The World Has Never Been This Small
Elizabeth Yin, Co-founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund
December 2025
At a time when the world is full of conflict—fighting, violence, tariffs, and seemingly more barriers than ever, I would argue that the world actually has never been smaller or closer together.
Case in point, I’m an Asian American from Silicon Valley, talking with you today in Toronto about connections between MENA and Canada! This is proof that we are so interconnected.
Let’s first talk about some of the trends I’ve seen that have made the world smaller.
Big companies are being built everywhere
When I started in venture over a decade ago, investors mostly invested in startups located in Silicon Valley. You could be a brilliant founder anywhere in the world, but if you weren’t in the Bay Area, people quietly assumed you weren’t going to be big.
That belief has been fading for years but in 2025, it is gone. Not “fading”—but gone.
We’ve certainly watched breakout companies spring up far beyond the Bay Area over the last few years. Toronto has minted its own unicorns. Some of you, perhaps work at one, or helped to build one.
Arguably some of the hottest companies today are not from the Bay Area. I think about Loveable, N8N, and Hugging Face from Europe. I think about Cohere from Canada. The list goes on and on. And really what is happening are three things:
There is a leveling of talent
Post-pandemic, the best engineers may or may not flock to Silicon Valley. You can find top talent in many places in the world. In addition, it’s also unclear whether you, candidly, need the best engineers to build a big tech company.
In fact, with the rise of smarter AI tools and vibe coding, more people than ever can build. Many non-technical founders are building great products. And, tech has largely become a commodity for many companies. In fact, 2 years ago, a lot of VCs proclaimed that they would never back an “AI wrapper company” – namely a company that used OpenAI’s (or equivalent) technology to power their product. Fast forward to today, many of the best AI companies are “AI wrapper companies” that are built on top of existing LLMs. In fact, a lot of startups have faltered because they wasted a lot of money trying to build their own models when they could have used a third party and allocated resourceI into other areas. Success in tech these days often comes down to distribution, customer service, and product experience – not how great the tech or AI model is.
Lastly, on talent, post-pandemic, people have also gotten used to remote work. A lot of the largest modern tech companies today thrive on remote work. Companies like Webflow, Zapier, Atlassian, Canva, and many others all hire talent remotely. This was unheard of 10 years ago. But now is the norm and allows you to attract great talent from everywhere.
Competition is fiercer than ever
What naturally stems from all of this is that anyone can start a tech company from anywhere in the world. And so this means that investors are seeing 50 versions of the same idea coming from all over the place.
It also means that even if you have a head start, it’s not enough. A few years ago, I used to believe that if a startup reached $10M ARR, scale was inevitable. But, I don’t believe that anymore. I’ve seen teams grow to eight figures and then go to 0 almost overnight by competitors who moved faster, learned faster, or distributed better.
We’ve seen this happen from our purview as consumers with products like notetakers. Otter AI created the notetaking space starting in 2016. But Granola - out of London I might add - is the new darling of the AI notetaking world that has blown everyone away and people constantly switch notetaking products. Even amongst some of the biggest companies, the competition between OpenAI and Anthropic is fierce. They are constantly outdoing each other – which is great for the consumer. But competition forces every company to keep running to stay ahead and achieve the next thing.
It means that the bar for capital is way higher. It’s not entirely wrong to say that investors expect Loveable-type of growth – e.g. getting to millions in revenue within weeks. Afterall, investors could be writing that one check into any company worldwide – not just in your geography or in your space.
It’s never been more competitive - for customers, for investor dollars, for talent, for everything. And even if you see no competition on the horizon, expect that fast followers are the default. Afterall, if you notice an opportunity, all the other smart people in the world will too.
Geography is fluid
The last trend is that geography is no longer constrained. When I started coming to Canada almost 10 years ago, the dialogue on every panel was always about “How can Canadian founders win?” Or how can I raise money as a “Canadian founder”? or “How do I go after the US market as a Canadian founder?”
These are no longer the right questions.
I have portfolio companies outside of Canada who are actively going after the Canadian market and hiring in the Canadian market. I have Canadian companies who are going after customers globally and hiring everywhere. I have companies from Southeast Asia or Canada or the US setting up offices in MENA and selling to customers there and raising money from there. I have US companies who speak no Spanish selling to customers in South America. Never have I seen so much international activity so early. You are now selling into a global market. You are potentially hiring from a global market. And potentially fundraising from a global market.
It has to make sense for your business, but if one part of the world is going to be a bigger buyer for your product than another, it makes total sense to go after it even if you’re not from there. For example, I just got back from MENA a couple of months ago, where I have several portfolio companies who are not from MENA selling to customers there. This makes total sense because they are working on things like software for construction, and MENA is on a construction tear compared to many other parts of the world right now. Go where your customers are and where it makes sense. Make your life easier and ride that trend that is happening in that part of the world.
So what does this all mean?
Synthesizing all of this, it has never been a better time to build. It’s way cheaper because of all the new AI tooling. You have access to global talent. And you can get to revenue faster if your product creates 10x productivity. There are going to be so many entrepreneurs who win in this era, and the time to build is now. This era is bigger than the 90s, and bigger than mobile or cloud.
This is where coming back to my premise that the world is small can help you. In today’s environment, you have to play to your strengths in who you hire, which customers you go after (and where they are and how quickly they can move), and where you raise capital. No longer are we in the days of people blindly saying “Let’s go after the US market and attract Silicon Valley investors” – that may or may not make sense for your business. You have a big wide world out there to access and you have to figure out what you want from it.
But if you can be strategic in figuring this out, talent is borderless, capital is available, and customers are everywhere. The world has never been smaller, and now is the time to build in this connected world.