VC 3.0 and the democratization of venture capital
Steve Case, founder of AOL, and early evangelist of ‘rise of the rest’ cities, posited recently in an interview that we are now living in the third wave of the Internet. “First-wave companies like AOL were building the internet, building the on-ramps,” argued Steve. “The second wave was building apps and software on top of the internet —think Facebook. This third wave is when the internet meets the real world. And it’s health care, it’s food and agriculture. These are big parts of our economy, and the domain expertise in those sectors and the partnerships you need to form to be successful in those sectors are often in the middle of the country, not on the coasts.”
For our part, Catapult has been at the forefront of advocating the importance of founders and venture investors to ‘think outside the Silicon Valley box.’ Early on we offered the proposition that a “decoupling of geography and capital” was afoot and being accelerated by an order of magnitude by the pandemic. This notion of a global decoupling of capital and geography — and, with it, the waning importance of geography as a competitive moat for capital and talent — is now being embraced by many fellow investors, most notably Endeavor’s Allen Taylor in his prolific writings on cross-border investing.