Most founders spend years trying to get to Silicon Valley. I spent years proving it doesn’t matter.
The startup world has a geography obsession — a deeply embedded belief that the best companies get built in the right zip codes, with the right local networks, surrounded by the right coffee shops full of the right investors. It’s one of the most expensive myths in entrepreneurship. And it’s finally starting to crack.
Soup.io recently published a piece diving into why geography is irrelevant for the most competitive startups of 2026 — and my approach to building across borders is at the center of it.
The article traces how I built multiple seven-figure technology companies without ever treating location as a constraint. Starting in Spain with no Silicon Valley network and no local market advantage, I made an early decision that changed everything: stop asking where to find talent and start asking how to build systems that manage talent anywhere.
That shift sounds small. The compounding effect is not.
One thing the piece captures well is the discipline distributed-first building forces on you. When every hire is a deliberate decision made across a global candidate pool, you think harder about whether the role is actually necessary. I run lean on purpose — sometimes starting with just two or three people — and I only scale when the data says it’s time, not when the growth feels like it demands it. That muscle, once built, is very hard for reactive-hiring companies to replicate.
The article also gets into something I feel strongly about: distributed teams don’t fail because of geography. They fail because the systems underneath them were designed for co-located teams and awkwardly retrofitted for remote ones. The fix isn’t proximity. It’s better architecture. “If your team needs a PhD to figure out your monitoring stack,” I tell the publication, “you’re doing it wrong.”
If you’ve ever wondered how to build a high-performance team without the overhead of an office, a local talent pool, or a physical headquarters holding you back, this piece is worth your time.
Read the full article on Soup.io →
Geography was never the moat. The quality of your systems always was.
