?” Medium, December 11, 2018, https://medium.com/@anupamr/distributed-teams-are-the-new-cloud-for-startups-14240a9822d7; and Gerry Claps, “The Difference Between Remote and Distributed Teams in Startups,” https://www.blossom.co/blog/remote-versus-distributed-teams.
4. Rastogi, “Are Distributed Teams the New Cloud for Startups?”
5. Ibid.
6. Author interview with Ruzwana Bashir, May 8, 2019.
7. Author interview with Dalton Wright, January 22, 2019.
8. Author interview with Wade Foster, April 30, 2019.
9. Patrick Gorman, “Zapier CEO Wade Foster on Managing a 100% Remote Workforce,” Chief Executive, October 31, 2018, https://chiefexecutive.net/zapier-ceo-wade-foster-on-managing-a-100-remote-workforce/.
10. Brie Reynolds, “Remote Companies Have More Women Leaders, and These Are Hiring,” Remote.co, November 6, 2017, https://remote.co/remote-companies-have-more-women-leaders-these-are-hiring/.
11. Ibid.
12. Zachary Crockett, “Life in the Silicon Prairie: Tech’s Great Migration to the Midwest,” Hustle, June 9, 2018, https://thehustle.co/life-in-the-silicon-prairie-techs-great-migration-to-the-midwest/.
13. Ibid.
14. “Good Design Is Good for Business,” https://www.invisionapp.com/about.
15. Rachel Starnes, “Building InVision Studio with a Fully Remote Team,” InVision Design, December 11, 2017, https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/studio-remote-design-team/.
16. “About InVisionApp,” Crunchbase, 2019, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/invisionapp#section-overview.
17. Author interview with Jasper Malcolmson, March 26, 2019.
18. Ibid.
19. Author interview with Kevin Fishner, September 6, 2019. See also Ron Miller, “HashiCorp Scores $100m Investment on a $1.9 Billion Valuation,” TechCrunch, November 1, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/01/hashicorp-scores-100m-investment-on-1–9-billion-valuation/.
20. Author interview with Wade Foster, 2019.
21. Author interview with Jason Fried, April 10, 2019.
22. Author interview with Matt Flannery, September 4, 2018.
23. Author interview with Jason Fried, 2019.
24. Author interview with Mark Frein, November 1, 2019.
25. Globant 10-K, via SEC. Market capitalization via Google Finance, http://bit.ly/3aMAacs.
26. Author interview with Martin Migoya, May 6, 2019.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Starnes, “Building InVision Studio with a Fully Remote Team.”
30. Author interview with Kevin Fishner, 2019.
31. Author interview with Mark Frein, November 1, 2019.
32. Gorman, “Zapier CEO Wade Foster on Managing a 100% Remote Workforce.”
33. “The 8 Reasons That Video Conferencing Is Better Than In-Person Conferencing,” IPRO, October 2, 2017, https://www.ipromedia.us/8-reasons-video-conferencing-better-person-conferencing/.
34. Examples include Zoom for videoconferencing, Slack for asynchronous chat, Trello for task management, GitHub for software development, LastPass for password management, and DocuSign for signatures, among many others.
35. Alison Griswold, “A Nearly Complete List of the 238 Places That Bid for Amazon’s Next Headquarters,” Quartz, November 4, 2017, https://qz.com/1119945/a-nearly-complete-list-of-the-238-places-that-bid-for-amazons-next-headquarters/; and “Amazon Selects New York City and Northern Virginia for New Headquarters,” Day One, Amazon Press Release, November 13, 2018, https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazon-selects-new-york-city-and-northern-virginia-for-new-headquarters.
36. Mark Niesse, “City of Amazon Proposed to Attract Company’s HQ2 to Georgia,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, October 3, 2017, http://bit.ly/2u0XSk8.
37. Shirin Ghaffary, “Even Tech Workers Can’t Afford to Buy Homes in San Francisco,” Vox, March 19, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/3/19/18256378/tech-worker-afford-buy-homes-san-francisco-facebook-google-uber-lyft-housing-crisis-programmers.
38. Marc Emmer, “Technology Companies Are Leaving Silicon Valley in Droves: Here’s Where They’re Going,” Inc., September 25, 2018, https://www.inc.com/marc-emmer/technology-companies-are-leaving-silicon-valley-in-droves-heres-where-theyre-going.html.
39. “Remote Work by the Numbers,” Simple Texting, March 30, 2018, https://simpletexting.com/remote-work-statistics/.
40. Hailley Griffis, “State of Remote Work 2018 Report: What It’s Like to Be a Remote Worker in 2018,” Buffer, 2019, https://open.buffer.com/state-remote-work-2018/#companies.
41. Mary Meeker, “Internet Trends Report 2019,” June 11, 2019, https://www.bondcap.com/pdf/Internet_Trends_2019.pdf.
42. Rastogi, “Are Distributed Teams the New Cloud for Startups?”
43. Boris Wertz, “Changing the Narrative on Distributed Teams in Silicon Valley,” Medium, August 7, 2018, https://medium.com/@bwertz/changing-the-narrative-on-distributed-teams-in-silicon-valley-bc55c5e619b1.
44. INSEAD, “Innovating Without Fear,” INSEAD Alumni Magazine, July 10, 2017, https://alumnimagazine.insead.edu/innovating-without-fear/; and Sramana Mitra, “From Startup to 500 Million Dollars: VistaPrint CEO Robert Keane (Part 2),” One Million by One Million Blog, June 25, 2009, https://www.sramanamitra.com/2009/06/25/wwfrom-startup-to-500-million-vistaprint-ceo-robert-keane-part-2/.
45. Author interview with Robert Keane, March 8, 2019.
46. Ibid.
47. http://bit.ly/2Rfxifg; TV Mahalingam, “How Nilesh Parwani Leveraged Internet and Lured Vistaprint into India,” Economic Times, January 20, 2013, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/company/corporate-trends/how-nilesh-parwani-leveraged-internet-and-lured-vistaprint-into-india/articleshow/18092814.cms; and Jason Keith and Jeff Esposito, “Vistaprint Expands Global Presence into Australia,” CNN Money, August 5, 2010, https://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0648420.htm.
48. Sara Castellanos, “Cimpress, Formerly Vistaprint, to Leave Lexington HQ This Year,” Boston Business Journal, July 22, 2015, https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/techflash/2015/07/cimpress-formerly-vistaprint-to-leave-lexington-hq.html.
49. Author interview with Robert Keane, March 8, 2019.
Chapter 7
1. The Social Network, Box Office Mojo (synopsis and statistics), https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=socialnetwork.htm.
2. Apple, https://www.apple.com/job-creation/; “Number of Tesla Employees from July 2010 to December 2018,” Statista, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/314768/number-of-tesla-employees/; SpaceX, http://www.spacex.com/about; and “Number of Full-Time Facebook Employees from 2004 to 2018,” Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-facebook-employees/.
3. Stanford University, “Facts 2018,” http://facts.stanford.edu/academics/graduate-profile; “Facts and Figures,” Berkeley Engineering, 2019, https://engineering.berkeley.edu/about/facts-and-figures; “Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2018: 15–1111 Computer and Information Research Scientists,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151111.htm#(1); and “Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2018: 15–1132 Software Developers, Applications,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151132.htm#st.
4. “Stanford Entrepreneurship Management Courses,” Stanford Graduate School of Business, https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/stanford-community/entrepreneurship/management-courses.
5. Suhas Motwani, “The 15 Best Associate and Rotational Product Manager Programs,” Medium, August 27, 2018, https://medium.com/pminsider/product-management-digest-apm-3c2631683139.
