Because products and technology now travel internationally faster than companies themselves can expand, startups are forced to go international much earlier in their life cycle than they used to, instead of waiting until they had hundreds of millions in revenue.
Ragu explains that instantaneous global access to products via APIs and software means startups can no longer delay international expansion until they're large, unlike in the past. ✦ AI generated
Ragu · a16z Podcast · 2026-07-03 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 9:45
“How much of this is also accelerated by what's happening in AI and just the ability to push out software updates right just immediately.”
the reality is that products and technology travel faster than companies can because if you got a great product everybody learns about it very quickly instantaneously you can access it through APIs wherever in the world you are you can build on top of those things so what happens is for startup companies usually in the olden days you didn't care about going international until you had a few hundred million dollars in revenue now these companies have to go sooner and sooner internationally.
verbatim transcript · starts at 9:45
9:45everybody learns about it very quickly instantaneously you can access it through APIs wherever in the world you are you can build on top of those things so what happens is for startup companies usually in the olden days you didn't care about going international until you had a few hundred million dollars in revenue etc now these companies have to go sooner and sooner sooner internationally. So while um the products are being discovered
10:12internationally sooner, also to Ben's earlier point, it's easier to adapt these products for local markets much more easily thanks to AI or as wise becomes the interface to localize uh and internationalize these products, it's so much more easier. But in order to capitalize on the opportunity at scale, things don't change, right? I mean, you still have to be in region. You still have to understand the market structure of the
10:43region that you want to operate in. Um, you have to understand partnerships, you have to build relationships. Lots of other countries have very relationship- based economies, not transaction-based economies. So it's it's this interesting blend where you've got to the technology moves really fast but the way you do business hasn't changed that fast. Yeah. Actually so a really great example of uh what Ragu was talking about. So uh when
11:10we were in uh Mexico recently um we were meeting with uh the CEO of Tel Ava Univision which uh Alonso Angua who is a great friend of the firms who one of our global partners and we were asking about gee you know what are your struggles and one of his challenges is you know he's really faces uh you know heavy competition from some of the kind of
11:35global streamers like you know a Netflix or Disney or so forth. who have this US technology that's very powerful. Um, but he has, you know, this unbelievable Spanish-sp speakaking content. Uh, but it was hard for him to get to play on a global basis because it's in Spanish. It's a Mexican Spanish accent, which is different than a an Argentinian Spanish or Colombian Spanish accent. Uh, and you