You don't have to leave anymore (a16z just confirmed it)

Both trips, same pattern. Founders from Brazil, from Turkey, from Italy, running US companies, moving back and forth. Not relocated. Not remote. Both.

That combination barely existed six or seven years ago. You picked a side. You moved to SF and started over, or you stayed home and accepted a smaller ceiling. Now people are doing both on purpose, and it's working better than either one alone.

a16z put numbers on it this week. 44% of the investments in their first two apps funds have an international founder, split roughly evenly between companies headquartered in the US and abroad. Gabriel Vasquez, the partner behind their borderless founder network, told TechCrunch the firm now spends over a million air miles a year chasing deals rather than waiting for teams to move.

That last part is the interesting bit. The expectation used to be that you move.

Three things, and none of them are about founders getting smarter.

Enterprise buyers outside the US woke up. Vasquez described the old pattern plainly: buyers in other countries moved slowly and didn't want to pay much. That shifted in the last three to five years. Seed-stage companies started closing Fortune 500 logos from Lisbon, from São Paulo, from Warsaw. a16z assumed those were exceptions. They weren't.

AI forced the hand of legacy companies. In markets where labor is cheap, software never really took hold. Why buy a tool when a person costs less. That argument stops working when the agent runs all night and doesn't quit. So the buyers appeared in places that had never bought software properly before.

American startups can't cover the world on day one. They serve the US first because that's rational. That leaves a real gap in every other market, and the person best positioned to fill it is someone who already lives there and already knows who to call.

The a16z piece hangs all of this on one idea, borrowed from Marc Andreessen: preferential attachment. A startup has to get into a loop where each resource it acquires makes the next one easier to acquire. Customers make hiring easier. Hiring makes fundraising easier. Fundraising makes press easier. Press makes customers easier. The whole game is getting the loop turning at all.

Most companies die before the first revolution. That's the actual failure mode. Not bad product, not bad market. The flywheel never caught.

So the borderless advantage isn't three separate perks stacked on top of each other. It's one thing: your home market is a cheaper place to start the loop. The first customer costs you less because your name already means something. The first ten hires cost you less because you know where they are. The first press cycle costs you less because you're a national story before you're an international one.

And once the loop is turning, it doesn't matter much where it started.

That's the sharp version of the argument, and it's better than the version most people repeat, which is just ‘networks are useful.’ Networks are always useful. What changed is that the cost of the first revolution dropped in a hundred cities at once.

Worth reading their playbook as a confession.

They describe hosting dinners in Stockholm, in Bogotá, in Madrid. They find the local luminary, the founder who already built something big and enjoys giving back, and they handle the curation around them. They show up nine times a year instead of once. They build relationships with people years before those people are obviously worth knowing.

None of that is investing. All of it is community building, done by a firm with thirty five billion dollars under management.

The reason is simple. If founders no longer have to move to SF, then a firm whose edge was being in SF has a problem. Proximity used to be the moat. Sand Hill Road worked because the deals came to Sand Hill Road. Once the deals stop coming, you either go get them or you stop seeing them.

So the million air miles isn't a flex. It's the cost of replacing a monopoly they lost.

And the thing they're buying with all that travel is not information. It's trust, at the only speed trust moves, which is in person and slowly. They're doing exactly what borderless founders do, one layer up: earning credibility in one place and spending it in another.

Here's the part the post doesn't say.

This advantage is priced off two gaps. Buyers at home who face less competition for their attention, and engineers at home who cost less than they're worth. Both gaps close.

Every good founder in São Paulo reading that post now knows to go close a local enterprise logo. Every US company that figures out international distribution shows up in that market too. And the moment a few funds start hiring aggressively out of a city, the talent there gets priced correctly within about eighteen months.

That's not a reason to skip the play. It's a reason to run it now, and to be honest that you're running an arbitrage rather than discovering a permanent law. Arbitrages pay well and then they stop.

What survives after the gaps close is the only part that was never really about price: knowing people. That stays scarce because it doesn't scale.

SOTI is a house. Twenty people, one week, one physical building. That sounds like the opposite of borderless.

It isn't.

The founders running this play well have one thing in common: they have real rooms in more than one place. Not a Slack channel. Rooms. People who answer the phone, who make an intro without being asked, who tell you which engineer is quietly available before anyone posts a job.

That doesn't happen online. It happens over a week of working next to someone, and then a Saturday with paella and fifty strangers.

We've run this four times now: Taranto, Castellterçol, Valencia in April, and San Francisco in July. Every edition, someone shows up building for one market and leaves with something they couldn't have got in it. We didn't design for that. It's just what the room does.

So if the thesis holds, and we think it does, the scarce thing stops being access to SF. SF is a flight. The scarce thing becomes having somewhere to come back to.

That's the part we're building.