6. Silicon Valley Product Management Association, https://svpma.org/about/.
7. Michael Booz, “These 3 Industries Have the Highest Talent Turnover Rates,” LinkedIn Talent Blog, March 2018, https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/trends-and-research/2018/the-3-industries-with-the-highest-turnover-rates.
8. Katie Hafner, “Google Options Make Masseuse a Multimillionaire,” New York Times, November 12, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/technology/12google.html.
9. The Alliance outlines different types of alliances. “Tours of duty” refers to shorter-term “single deployments,” focused on completing specific finite missions. Some are “rotational” for entry-level employees and are two to four years. “Foundational” tours are for those whose lives are more closely linked to the success of the company and thus longer term. “Transformational” tours are negotiated one-on-one with the employer, and both the employee and the employer are “transformed” through the project. Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh, and Ben Casnocha, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).
10. Author interview with Josh Simair, October 26, 2018.
11. Ibid.
12. Survey administered to readers of [99%Tech], my personal newsletter, and to students in the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School, Haas School of Business, and Wharton School of Business entrepreneurship groups, as well as individual outreach to operators and investors in emerging markets.
13. “The Human Capital Crisis: How Social Enterprises Can Find the Talent to Scale,” Rippleworks report, 2016, http://bit.ly/2uME8RL; author interview with Doug Galen, January 24, 2019; and Will Gaybrick, “Tech’s Ultimate Success: Software Developers Are Now More Valuable to Companies Than Money,” CNBC, September 6, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/06/companies-worry-more-about-access-to-software-developers-than-capital.html.
14. “Future Undergraduate Students: Department Overview,” University of Manitoba, 2019, http://umanitoba.ca/faculties/engineering/departments/ece/pros_students/undergrad/index.html.
15. “The Human Capital Crisis: How Social Enterprises Can Find the Talent to Scale.”
16. Ian Duncan, “Research Reveals University Degree Holders Can Take Five Years to Get a Job,” UReport, July 7, 2017, https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/ureport/story/2001246480/reserach-reveals-university-degree-holders-can-take-five-years-to-get-a-job.
17. Author interview with Amanda Lannert, April 15, 2019.
18. Tristin Hopper, “Mars and the North Pole Are Warmer Than Winnipeg: A Guide to How Damned Cold It Is,” National Post, December 27, 2017, https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/mars-and-the-north-pole-are-warmer-than-winnipeg-a-guide-to-how-damned-cold-it-is.
19. Author interview with Josh Simair, October 26, 2018.
20. Author interview with Josh Simair, 2018; and Sean Silkoff, “Winnipeg Startup SkipTheDishes Gobbled Up by Britain’s Just Eat,” Globe and Mail, December 15, 2016, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/winnipeg-startup-skipthedishes-purchased-by-britains-just-eat/article33341734/.
21. Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
22. Author interview with Josh Simair, 2008.
23. “Seed Round—Shortlist—2017-09-19,” Crunchbase, https://www.crunchbase.com/fundinground/shortlist-5-seed--3837ea6c#section-lead-investors; and author interview with Paul Breloff, June 6, 2019.
24. Jean-Michel Lemieux, “Dev Degree—A Big Bet on Software Education,” Shopify, September 24, 2018, https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/dev-degree-a-big-bet-on-software-education.
25. “Dev Degree: Overview,” Dev Degree, https://www.devdegree.ca/dev-degree-model.
26. Author interview with Jean-Michel Lemieux, May 10, 2019.
27. Lemieux, “Dev Degree—A Big Bet on Software Education.”
28. Author interview with Jean-Michel Lemieux, 2019.
29. “Shopify’s Dev Degree Expands to York University,” Shopify, September 24, 2018, https://news.shopify.com/shopifys-dev-degree-expands-to-york-university.
30. V. Kasturi Rangan and Katharine Lee, “Bridge International Academies: A School in a Box,” Harvard Business School Case 511-064, October 2010 (revised April 2013), https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=39462.
31. Author interview with Brittany Forsyth, April 24, 2019.
32. Jing Cao, “IBM Paid $1.3 Billion to Acquire Cleversafe in Hybrid-Cloud Push,” Bloomberg, February 23, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-24/ibm-paid-1–3-billion-to-acquire-cleversafe-in-hybrid-cloud-push.
33. Author interview with Chris Gladwin, April 12, 2019.
34. William Craig, “The Importance of Having a Mission-Driven Company,” Forbes, May 15, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamcraig/2018/05/15/the-importance-of-having-a-mission-driven-company/#1ed687983a9c.
35. Zameena Mejia, “Nearly 9 out of 10 Millennials Would Consider Taking a Pay Cut to Get This,” CNBC, June 28, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/27/nearly-9-out-of-10-millennials-would-consider-a-pay-cut-to-get-this.html.
36. Author interview with David Levine, February 15, 2019.
37. Ibid.
38. Author interview with Josh Simair, 2018.
39. Of course, there are multiple dynamics at play here. Employees are less likely to demand stock options, but at the same time management is less likely to offer them. Dominic Jacquesson, “Introducing Our Guide to Stock Options for European Entrepreneurs,” Index Ventures, December 4, 2018, https://www.indexventures.com/blog/introducing-our-guide-to-stock-options-for-european-entrepreneurs.
40. Author interview with Lyndsay Handler, November 11, 2018.
41. Ibid.
Chapter 8
1. “Mixed Martial Arts,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/sports/mixed-martial-arts.
2. Jenny Flinn, “The Rise and Rise of Ultimate Fighting (and Why Boxing Is Now So Passé),” Conversation, March 9, 2016, https://theconversation.com/the-rise-and-rise-of-ultimate-fighting-and-why-boxing-is-now-so-passe-55910.
3. Charlotte Edwardes, “Ali Parsa: The Former Refugee Bringing Algorithms to Healthcare,” Evening Standard, July 12, 2018, https://www.standard.co.uk/futurelondon/health/ali-parsa-the-former-refugee-bringing-algorithms-to-healthcare-a3885941.html.
4. Ibid.
5. NHS Support Federation, “Circle Health,” nd, https://www.nhsforsale.info/private-providers/circle-new/.
6. Edwardes, “Ali Parsa: The Former Refugee Bringing Algorithms to Healthcare.”
7. “Babylon Health Services,” Babylon, https://www.babylonhealth.com/product.
8. Aliya Ram, “Babylon Signs Tencent Deal to Deploy Health Technology on WeChat,” Financial Times, April 05, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/40fae194–381d-11e8-8eee-e06bde01c544.
9. “Babylon Health: Rwanda Case Study,” Babylon Health, 2019, https://marketing-assets.babylonhealth.com/business/Rwanda-Case-Study.pdf.
10. Ingrid Lunden, “Babylon Health Confirms $550m Raise at $2+ Billion Valuation to Expand Its AI-Based Health Services,” TechCrunch, August 2, 2019, https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/02/babylon-health-confirms-550m-raise-to-expand-its-ai-based-health-services-to-the-us-and-asia.
11. A. H. Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review 50, no. 4 (1943), 370–396.
12. Ibid.
13. “Accelerating Status in Emerging Markets: Insights from 43 Programs,” Global Accelerator Learning Initiative, May 2017, http://bit.ly/38hmWT9.
14. “Capital Evolving: Alternative Investment Strategies to Drive Inclusive Innovation,” Village Capital, 2018. The report states, “This number was derived from the CB Insights dataset and is current as of 10.12.18.” See also “The Global Unicorn Club,” CB Insights, 2019, https://www.cbinsights.com/research-unicorn-companies. The methodology includes adding up the number of companies in industries (companies in industries listed as biotechnology, edtech, energy, fintech, food, healthcare) by the total number of companies. The total dollar amount of these companies was added up as well and amounted to only 13 percent of total companies.
