Multi-national Start-Ups and Going Global…
Two weeks ago, I spent a very interesting couple of hours at the London Business School with Prof. Gerry George and his summer school students, where I was on a panel discussing entrepreneurs and teams that we like to invest in.
After the session, I had a brief discussion with a few students on Globalization and how this was fundamentally changing the way we are looking at businesses and opportunities.
Val Agostino of eBags, who was at the session later sent me the link to this amazing article on Business 2.0 “The Mighty Micro-Multinational” by Michael Copeland:
(Business 2.0) – WHEN WORKING IN THE TROPICAL SUN BECOMES too much for Ivko Maksimovic, the lanky Serbian heads to one of the Dominican Republic’s pristine white-sand beaches… Maksimovic, 29, is the CTO of Vast.com, a startup search company based in San Francisco. He lives in the Dominican Republic because it’s warm and far from Serbia’s troubles. He works for Vast because his bosses think he’s the best person for the job, and it doesn’t matter much where he is physically as long as he has a broadband connection.
Vast launched a year ago in its present form and now employs 25 people who work across five time zones, four nations, and two continents–all of which makes it a particularly striking example of a growing breed of startup that can best be described as a micro-multinational.
I can see these kind of companies becoming the norm rather than the exception in the years to come. In the past few months alone, I have come across at least three start-ups that have operations across three continents.
