Officially a teenager

• 500 Global celebrated its 13th Anniversary in July! CEO & Founding Partner Christine Tsai was invited on Bloomberg Technology’s VC Spotlight to share her insights from investing in over 2800 companies, and what’s changed since 2010.
• Christine shared that back in 2010, the cost to start a company was coming down dramatically as online platforms like Google, Facebook/Meta, Apple became more accessible, leading to big opportunities for founders building startups all around the world.  500 Global started investing in early-stage companies alongside this global trend.
• From day one, 500 Global’s focus has largely been in the United States and globally. We’ve identified 25 of the largest and fastest growing economies, which we call the ‘rise economies’, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, Mexico, and more. In fact, about half of 500 Global’s portfolio consists of non-U.S. companies.
• Those early days of investing opened up opportunities to establish deeper relationships with our founders, and support them on their journey from pre-seed to pre-IPO. 
• “Because we have our roots in investing in a large number of companies across a number of sectors, one of the big benefits of that, and an advantage for us, is to be able to spot emerging innovation, not just in the U.S. but in all corners of the world,” she said.
• What has also evolved over the last 13 years globally is a huge growth in venture funding, technology penetration, as well as the intersection between technology, venture capital and policy.
• On artificial intelligence (AI), Christine shares  “(AI) is really a global story. Often times what we’ve seen in the early days is that certain business models will start in the U.S., and then we see them happen in other parts of the world. But for AI, it really is happening in parallel in many different markets.” 
• Watch the full interview here.