15. Identified sample of the fastest-growing startups, valued at more than $100m, in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Startup list sourced from interviews with venture capitalists in each region.
16. Soumya Gupta, “Rivigo Is Changing the Way Women Look at Trucking Business, Says Gazal Kalra,” BW Businessworld, May 9, 2017, http://www.businessworld.in/article/Rivigo-Is-Changing-The-Way-Women-Look-At-Trucking-Business-Says-Gazal-Kalra/09-05-2017–117861/.
17. Rajat Gupta, Sriram Jambunathan, and Thomas Netzer, “Building India: Transforming the Nation’s Logistic Infrastructure,” McKinsey & Company, September 2010, https://mck.co/3acf1rF; and “India Aiming to Reduce Logistics Cost to Less than 10% of GDP by 2022,” Business Standard, August 24, 2018, https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-cm/india-aiming-to-reduce-logistics-cost-to-less-than-10-of-gdp-by-2022–118082400367_1.html.
18. Neha Mittal et al., “The Endemic Issue of Truck Driver Shortage—A Comparative Study between India and the United States,” Research in Transportation Economics, 2018, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325985103_The_endemic_issue_of_truck_driver_shortage_-_A_comparative_study_between_India_and_the_United_States.
19. “High-Impact Entrepreneurs Create the Most Jobs: Endeavor and GEM Release New Report,” Endeavor, September 16, 2011, https://endeavor.org/blog/research/endeavor-gem-report-2011/.
20. Ibid.
21. “A Unified Logistics Platform Facilitating One-Stop Solution for All Needs,” Rivigo, https://rivigo.com/products#freight-marketplace.
22. Author interview with Deepak Garg, August 9, 2018, by phone.
23. Mihir Dalal, “Logistics Start-Up Rivigo Services in Talks to Raise up to $400 Million,” LiveMint, September 07, 2018, https://www.livemint.com/Companies/1RbFAMBoyebXFj7dhcoNGM/Logistics-startup-Rivigo-Services-in-talks-to-raise-up-to.html.
24. Marshall Ganz, Tamara Kay, and Jason Spicer, “Social Enterprise Is Not Social Change,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2018, https://ssir.org/articles/entry/social_enterprise_is_not_social_change.
25. Leo Mirani, “What Google Really Means by ‘Don’t Be Evil,’” Quartz, October 21, 2014, https://qz.com/284548/what-google-really-means-by-dont-be-evil/.
26. “Why Pledge 1% Is One of the Most Innovative Companies of 2017,” Fast Company, February 13, 2017, https://www.fastcompany.com/3067480/why-pledge-1-is-one-of-the-most-innovative-companies-of-2017.
27. Mike Montgomery, “What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from the Philanthropic Struggles of Toms Shoes,” Forbes, April 28, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikemontgomery/2015/04/28/how-entrepreneurs-can-avoid-the-philanthropy-pitfalls/#371280b71c38.
28. Ross Baird, The Innovation Blind Spot: Why We Back the Wrong Ideas—And What to Do about It (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2017), chapter 4.
29. Author interview with Deepak Garg, August 8, 2018.
30. Sumanth Raj Urs, “200 Engineers, 261 Million People: GO-JEK’s Impact in Indonesia,” Medium, January 23, 2018, https://blog.gojekengineering.com/200-engineers-261-million-people-go-jeks-impact-in-indonesia-b8f87934e6c1.
31. Erica Glasener, “The Magic of Banyan Trees,” Tribune Business News, January 23, 2012, https://search.proquest.com/abicomplete/docview/917252674/AF487DE8677A488BPQ/15?accountid=14437.
32. Author interview with Deepak Garg, August 8, 2018.
33. “Mobile Money Metrics,” GSMA, 2019, https://www.gsma.com/mobilemoneymetrics/#global?y=2017?v=overview?g=global.
34. John Delaney, “A New Consumer Protection Agenda for Working Families,” Huffington Post, September 9, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-k-delaney/a-new-consumer-protection_b_11910482.html.
35. “State of Homelessness,” National Alliance to End Homelessness, 2019, https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-report/.
36. Zack Friedman, “Student Loan Debt Statistics in 2018: A $1.5 Trillion Crisis,” Forbes, June 13, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2018/06/13/student-loan-debt-statistics-2018/#4cdd86cb7310.
37. Larry Fink, “A Sense of Purpose,” BlackRock, 2019, https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/larry-fink-ceo-letter.
38. “Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote ‘An Economy That Serves All Americans,’” Press Release, August 19, 2019, https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans.
39. William Dowling, “The Business Case for Caring—A Helio Analysis of Certified B Corps,” The UpRound by CircleUp, June 1, 2018, https://circleup.com/blog/2018/06/01/the-business-case-for-caring-a-helio-analysis-of-certified-b-corps/.
40. Mozaffar Khan, George Serafeim, and Aaron Yoon, “Corporate Sustainability: First Evidence on Materiality”, November 9, 2016, The Accounting Review 91, no. 6, pp. 1697–1724, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2575912; and George Serafeim, “Public Sentiment and the Price of Corporate Sustainability,” October 12, 2018, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3265502.
41. Jesus Godoy Bejarano and Diego Téllez, “Mission Power and Firm Financial Performance,” Center for Research in Economics and Finance (CIEF), Working Paper No. 17-04, February 23, 2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2929832.
Chapter 9
1. Carmel Lobello, “The Stories Behind 3 Great Business Mantras,” The Week, June 24, 2013, https://theweek.com/articles/462863/stories-behind-3-great-business-mantras.
2. Morgan Brown, “Uber—What’s Fueling Uber’s Growth Engine?” GrowthHackers, nd, https://growthhackers.com/growth-studies/uber.
3. Ian Frazier, “The Vertical Farm,” New Yorker, January 1, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/09/the-vertical-farm.
4. Ibid.
5. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/aerofarms#section-overview; and author interview with David Rosenberg, August 20, 2018.
6. Author interview with Chris Folayan, August 2, 2018.
7. Author interview with Thomaz Srougi, August 3, 2018.
8. Lydia Ramsey, “US Investors Are Pouring Millions into a Healthcare Company That Doesn’t Take Insurance and Lists Its Prices like a ‘McDonald’s Menu,’” Business Insider, August 14, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/how-dr-consulta-is-changing-the-brazilian-healthcare-system-2018-8?IR=T.
9. Danny Crichton, “Using Tech and $100M, Dr Consulta Transforms Healthcare for the Poorest,” TechCrunch, June 19, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/19/dr-consulta-transforms-healthcare-for-the-poorest/.
10. Ibid.
11. Author interview with Ella Gudwin, December 19, 2018.
12. Author interview with David Rosenberg, August 20, 2018.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (New York: Random House, 2012).
17. “A Guide to Anticipating the Future Impact of Today’s Technology,” Ethical OS, 2018, https://ethicalos.org/.
18. Author interview with Achmad Zaky, June 18, 2019.
19. Alex Hern, “Uber and Lyft Pull Out of Austin After Locals Vote Against Self-Regulation,” Guardian, May 9, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/09/uber-lyft-austin-vote-against-self-regulation; Jillian Jorgensen and Will Bredderman, “Bill de Blasio’s Quest to Cap Uber Ends with a Whimper,” Observer, January 15, 2016, http://observer.com/2016/01/bill-de-blasios-quest-to-cap-uber-ends-with-a-whimper/; and Josie Cox, “Uber’s Appeal Against TfL’s Licence Ban Will Not Be Heard until Spring 2018,” Independent, December 11, 2017, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uber-london-ban-appeal-tfl-licence-taxi-app-spring-2018-heard-court-ride-hailing-a8103666.html. London decided not to renew Uber’s operation license in the fall of 2017. Uber has appealed the decision and continues to operate in the city.
