Forty-four percent. According to Gabriel Vasquez, a partner who covers AI apps and helps shape Andreessen Horowitz’s global investment strategy, that is the proportion of the firm’s Apps Fund One and Two investments backing a company with an international founder.
Coming from a firm whose reputation rests on its American dynamism thesis, the figure carries weight. Holding a U.S. passport is not part of the criteria. And the position a16z now takes stretches past simple openness to all comers: in the firm’s view, founders based outside the U.S. are sitting on the stronger hand.
The pitch, in a sentence
“There is now an advantage to having one foot in your home country, and one foot in Silicon Valley,” Strange and Vasquez wrote in a post to which TechCrunch had early access.
Angela Strange, a general partner at a16z, co-runs the firm’s Borderless Founder network with Vasquez. The program exists to back immigrant and international founders, and its original premise was the well-worn idea that a great company can emerge anywhere. What’s new is the assertion that being based outside the U.S. now works as an asset instead of a penalty.
Vasquez attached a price tag to the firm’s conviction. Rather than demanding that every team pack up and move stateside, a16z is prepared to “spend more than one million air miles” pursuing international dealflow, he told TechCrunch.
What changed was who’s buying
Selling enterprise software abroad used to be a grind. “The buyers from countries outside the U.S. were not moving rapidly, and their willingness to pay was very low,” Vasquez said.
According to him, that dynamic turned around “in the last three to five years,” and startups can now sign large corporations anywhere on the map, including in markets that nobody would describe as cutting edge.
Seed-stage companies gave the game away. Once a16z began fielding pitches from international startups at that stage already working with Fortune 500 companies, “we thought this might be an exception, but it was clearly a trend,” Vasquez said.
His read on how unusual that once was checks out. Across Europe in particular, big corporates interacted with startups via open innovation schemes and accelerators while keeping the checkbook closed. Turning them into paying customers proved so difficult that France stood up a dedicated program, “I Choose French Tech.”
Why cheap labor stopped being a moat
Vasquez pins the shift on AI. Incumbents decided that staying competitive meant buying third-party solutions, even in places where hiring people is still inexpensive.
He points to Latin America. “Software never really picked up in the region, because you were competing with cheap labor,” he said. Today AI agents run “always on,” keep getting more accurate, and have become routine in customer service and beyond.
What this opens up is a window of timing, not a gap in technology. “There’s so much appetite at the enterprise level for companies all around the world to consume AI, but American [startups] don’t have the speed yet to go serve the entire market from day zero, so they obviously prioritize U.S. companies,” Vasquez said.
The gap leaves space for a founder on the ground to sell an AI product to companies back home while shuttling between there and the U.S. “The concept of headquarters is something that is changing a lot; it’s just more fluid,” Vasquez said. Governments, he observed, appear to be arriving at the same view.
Poland bought into a company that isn’t headquartered there
A recent example: Poland took a stake in ElevenLabs, an a16z portfolio company. The voice AI startup maintains only a subsidiary in Poland rather than its headquarters. InPost and LOT Polish Airlines are among its customers, and co-founders Piotr Dąbkowski and Mateusz Staniszewski represent Polish talent in AI, a cohort with a strong presence at OpenAI as well.
Call it the fluid-headquarters thesis, underwritten by a state check.
The hiring math is the real edge
On talent, Vasquez’s case turns concrete. “Right now, recruiting in Silicon Valley is the hardest thing, because you’re competing with Anthropic and OpenAI that have raised billions and billions of dollars for the best talent,” he said.
Founders abroad routinely recruit from talent pools those two labs aren’t touching. It amounts to a hard cost advantage, and it’s the piece of the thesis that survives regardless of how anyone interprets enterprise buying cycles.
Hence the constant flights, Stockholm among the frequent destinations, in search of the next unicorn. A number of the most impressive AI scaleups started life as European academic spinouts, and VCs are on their trail.
All of which inverts the usual framing. As Dealroom founder Yoram Wijngaarde put it: “European talent remains one of America’s biggest startup advantages.”