Tech has the potential to be THE great global leveler. American and Chinese tech currently dominate the world. Big tech gets bigger. Anyone trying to escape this is fighting the gravitational pull of cosmically large entities.
The gravitational pull works like this: America, China, and some other countries (to a lesser extent) produce the largest and most powerful tech companies along with the largest and most productive start-up ecosystems and risk capital. Those companies attract motivated and talented people from across the globe. The flywheel of capital and talent spins faster, and capital and experience become hyper-concentrated.
Growing Wealth Outside the Orbit
One of the ways that smaller nations, companies, and tech ecosystems can be supported in this dynamic is through investment. Economic differences are obvious, measurable, and important, and capital investment is essential to the emerging market.
But the less obvious and more complex imbalance between established markets and emerging ones is expertise. Because the United States and China have more massive businesses and start-up ecosystems than the rest of the world, they naturally have more leaders and operators who are experienced in building and running businesses at this scale. This experience is highly valuable and extremely rare.
It is common to see experienced tech leaders and operators jump between Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, X, Tesla, OpenAI, Oracle, and a handful of other elite names in American tech. However, it is more uncommon for them to work for companies in smaller markets. These companies often do not have the culture, priority, budget, impact, or cutting-edge technology that can attract leaders and operators of the highest caliber. The result is that the experience needed to build the world’s best companies remains concentrated in a few select markets.
Spreading Expertise
Part of Techquity’s thesis is that the experience we have accumulated from decades in the top tech companies of the world can be invested as a growth lever for scaling companies, no matter where they are from. Just as some investment firms inject capital into emerging markets, Techquity seeks to inject big tech leadership and expertise into the markets and companies where it is needed most.
Because we know that our experience is unique, useful, and highly concentrated in only one or two places in the world.
If you work with companies that could use some of this experience, let’s be in touch.