20. Itika Sharma Punit, “Panic Buttons Won’t Fix Ola and Uber’s Sexual-Assault Problem,” Quartz India, June 7, 2018, https://qz.com/india/1298182/why-ola-and-ubers-measures-for-womens-safety-is-just-not-working/.
21. Austin Carr, “Why Jack Dorsey Killed the Square Credit Card,” Fast Company, August 12, 2014, https://www.fastcompany.com/3032811/why-jack-dorsey-killed-the-square-credit-card.
22. Author interview with Yousef Hammad, July 30, 2018.
23. Author interview with David Rosenberg, 2018.
24. Bitange Ndemo and Tim Weiss, eds., Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
25. Jorge Gaxiola Moraila, Alexis Leon Trueba, and Gabriel Franco Fernández, “The New Mexican FinTech Law—Balancing Innovation, Security and Stability,” Financier Worldwide, August 2018, https://www.financierworldwide.com/the-new-mexican-fintech-law-balancing-innovation-security-and-stability.
26. Samantha Murphy, “Facebook Changes Its ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Motto,” Mashable, April 30, 2014, https://mashable.com/2014/04/30/facebooks-new-mantra-move-fast-with-stability/#3f4wKHt.zPqV.
27. Ibid.
28. Analysis of Facebook market capitalization, via Google Finance, for the last six months of 2018, https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook&tbm=fin.
Chapter 10
1. Josh Lerner, a Harvard Business School professor, accurately characterized the dynamic that creates this bond: “Venture Capital exists when entrepreneurs have an idea and no capital, and investors have capital but no good ideas.” Josh Lerner and Paul Gompers, “The Venture Capital Revolution,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 15 (2001): 145–168. doi: 10.1257/jep.15.2.145.
2. Author interview with Carlos Antequera, September 25, 2018.
3. Ibid.
4. A typical venture capital fund has a “2 & 20” structure. This consists of a 2 percent annual management fee on the capital investors have pledged, and a 20 percent share in the profits generated.
5. “Fin-Tech,” Economist, December 2015, https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21684805-there-were-tech-startups-there-was-whaling-fin-tech.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. “Venture Capital Funnel Shows Odds of Becoming a Unicorn Are About 1%,” CB Insights, September 6, 2018, https://www.cbinsights.com/research/venture-capital-funnel-2/; and Paul Gompers et al., “How Do Venture Capitalists Make Decisions?” National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER working paper number 22587, September 2016, doi:10.3386/w22587.
9. Pui-Wing Tam and Shayndi Raice, “A $9 Billion Jackpot for Facebook Investor,” Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2012, https://on.wsj.com/2QRBtio.
10. William Alden and David Gelles, “In WhatsApp Deal, Sequoia Capital May Make 50 Times Its Money,” New York Times, February 20, 2014, https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/02/20/in-whatsapp-deal-sequoia-capital-may-make-50-times-its-money/.
11. Cambridge Associates, “US Venture Capital Index and Selected Benchmark Statistics,” March 31, 2018, https://www.cambridgeassociates.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/WEB-2018-Q1-USVC-Benchmark-Book.pdf.
12. “2019 AVCA Members,” African Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, 2019, https://www.avca-africa.org/members/avca-members/. Count of “General Partner” venture capital and private equity funds listed.
13. Ibid. Count of “Full Member” venture capital and private equity funds listed for Private Capital Investment in Latin America.
14. “Venture Monitor 1Q18,” PitchBook, 2018, https://files.pitchbook.com/website/files/pdf/1Q_2018_PitchBook_NVCA_Venture_Monitor.pdf.
15. For instance, Google purchased fifteen companies in 2017 alone. “The Google Acquisition Tracker,” CB Insights, nd, https://www.cbinsights.com/research-google-acquisitions.
16. “Ex-U.S. Private Equity & Venture Capital Index and Selected Benchmark Statistics,” Cambridge Associates, December 31, 2015, http://bit.ly/3a6u5XY. 15-year average across all geographies. Reflects 565 funds globally.
17. Prequin, “Venture Capital in Emerging Markets,” ValueWalk, May 10, 2018, https://www.valuewalk.com/2018/05/venture-capital-in-emerging-markets/.
18. Paul Gompers et al., “How Do Venture Capitalists Make Decisions?”; and Tomer Dean, “The Meeting That Showed Me the Truth about VCs,” TechCrunch, June 1, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/the-meeting-that-showed-me-the-truth-about-vcs/.
19. Anne S. Habiby and Deirdre M. Coyle Jr., “The High-Intensity Entrepreneur,” Harvard Business Review, September 2010, https://hbr.org/2010/09/the-high-intensity-entrepreneur.
20. “The Crunchbase Exited Unicorn Leaderboard,” accessed January 26, 2020, https://techcrunch.com/unicorn-leaderboard/exited/.
21. Asia Partners analysis of Sharpe ratios of industries, internal analysis, August 2018. This covers the 2002–2017 time period and looks at Southeast Asia technology stocks as proxy for technology as industry.
22. Of course, the suggestion is not to get a collection of investors to support innovators for the sake of it. “Party rounds”—the pejorative term used for seed rounds with five or more funds—are not what I am talking about. In party rounds, funds approach the investment as a passing-of-the-hat type of opportunity—a small bet to have a look for the next round, akin to buying an option. While, in theory, a party round means that many people are available to help or share strategic advice, unfortunately it often indicates that no one is invested sufficiently to offer assistance. Ultimately, small seed bets are not meaningful allocations of the VC funds and are thus deprioritized.
23. Francesco Corea, “Artificial Intelligence and Venture Capital,” Medium, July 18, 2018, https://medium.com/@Francesco_AI/artificial-intelligence-and-venture-capital-af5ada4003b1; and Xuan Tian, “The Role of Venture Capital Syndication in Value Creation for Entrepreneurial Firms,” Review of Finance, forthcoming (available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=954188).
24. Eliot Brown, “In Silicon Valley, the Big Venture Funds Keep Getting Bigger,” Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-silicon-valley-the-big-venture-funds-keep-getting-bigger-1501002000.
25. “Something Ventured,” documentary film, directed by Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine (April 24, 2011).
26. Jason Rowley, “Where and Why Venture Capitalists Invest Close to Home,” Tech-Crunch, November 16, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/16/where-and-why-venture-capitalists-invest-close-to-home/.
27. Serena Saitto, “The Biggest Tech Investor Silicon Valley Ignores,” The Information, February 21, 2018, https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-biggest-tech-investor-silicon-valley-ignores.
28. Staff Writer 3, “The Greatest Venture Capital Investment Ever? Naspers Cashes in $10bn Tencent Stake for Whopping 55,000% Return,” African Business Central, March 30, 2018, https://www.africanbusinesscentral.com/2018/03/30/the-greatest-venture-capital-investment-ever-naspers-cashes-in-10bn-tencent-stake-for-whopping-55000-return/.
29. Saitto, “The Biggest Tech Investor Silicon Valley Ignores.”
30. “Vostok Emerging Finance,” 2017, http://www.vostokemergingfinance.com/.
31. “Series D—GuiaBolso—2017-10-18,” Crunchbase, https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/guiabolso-series-d--c5330480#section-locked-charts.
