Who is The Startup Vagabond? Growing up I was always a big fan of Anthony Bourdain. His lust for life and adventure were infectious. Travel the world, eat delicious foods, meet interesting people and live life as one grand adventure. Sadly, I am not a good cook. So going into the culinary world was not going to be it. I could go into how growing up in Houston exposed me to many cultures outside of my own, or how moving around a lot made me adaptable, but I have no desire to bore you to tears so I'll skip ahead a bit. When it came time to get my education I chose a university that had an international business major. The thought of working just in the USA and using only English my whole career sounded quite boring. As a minor I chose Mandarin Chinese. 

Skipping ahead again, I ended up landing an awesome internship in Beijing, China to start my final year at university. It was a real Right Of Passage or Trial By Fire time in my life. I'll be honest, my Mandarin was elementary at best. I barely even passed the year of Mandarin classes and HSK 2 before getting there. It was July 2017 and if you know anything about Beijing summers, you know it's hot and humid. Landing in a foreign city, alone, with bad language skills and drenched in sweat, it was do or die! 6 months go by in a flash. Delicious food, new friends, tons of learning about international business and traveling all over Beijing, Shanghai, Zhungzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and even a weekend trip to Tokyo. It was an experience I cant possibly put into sufficient words. 

Around late December 2017 I landed back in the USA not knowing exactly what I wanted to do with my life but I knew it had to do with entrepreneurship and international business. Fast Forwarding from 2018 - Present. In those 5 years I went from selling homes, to stocking grocery shelves during the pandemic, to becoming a bartender, teaching myself about personal finance and coding in JavaScript and C#, started my own startup, worked for 2 other startups, and then shut down my startup. Early 2024 was quite a whirlwind to say the least. I could see my own startup wasn't going to make it, but putting down your baby is never easy. Years of work down the drain. Yes, I had learned a lot. Especially what not to do. Objectively you learn way more from your failures than your successes, but that doesn't make it any easier to say goodbye. 

As I was closing one chapter I got ready to open the next one. It was just an idea, but it had been in the back of my head for years now. I knew I could never be the next Anthony Bourdain. The market is already way too oversaturated with food bloggers and vloggers. And once again, I wouldn't stand a chance against any of them in the kitchen. I decided to rewatch his show No Reservations and then I came across an interview of his where someone was asking about his culinary career. Turns out, he was never the greatest chef. In fact even he admitted he would be easily beaten by all the other famous chefs. It wasnt his skill behind the grill that made his show successful, it was the combination of his experience in the kitchen and love for learning about these people around the world that made his brand. Are there better chefs? Yes. Are there better people on camera? Yes. But no one did it like he did. 

And that's when it clicked. Am I the worlds greatest entrepreneur? No. Am I the greatest YouTube interviewer? No to this as well. However, what sets me apart is my love for entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, and international business. So I started looking on YouTube to learn more about startups in Japan, South Korea, Italy, Germany and Brazil. What I found was either nothing, or the occasional recap of some conference where startups were with very little information about the startups themselves. I don't care how many attendees you had, show me the awesome innovation happening in your part of the world. Teach me something that I can bring back to my ecosystem and help grow it. What are you doing right that I can learn from? The more I searched the more disappointed I became. So, like every entrepreneur ever, I said "Well, if no one else will do this, I guess I will." 

So what is The Startup Vagabond? To be honest, I'm still figuring it out. We're very early on, but I hope you will subscribe and leave feedback as we go so I can continue to improve. 1% better every day is the motto. My hope with this channel is create a community of international startup founders, investors and government organizations that can learn best practices from each other. Although we are separated by thousands of miles and language differences, we are all still human and will always have far more in common than differences. I want this to be a channel of innovation and one day collaboration. 

I truly believe that 2019 was the last year of "Silicon Valley supremacy". After the pandemic, the sudden boom of decentralized work changed everything. And with the internet and connectivity being ubiquitous, there's very little stopping kids around the world with access from becoming the next top software developers and AI engineers. Think back to just 50 years ago, if you wanted the best education your only real option was the top universities. 20 years ago the internet was in it's infancy, but now you would be hard pressed to find a subject you couldn't learn all about online. You don't have to go to Harvard or Stanford anymore for the best educations. Take a look at the Startup Genome "Global Ecosystem Report"s from the past few years. Silicon Valley is losing it's share of the market. The belief that you have to go to California to build a unicorn is starting to fade. 

Final Thoughts: When people think of startup entrepreneurship they tend to refer to the 80's-00's as this golden age. It's not wrong, but I don't believe it's the best way to look at it. From all that i've read and studied on the development of economies in general and startup ecosystems specifically, it comes in stages. In America we started with the government investing in military companies, which eventually led to the first real startup success of IBM. The genealogy that followed after IBM is something to be studied. Apple and Microsoft both have benefitted from IBM in their own ways when their founders were still in school, and there's a countless number of startups that either had their founder start at IBM before running their own startup, or startups getting investments from former IBM employees. One day I will write more about this topic but for now, Stage 1 seems to be your city/state/country's first big win. Obviously that was IBM in America's case. However, it's the transitions that are crucial. From Stage 0 to Stage 1 you need massive buy in from local government, universities, and community leaders. From Stage 1 to Stage 2 you need founders who are willing to invest back into their community to grow more startups. Silicon Valley is only Silicon Valley because they successfully moved between these stages and continue to reinvest back into their community. 

Final Final Thoughts: If you have stayed with me this far, thank you. I'm usually not this long-winded so I will wrap it up. All this rambling to say, I believe we are in a golden age now of International Innovation. You don't have to physically be in Silicon Valley anymore to access most of the same resources and investments SV based startups have. There are governments all over the world in Chile, Brazil, Seoul, India, Japan and all over the EU who see the importance of starting a startup community in their own country. They're working with local investors to keep the money in their community. We get to witness the birth of startup ecosystems all over the world all at once. So what does a silicon valley look like in Mexico City? Turin, Italy? Yokohama, Japan? I don't know. But I hope to document and learn from it all. I wake up every day now excited to learn more about the entrepreneurship happening all over the world. What do founders in Seoul know that I don't? What can I learn from them and bring back to Texas to make our startup ecosystem stronger? What could I share with them to help the Seoul ecosystem grow faster? Could I connect founders there with investors from here? Once again, I don't know yet, but I will figure it out. 

Follow us on Instagram @thestartupvagabond and subscribe on YouTube. And if you are a founder outside of the USA or know some, please sign up on my website at thestartupvagabond.com so I can meet you, learn about your startup and show you off to the world. So, until we meet again...