Andreessen Horowitz has made headlines for its American dynamism thesis, but a U.S. passport is no requirement. According to Gabriel Vasquez, a partner focusing on AI apps and the firm’s global investment strategy, “44% of our investments in the Apps Fund One and Two have an international founder.”
Together with general partner Angela Strange, Vasquez is the driving force behind a16z’s Borderless Founder network, an initiative to support immigrant and international founders. Their premise is that great companies could be born anywhere, but they now believe foreign entrepreneurs actually have an edge over their American peers.
The U.S. has always attracted foreign founders; but in the current AI-dominated cycle, a16z acknowledges that their roots are more helpful than they used to be. “There is now an advantage to having one foot in your home country, and one foot in Silicon Valley,” Strange and Vasquez wrote in a post to which TechCrunch had early access.
Talking to TechCrunch exclusively, Vasquez broke down how this advantage has become significant enough for a16z to “spend more than one million air miles” in order to go after international dealflow — rather than expecting each and every team to move to the U.S.