32. Alex Graham, “Exploring Evergreen Funds with a VC Investor Who Raised One,” TopTal Finance, nd, https://www.toptal.com/finance/venture-capital-consultants/evergreen-funds.
33. For its newest global fund, Carlyle, the global private equity firm, launched a long-dated fund. This is one of the most well-documented examples in the space; see “The Carlyle Group Raises $3.6 Billion for First Long-Dated Private Equity Fund,” Carlyle Group, press release, October 19, 2016, https://www.carlyle.com/media-room/news-release-archive/carlyle-group-raises-36-billion-first-long-dated-private-equity.
34. “Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent: BAT Companies Dominate Chinese VC,” PitchBook blog, April 29, 2019, https://pitchbook.com/blog/baidu-alibaba-and-tencent-bat-companies-dominate-chinese-vc.
35. Jon Russell, “Alibaba’s Ant Financial Is Raising $3B in Debt to Finance a Global M&A Spree,” TechCrunch, February 8, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/08/alibabas-ant-financial-is-raising-3b-in-debt-to-finance-a-global-ma-spree/.
36. Josh Horwitz, “The ‘SoftBank of China’ Has Quietly Invested Tens of Billions Globally Since 2015,” Quartz, May 17, 2018, https://qz.com/1279190/tencent-the-softbank-of-china-has-invested-tens-of-billions-globally-since-2015/.
37. Crunchbase company profiles, “Grab” and “Go-Jek,” https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/go-jek, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/grabtaxi.
38. Fred Imbert, “SoftBank Launches $5 Billion Latin America Tech Fund,” CNBC, March 7, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/07/softbank-launches-5-billion-latin-america-tech-fund.html.
39. “The 2018 Global CVC Report,” CB Insights, 2019, https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/corporate-venture-capital-trends-2018/.
40. Jean-François Caillard, “Why Is the Corporate Venture Growing So Fast? What Are the Keys?” October 27, 2017, https://medium.com/@jfcaillard/why-is-the-corporate-venture-growing-so-fast-what-are-the-keys-b7cab8156b5e; and Teddy Himler, “Corporate VC Is on the Rise: Here’s What to Know,” Forbes, February 14, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/valleyvoices/2017/02/14/corporate-vc-on-the-rise/#178efe5abbf2.
41. “The 2018 Global CVC Report,” CB Insights.
42. Melissa Mittelman, “TPG Seals Record $2 Billion for Fund Co-Led by Bono,” Bloomberg, October 3, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-03/tpg-seals-record-2-billion-for-rise-impact-fund-co-led-by-bono.
43. “What Is Impact Investing and How Did It Begin?” The Case Foundation, September 2014, http://www.gih.org/Examples/EXDetail.cfm?ItemNumber=6907, accessed August 12, 2018; and Abby Schultz, “Impact Investors Hold US$228 Billion in Assets,” Barrons, June 6, 2018, https://www.barrons.com/articles/impact-investors-hold-us-228-billion-in-assets-1528294454.
44. Author interview with Keith Harrington, June 27, 2018.
45. Ibid.
46. These funds include firms like Lighter Capital (an early pioneer of the model) in Seattle, Cypress Growth Capital in Dallas, and Decathlon Capital Partners in Park City, Utah.
47. Bartosz Trocha, “How 83 Venture Capital Firms Use Data, AI & Proprietary Software to Drive Alpha Returns,” Medium, July 1, 2018, https://hackernoon.com/winning-by-eating-their-own-dogs-food-83-venture-capital-firms-using-data-ai-proprietary-da92b81b85ef; and Eze Vidra, “How Venture Capital Funds Leverage AI and Big Data,” VC Cafe, November 28, 2018, https://www.vccafe.com/2018/11/28/how-venture-capital-funds-leverage-ai-and-big-data/.
48. Kate Clark, “Clearbanc Plans to Disrupt Venture Capital with ‘The 20-Min Term Sheet,’” TechCrunch, April 4, 2019, https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/03/clearbanc-plans-to-disrupt-venture-capital-with-the-20-min-term-sheet/.
49. Connie Loizos, “Social Capital Has Started Investing in Startups, Sight Unseen,” TechCrunch, October 25, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/25/social-capital-has-started-investing-in-startups-sight-unseen/.
50. Eze Vidra, “Turns Out Venture Capital Is a People Business, or Is It?” VC Cafe, June 12, 2018, https://www.vccafe.com/2018/06/12/turns-out-venture-capital-is-a-people-business-or-is-it/.
51. Katy Steinmetz, “How Chamath Palihapitiya Wants to Disrupt Silicon Valley,” Time, July 19, 2018, http://time.com/5342756/chamath-palihapitiya/; and Ashley Carroll, “From Experiment to Product: Capital-as-a-Service One Year Later,” Medium, June 18, 2018, https://medium.com/social-capital/from-experiment-to-product-capital-as-a-service-one-year-later-6d8b4b9c038b.
52. The average time to exit at the Frontier, as discussed in chapter 3, can exceed ten years. The average American marriage is 8.2 years; see Matthew Schimkowitz, “How Long Does an Average Marriage Last around the World?” Hopes&Fears, 2019, http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/city/city_index/214133-city-index-marriage-lengths.
53. James Chen, “Accredited Investor,” Investopedia, February 23, 2019, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accreditedinvestor.asp.
54. Ramana Nanda, Robert F. White, and Alexey Tuzikov, “Initial Coin Offerings,” Harvard Business School Technical Note 818-067, November 2017 (Revised December 2017), https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=53510.
55. David Floyd, “Billion: 2018 ICO Funding Has Passed 2017’s Total,” Coin Desk, April 19, 2018, https://www.coindesk.com/6-3-billion-2018-ico-funding-already-outpaced-2017/$6.3.
56. Shobhit Seth, “80% of ICOs Are Scams: Report,” Investopedia, April 2, 2018, https://www.investopedia.com/news/80-icos-are-scams-report/.
57. Many ICOs are raised by the companies outlining their business plans in a white paper (an explanation outlining what the coin will be for and how the money will be used). In venture capital, to raise similar amounts of capital would traditionally require meaningfully more business traction.
58. Lupercal Capital, “ICOs: A Changing Regulatory Environment,” February 7, 2018, https://hackernoon.com/icos-a-changing-regulatory-environment-77119ffff26b.
59. M. Szmigiera, “Crowdfunding—Statistics & Facts,” Statista, November 29, 2018, https://www.statista.com/topics/1283/crowdfunding/.
60. “Crowdfunding,” Statista, nd, https://www.statista.com/outlook/335/100/crowdfunding/worldwide#market-globalRevenue.
61. Author interview with Erik Hersman, May 17, 2018, via WhatsApp.
Chapter 11
1. Author interview with Hernan Kazah, June 7, 2018.
2. “E-commerce in Latin America—Statistics & Facts,” Statista, July 13, 2018, https://www.statista.com/topics/2453/e-commerce-in-latin-america/.
3. “Mercado Libre (MELI): IPO Details,” Crunchbase, 2019, https://www.crunchbase.com/ipo/mercadolibre-ipo--51d436e2#section-details; and “MercadoLibre, Inc. (MELI),” Yahoo Finance, 2019, https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MELI?p=MELI.
4. Author interview with Hernan Kazah, 2018.
5. Kaszek Ventures, 2019, https://www.kaszek.com/portfolio.
6. “The Multiplier Effect,” Endeavor, https://readymag.com/endeavor/multipliereffect/.
7. Ibid.
8. “Global Network of Failure Researchers,” Failure Institute, September 7, 2017, https://thefailureinstitute.com/researchers-network/.
9. Author interview with Pepe Villatoro, June 20, 2018.
10. “Stories About Failure,” Fuckup, 2019, https://fuckupnights.com/; and author interview with Pepe Villatoro, June 20, 2018.
11. Sophus A. Reinert, Dawn H. Lau, and Amy MacBeath, “Going Rogue: Choson Exchange in North Korea,” Harvard Business School Case 717-015, October 2016 (Revised October 2017), https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=51812.
12. Ibid.
13. Author interview with Geoffrey See, August 19, 2018.
14. “Learn, Network, Startup,” Startup Weekend, 2019, https://startupweekend.org/.
15. Author interview with Yasser Bashir, October 25, 2018.
16. Mehreen Omer, “Breaking: Careem Acquires Savaree,” Pakwired, March 30, 2016, https://pakwired.com/careem-acquires-savaree/.
17. Author interview with Fred Swaniker, July 12, 2018.
18. Fred Swaniker, “The Leaders Who Ruined Africa, and the Generation Who Can Fix It,” TED talk, transcript, October 2014, https://www.ted.com/talks/fred_swaniker_the_leaders_who_ruined_africa_and_the_generation_who_can_fix_it/transcript.
19. David Fine et al., “Africa at Work: Job Creation and Inclusive Growth,” McKinsey & Company, August 2012, https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/middle-east-and-africa/africa-at-work.
20. Fred Swaniker, “4 Lessons Learned About What It Takes to Be an Entrepreneur,” video, YouTube, July 29, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa5Dt2busNA.
21. Nate Berg, “How the African Leadership Academy Is Fighting the Continent’s Education Exodus,” Fast Company, December 20, 2010, https://www.fastcompany.com/1702244/how-african-leadership-academy-fighting-continents-education-exodus.
22. “Founders’ Story,” African Leadership Academy, 2019, http://www.africanleadershipacademy.org/about/founders-story/.
23. “Success after ALA,” African Leadership Academy, 2019, http://www.africanleadershipacademy.org/about/our-impact/university-placements/; “Reekworth Highlights 2017,” Reekworth Junior (Mabelreign Campus), December 12, 2017, https://www.reekworthjuniorschool.com/single-post/2017/12/12/Reekworth-Highlights-2017; and “Mapping Change in Africa: Meet 5 Enterprising ALA Alumni,” African Leadership Academy, March 28, 2018, http://www.africanleadershipacademy.org/ala-alumni-enterprise/.
24. “AAE,” African Leadership Network (ALN), October 6, 2017, http://africanleader shipnetwork.com/.
25. “Our Meta Skills,” ALU, December 16, 2016, https://www.alueducation.com/about/our-meta-skills/.
26. “Are You Ready for the Opportunity Presented by Africa’s Growing Insurance Industry?” ALU School of Insurance, nd, https://www.alueducation.com/soi/.
27. “Computer Science,” ALU, 2017, https://www.alueducation.com/programmes/undergraduate/degree-programmes/computer-science/.
28. Yinka Adegoke, “African Leadership University Has Raised $30 Million to Help Reinvent Graduate Education,” Quartz Africa, January 4, 2019, https://qz.com/africa/1515015/african-leadership-university-raises-30-million-series-b/.
29. “Hello, We Are iHub,” iHub Nairobi, 2019, https://ihub.co.ke/.
30. Toby Shapshak, “Kenya’s iHub Enters a New Chapter,” Forbes, March 11, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/tobyshapshak/2016/03/11/kenyas-ihub-enters-a-new-chapter/#535dca644f6a.
31. Irene Hau, “[4TH GEN #5] Case Study: iHub,” The Sound of the City Blog, WordPress, May 12, 2015, https://thesoundofthecity.wordpress.com/2015/05/12/4th-gen-5-case-study-ihub/. iHub was recently acquired by the Nigerian innovation center and seed-fund CcHub; see https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/26/nigerias-cchub-acquires-kenyas-ihub-to-create-mega-africa-incubator/.
32. Author interview with Matt Clifford, October 23, 2018.
33. Entrepreneur First, https://www.joinef.com/.
34. Rhett Morris and Lili Török, “Fostering Productive Entrepreneurship Communities: Key Lessons on Generating Jobs, Economic Growth, and Innovation,” Endeavor Insight, October 2018, https://endeavor.org/content/uploads/2015/06/Fostering-Productive-Entrepreneurship-Communities.pdf.
35. Endeavor, “The Multiplier Effect,” Endeavor Insight, https://readymag.com/endeavor/multipliereffect/.
36. Endeavor, “The Power of Entrepreneur Networks: How New York City Became the Role Model for Other Urban Tech Hubs,” Endeavor Insight Report, November 2014, http://www.nyctechmap.com/nycTechReport.pdf.
37. “Endeavor 2018/2019 Impact Report,” November 2019; and “Endeavor Board: Linda Rottenberg,” Endeavor, 2019, https://endeavor.org/global-board/linda-rottenberg/.
38. Global Off-Grid Lighting Association, “About Us,” https://www.gogla.org/about-us.
39. “Aramex: Delivery Unlimited,” Aramex, 2019, http://bit.ly/3a34nUa; and “Investor Presentation, Q2, 2019 Results,” June 30, 2019, https://www.aramex.com/docs/default-source/resourses/inverstor_presentation_q2_2019.pdf.
40. Sami Mahroum, Black Swan Start-ups: Understanding the Rise of Successful Technology Business in Unlikely Places (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
41. “Overview: Maktoob,” Crunchbase, 2019, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/maktoob#section-overview; and “Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur: Meet the Ron Conway of the Middle East (TCTV),” TechCrunch, September 16, 2010, https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/16/middle-east-ron-conway-fadi-ghandour-shervin-pishevar/.
42. Elizabeth MacBride, “The Middle East’s First Unicorn: Souq.com’s CEO on Leadership, Timing and Coping with Rejection,” Forbes, March 25, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethmacbride/2016/03/25/e-commerce-gold-in-the-middle-east-behind-souqs-success-story/#58610b4c1ee0.
43. Jon Russell, “Amazon Completes Its Acquisition of Middle Eastern E-commerce Firm Souq,” TechCrunch, July 3, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/03/amazon-souq-com-completed/; and Ronaldo Mouchawar, “Souq’s CEO on Building an E-Commerce Powerhouse in the Middle East,” Harvard Business Review, September–October 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/09/souq-coms-ceo-on-building-an-e-commerce-powerhouse-in-the-middle-east.
44. Heather Somerville, Alexander Cornwell, and Saeed Azhar, “Uber Buys Rival Careem in $3.1 Billion Deal to Dominate Ride-Hailing in Middle East,” Reuters, March 25, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-careem-m-a-uber/uber-buys-rival-careem-in-3-1-billion-deal-to-dominate-ride-hailing-in-middle-east-idUSKCN1R70IM.
45. Christopher T. Rogers and Peter Weed, “What Careem’s $3.1 Billion Acquisition Means for the Middle East,” Forbes, April 17, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/valleyvoices/2019/04/17/what-careems-3-1-billion-acquisition-means-for-the-middle-east/#2fba3c887fa2.
46. Noor Shawwa, “The Success and Multiplier Effects That Careem’s Acquisition by Uber Will Have on the Middle East’s Startup Ecosystem,” Entrepreneur, April 2, 2019, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/331568.
47. Morris and Török, “Fostering Productive Entrepreneurship Communities.”
48. Ibid.
49. “100 Flipkart Employees to Turn Millionaires Post Walmart Deal, but Here’s the Catch,” News Minute, May 11, 2018, https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/100-flipkart-employees-turn-millionaires-post-walmart-deal-here-s-catch-81087.
50. Anne S. Habiby and Deirdre M. Coyle Jr., “The High-Intensity Entrepreneur,” Harvard Business Review, September 2010, https://hbr.org/2010/09/the-high-intensity-entrepreneur.
51. Ibid.
52. Tom Huddleston Jr., “This 36-Year-Old Self-Made Billionaire Started His First Business at 16 with a $500 Loan from His Dad—Here’s His Best Advice,” CNBC, July 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/30/how-div-turakhia-became-indias-youngest-self-made-billionaire.html.
53. Author interview with André Street, August 20, 2018.
54. The seminal story of the “Traitorous Eight” illustrates the power of older siblings in kick-starting the ecosystem flywheel. In the 1950s, Silicon Valley was only one of many hubs building transistors (computer processors), and certainly not the leader. But things quickly changed in the West’s favor. William Shockley, who coinvented the transistor while at Bell Labs, founded his own company, Shockley Semiconductor Labs, in 1956 in Mountain View, California. It was the first company to make transistors out of silicon. Shockley attracted a number of top computer scientists from the East Coast, which was still the hub of computer science development. In 1957, eight of Shockley’s employees left to launch their own firm, Fairchild Semiconductor. Now dubbed the Traitorous Eight, they partnered with Sherman Fairchild and helped scale the company to become a leading manufacturer of transistors. In the early 1960s, Fairchild helped make computer components for the Apollo program. Over the next decade, many of the Traitorous Eight and their employees left Fairchild and founded their own companies. Gordon Moore (of Moore’s law) and Robert Noyce founded Intel in 1968. Eugene Kleiner co-founded the storied venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Other employees went on to start the chip companies AMD and Nvidia, and Don Valentine founded Sequoia, arguably the most successful venture capital firm in history.
55. Rhett Morris, “The First Trillion-Dollar Startup,” TechCrunch, July 26, 2014, https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/26/the-first-trillion-dollar-startup/.
56. Charlie Parrish, “Meet the PayPal Mafia, the Richest Group of Men in Silicon Valley,” Business Insider, September 20, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-paypal-mafia-the-richest-group-of-men-in-silicon-valley-2014-9.
57. Analysis summing market caps of PayPal Mafia–founded businesses, based on public data.
58. “The Multiplier Effect,” 2019, https://readymag.com/endeavor/multipliereffect/.
59. The acceleration graphs come from publicly available data from CB Insights by market. For each year, the total number of unicorns is represented by the number of unicorns from previous years plus the number of new unicorns that year.
60. Analysis could be further refined by exploring exits at a range of valuation sizes (not just unicorns), concentration in time, and geographic proximity, among other factors. The idea came from a discussion with Nick Nash, co-founder of Asia Partners, and a trend the company had observed in China and India.
61. Figure 11-2 cuts off China unicorn acceleration, today over 100. Latin America has many years with low unicorn count before acceleration.
62. Author interview with Amanda Lannert, April 15, 2019.
Chapter 12
1. “Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Diagnostic Toolkit,” Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs, December 2013, https://assets.aspeninstitute.org/content/uploads/files/content/docs/pubs/FINAL%20Ecosystem%20Toolkit%20Draft_print%20version.pdf.
2. Originally proposed by Alfred Marshall in his book Principles of Economics, Great Mind Series, first published in 1890. It was pushed forward by other thinkers, including Michael Porter through his theories of economic clusters. See Michael Porter, “Clusters and the New Economics of Competition,” Harvard Business Review, November–December 1998, https://hbr.org/1998/11/clusters-and-the-new-economics-of-competition.
3. Author interview with Chris Heivly, February 15, 2019.
4. AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674753402&content=reviews.
5. Vivek Wadhwa, “Silicon Valley Can’t Be Copied,” MIT Technology Review, July 3, 2013, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/516506/silicon-valley-cant-be-copied/.
6. Saxenian, Regional Advantage.
7. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002); and Brad Feld, Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2012), https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Startup+Communities%3A+Building+an+Entrepreneurial+Ecosystem+in+Your+City-p-9781118483312. Feld’s excellent book succinctly summarizes the different ecosystem-building approaches and helped shape my own thinking on the subject.
8. Victor Hwang and Greg Horowitt, The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley (Los Altos Hills, CA: Regenwald, 2012), http://therainforestbook.com/.
9. Feld, Startup Communities.
10. “Doing Business 2019: Training for Reform,” International Bank for Reconstruction & Reform /World Bank Group, 2019, http://bit.ly/38aK8Cp.
11. Ana Maria Zárate Moreno, “Regulation, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship,” Regulatory Studies Center, The George Washington University, December 8, 2015, https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs1866/f/downloads/RegInsight_AMZM-regulation-and-Innv%26entrep-literature-review120815.pdf.
12. Of course, this is a correlation and not causation. There are a range of factors that drive this, and GDP growth also influences the rate of international study, because it increases disposable dollars for investment.
13. Asia Partners Research, January 2018, https://www.asiapartners.com/; Rachel T. Barclay, Mandie Weinandt, and Allen C. Barclay, “The Economic Impact of Study Abroad on Chinese Students and China’s Gross Domestic Product,” Journal of Applied Business and Economics 19, no. 4 (2017), http://www.na-businesspress.com/JABE/BarclayRT_Web19_4_.pdf; Yukiko Shimmi, “The Problematic Decline of Japanese International Students,” International Higher Education 64 (Summer): 9–10, https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/ihe/article/download/8558/7691/; Annette Bradford, “Changing Trends in Japanese Students Studying Abroad” International Higher Education 83, Special Issue (2015), https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/ihe/article/download/9086/8193/; and Mantong Guo, “The Economic Impact of International Students on Their Countries of Origin,” April 5, 2017, Georgetown University Master’s Thesis, https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/1043914.
14. Ibid; “GDP Growth (Annual %): Japan,” The World Bank, 2019, https://bit.ly/38MNtrD.
15. Ibid; James McCrostie, “More Japanese Students May Be Studying Abroad, but Not for Long,” Japan Times, August 9, 2017, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2017/08/09/issues/japanese-may-studying-abroad-not-long/#.XGnuo5NKgnV.
16. While the results of the companies have been mixed (many have left the country after the program, and few have scaled), the organizers largely consider the initiative successful on the qualitative, cross-pollination front.
17. Author interview with Amy Nelson, November 2018.
18. “About Us,” C100, https://www.thec100.org/.
19. Stuart Anderson, “Immigrants and Billion-Dollar Companies,” Near Policy Brief, National Foundation for American Policy, October 2018, http://bit.ly/2thz2g0; and Dinah Wisenberg Brin, “Immigrants Form 25% of New U.S. Businesses, Driving Entrepreneurship in ‘Gateway’ States,” Forbes, July 31, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/dinahwisenberg/2018/07/31/immigrant-entrepreneurs-form-25-of-new-u-s-business-researchers/#4cf713ac713b.
20. From a search of the AngelList job board, looking at all open roles in the United States and a comparative list willing to sponsor immigrants, as of February 25, 2019: www.Angel.co/jobs.
21. Justin Sink, “Trump Administration Blocks ‘Startup Visas’ That Tech Leaders Backed,” Bloomberg, July 10, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-10/trump-administration-blocks-startup-visas-tech-leaders-back.
22. Olivia Carville, “Trump Booted Foreign Startup Founders. Other Countries Embraced Them,” Bloomberg, October 1, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-01/trump-booted-foreign-startup-founders-other-countries-embraced-them; and “Attracting Foreign Entrepreneurs,” Business Roundtable, 2019, https://www.businessroundtable.org/policy-perspectives/immigration/state-of-immigration/attracting-foreign-entrepreneurs.
23. Jordan Crook, “Unshackled Is a New $3.5m Early Stage Fund That Looks a Lot Like an Accelerator,” TechCrunch, November 13, 2014, https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/13/unshackled-is-a-new-3–5m-early-stage-fund-that-looks-a-lot-like-an-accelerator/.
24. “Overview: Unshackled Ventures,” Crunchbase, 2019, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/unshackled-ventures#section-overview; and Kate Clark, “Unshackled Ventures Has $20m to Invest Exclusively in Immigrant Founders,” May 2, 2019, https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/02/unshackled-ventures-has-20m-to-invest-exclusively-in-immigrant-founders/.
25. “37 Chinese Companies That Became Unicorns in 2018,” CB Insights, March 6, 2019, https://www.cbinsights.com/research/china-unicorns-2018/; “55 US Companies That Became Unicorns in 2018,” CB Insights, March 13, 2019, https://www.cbinsights.com/research/us-unicorns-2018/; and Jason Rowley, “Chinese Startups Lead US Rivals in 2018 Venture Race,” Crunchbase, October 17, 2018, https://news.crunchbase.com/news/chinese-startups-lead-us-rivals-in-2018-venture-race/.
26. An H-1B visa allows companies in the United States to temporarily employ foreign nationals for particular occupations. It falls under the Immigration and Nationality Act.
27. Suvir Varma and Alex Boulton, “Southeast Asia Churns Out Billion-Dollar Start-Ups,” Bain & Company, December 20, 2018, https://www.bain.com/insights/southeast-asia-churns-out-billion-dollar-start-ups-snap-chart/.
28. “Global Ecosystem Ranking Report,” Startup Genome, 2017 report, https://startupgenome.com/reports.
29. Pooja Singh, “Why Singapore Is a Startup Paradise,” Entrepreneur Asia Pacific, December 13, 2018, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/324589.
30. Christopher M. Schroeder, “A Different Story from the Middle East: Entrepreneurs Building an Arab Tech Economy,” MIT Technology Review, August 3, 2017, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608468/a-different-story-from-the-middle-east-entrepreneurs-building-an-arab-tech-economy/.
31. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class.
32. “Become an e-Resident,” Republic of Estonia, https://e-resident.gov.ee/become-an-e-resident/.
33. Author interview with Penny Pritzker, April 19, 2019.
34. “Our Portfolio,” Rippleworks, 2019, http://www.rippleworks.org/portfolio/.
35. Author interview with Doug Galen, January 24, 2019.
36. David Yin, “What Makes Israel’s Innovation Ecosystem So Successful,” Forbes, January 9, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidyin/2017/01/09/what-makes-israels-innovation-ecosystem-so-successful/#1e1bb2b270e4.
37. John Paglia and David Robinson, “Measuring the Role of the SBIC Program in Small Business Job Creation,” Library of Congress, January 2017, https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/articles/SBA_SBIC_Jobs_Report.pdf.
38. James Manzi et al., “U.S. Corporate Cash Reaches $1.9 Trillion but Rising Debt and Tax Reform Pose Risk,” S&P Global, May 25, 2017, https://www.spglobal.com/en/research-insights/articles/us-corporate-cash-reaches-19-trillion-but-rising-debt-and-tax-reform-pose-risk.
39. Eric Paley, “Toxic VC and the Marginal-Dollar Problem,” TechCrunch, October 26, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/toxic-vc-and-the-marginal-dollar-problem/.
40. “What Is a Regulatory Sandbox?” November 20, 2017, https://www.bbva.com/en/what-is-regulatory-sandbox/.
41. “Welcome to the Aadhaar Dashboard,” Unique Identification Authority of India, https://uidai.gov.in/aadhaar_dashboard/index.php; and author interview with Nandan Nilekani, May 16, 2019, via phone.
42. “India Stack—The Bedrock of a Digital India,” IndiaStack, December 7, 2017, https://indiastack.org/india-stack-the-bedrock-of-a-digital-india/.
43. Author interview with Nandan Nilekani, 2019.
44. “The Landscape for Impact Investing in East Africa: Kenya,” Open Capital and Global Impact Investing Network, August 2015, https://bit.ly/2U2uQLV.
45. Ibid.
46. Rhett Morris and Lili Török, “Fostering Productive Entrepreneurship Communities: Key Lessons On Generating Jobs, Economic Growth, and Innovation,” Endeavor Insight, October 2018, https://endeavor.org/content/uploads/2015/06/Fostering-Productive-Entrepreneurship-Communities.pdf.
47. James A. Brander, Edward Egan, and Thomas F. Hellmann, “Government Sponsored Versus Private Venture Capital: Canadian Evidence,” National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2010, pp. 275–320, https://www.nber.org/chapters/c8226.pdf.
48. Yasuyuki Motoyama, Jared Konczal, Jordan Bell-Masterson, and Arnobio Morelix, “Think Locally, Act Locally: Building a Robust Entrepreneurial Ecosystem,” Kauffman Foundation, April 2014, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2425675.
49. Dane Strangler and Jordan Bell-Masterson, “Measuring an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem,” Kauffman Foundation, 2015, https://www.kauffman.org/-/media/kauffman_org/research-reports-and-covers/2015/03/measuring_an_entrepreneurial_ecosystem.pdf.
50. Endeavor, “The Multiplier Effect,” Endeavor, 2019, https://readymag.com/endeavor/multipliereffect/.
51. Bitange Ndemo and Tim Weiss, eds., Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), http://digitalkenyabook.com/.
Conclusion
1. Alistair Barr, “Facebook’s China Argument Revealed in Zuckerberg’s Hearing Notes,” Bloomberg, April 10, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-11/facebook-antitrust-rebuttal-revealed-in-zuckerberg-hearing-notes.
2. “Number of Monthly Active Facebook Users Worldwide as of 4th Quarter 2018 (in Millions),” Statista, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/.
3. “Number of Monthly Active WeChat Users from 4th Quarter 2011 to 4th Quarter 2018 (in Millions),” Statista, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/255778/number-of-active-wechat-messenger-accounts/.
4. Jeff Desjardins, “These Are the World’s Largest Tech Giants,” World Economic Forum, July 16, 2018, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/visualizing-the-world-s-20-largest-tech-giants.
5. Richard Florida and Ian Hathaway, “Rise of the Global Startup City,” Center for American Entrepreneurship, nd, http://startupsusa.org/global-startup-cities/.
6. “RIP Good Times,” Sequoia Capital, 2008, https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/rip-good-times.
7. Jayson DeMers, “You Can Beat the Next Recession: Here Are 5 Companies That Did Just That,” Entrepreneur, November 9, 2017, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/304099.
8. “Downturn, Start Up,” Economist, January 7, 2012, https://www.economist.com/node/21542390.
9. Anna Hensel, “U.S. Share of Global Venture Capital Fell More Than 20% in 5 Years,” VentureBeat, October 5, 2018, https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/05/u-s-share-of-global-venture-capital-fell-more-than-20-in-5-years/.
10. Sim Sim Wissgott, “World Population in 2018: Facts and Numbers,” CTGN, July 11, 2018, http://bit.ly/388ObyO.
11. Rebecca Fannin, “A New Era Unfolds from Silicon Dragon to Tech Titans of China,” Forbes, September 8, 2019, http://bit.ly/36U0a3j.