Allen Taylor, Managing Partner at Endeavor Catalyst, shares how Endeavor is fueling the rise of world-class startups in emerging markets—places often overlooked by traditional venture capital. Allen reveals how Endeavor identifies and supports high-potential founders before investing, why scaling talent is just as critical as scaling products, and how global ecosystems are evolving to produce unicorns from regions like Latin America, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. He also shares practical advice for founders operating outside established innovation hubs and highlights how Endeavor’s unique investment model flips traditional venture capital on its head.
Allen Taylor, Managing Partner at Endeavor Catalyst, shares how Endeavor is fueling the rise of world-class startups in emerging markets—places often overlooked by traditional venture capital. Allen reveals how Endeavor identifies and supports high-potential founders before investing, why scaling talent is just as critical as scaling products, and how global ecosystems are evolving to produce unicorns from regions like Latin America, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. He also shares practical advice for founders operating outside established innovation hubs and highlights how Endeavor’s unique investment model flips traditional venture capital on its head.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
[03:00] How Allen’s international career led him to Endeavor and a global mission to support entrepreneurs in overlooked markets
[05:55] Why talent is everywhere—but opportunity isn’t—and how Endeavor flips the script on where billion-dollar companies are built
[09:50] The contrarian strategy that made Endeavor Catalyst one of the most successful global venture funds
[15:31] What does it take to become an Endeavor startup?
[25:48] The biggest challenges founders face outside major tech hubs—and why scaling talent is the hardest part of growth
[29:04] Why Allen is bullish on Latin America, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa as the next breakout regions for global innovation
The non-profit organization Allen is passionate about: Kauffman Fellows
Allen Taylor is the Managing Partner at Endeavor Catalyst, the venture capital fund supporting Endeavor’s global community of high-impact entrepreneurs. With nearly 20 years at Endeavor, Allen has helped drive the organization's global expansion and innovative investment model, which backs companies across Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and beyond. Previously, Allen worked in international development and studied in Argentina, igniting his passion for supporting global entrepreneurship. Allen is also a Kauffman Fellow and serves on the board of the Kauffman Fellows Program.
Endeavor Catalyst is the co-investment fund of Endeavor, the leading global community of high-impact entrepreneurs. Since 2012, Endeavor Catalyst has invested in over 300 companies across 30+ countries, backing founders who are building transformative businesses in emerging and underserved markets. With a rules-based model, Endeavor Catalyst automatically invests alongside professional VCs when Endeavor Entrepreneurs raise Series A, B, or C rounds. Its portfolio includes Latin America’s first unicorn, Mercado Libre, and pioneering companies like Nubank and InstaDeep.
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Endeavor in some way is founded on this idea of, you know, I'll call it the remarkable individual theory of societal change, right? There's these special humans. Those are the founders, right? They're the awesome, very unique, one in a million, one in 10 million type individuals. But as they grow and scale a company, they can only take it to a certain level without having a layer beneath them of really talented people, oftentimes with expertise and experience.
Gopi Rangan: You are listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur - a podcast for founders with ambitious ideas. Venture capital investors and other early believers tell you relatable, insightful, and authentic stories to help you realize your vision. Welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I'm your host Gopi Rangan. My guest [00:01:00] today is Allen Taylor. Allen is the managing partner at Endeavor Catalyst.
Endeavor Catalyst is connected to Endeavor. We're going to learn more about what is Endeavor and his role at Endeavor Catalyst. He's been at Endeavor for almost 20 years. Endeavor is one of the most active organizations for entrepreneurs all around the world. And we will find out more about how the entrepreneurs come together at all these locations around the world.
What kind of startups are part of the ecosystem? I have a lot of statistics I can share, but before we go into a lot of details, let's welcome Allen. Allen, welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur.
Allen Taylor: Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.
Gopi Rangan: Let's start with you. You grew up in California, but you've also had a very international career focused on LATAM and various other locations.
And you've now been at Endeavor for almost 20 years. Walk us through that journey from your early days in California.
Allen Taylor: [00:02:00] Sure. It's a great story, but I am a Californian and I grew up here. I didn't actually even have a passport till I was 16 or 17 years old. But since then I've spent a lot of time in other places and actually essentially my whole career, uh, living and working in emerging markets and kind of growing ecosystems around the world. I guess that first started almost by chance, I ended up living and studying during college in Argentina, originally for a semester, I then went back for a year, and kind of fell in love with Latin America. So I was a gringo kid who spoke some Spanish and found my way to Endeavor in the summer of 2006. I was 25 years old. I thought I would work here for two or three years and, as you said, almost 20 years later I'm still here.
Gopi Rangan: What is your role at Endeavor? And also, can you also describe Endeavor Catalyst? What is Endeavor and how is Endeavor Catalyst connected?
Allen Taylor: For sure. So I've had a number of different [00:03:00] jobs over time. Endeavor itself is a really unique organization. It is a global mission driven, non profit, network, really, of entrepreneurs trying to change the world, right? And of individuals who really believe that talent is everywhere, that there are amazing entrepreneurs all over the place, in every city and country and corner of the globe. But the thing that's not really well distributed are the networks of knowledge and know how and mentorship and sometimes capital that can really help people build and scale companies.
So at its core Endeavor is this idea that perhaps the best way to create jobs and create economic development and build entrepreneurial ecosystems is just to find the very best entrepreneurs that already exist in all these places. And then help them really scale. And we can get more into it, but obviously Endeavor has grown and evolved a lot from our origins and our roots almost 30 years ago in countries like Argentina and Chile and Uruguay [00:04:00] and Brazil, to now be in 45 countries around the world with local teams based on the ground in 63 different cities now, I think. It's a very global organization, but it was always structured as a 'of, by and for entrepreneurs' where the entrepreneurs were really owning and running it. And it was a nonprofit where we raised donations to run it. That changed about 12 years ago, where we added, on top of the nonprofit structure, our own venture capital fund, actually to invest in the companies that Endeavor was coaching and helping and supporting. And that fund, which we can talk more about is called Endeavor Catalyst.
Gopi Rangan: I know that the Endeavor organization is widespread all around the world, but you actually don't have a strong presence in Silicon Valley and perhaps in other parts of the U. S. as well, and you're beginning to grow that.
I want to recognize the fact that you've invested in tens of countries, 30 plus countries. You've invested in 300 plus startups all across the world. And out of these [00:05:00] companies every sixth company is a unicorn. That is staggeringly high.
Allen Taylor: Pretty awesome. Right?
Gopi Rangan: Yeah. And you've invested in the first unicorn in at least 10 different situations coming out of each of these global hubs.
What an amazing story. And for you to have been able to get to this point today, You developed a team and believed in that concept well before anybody else did. How did that come about?
Allen Taylor: Yeah. So I realized I also didn't answer your previous question, which is my role today. Today at Endeavor, I am the managing partner of Endeavor Catalyst.
That's the fund. I also oversee a whole part of our business related to helping Endeavor entrepreneurs raise capital. But my own story is intertwined with Endeavor's growth because the original co founder of Endeavor is a woman named Linda Rotenberg, who still is today the CEO. She's based in New York.
The initial idea, in some ways the contrarian idea, the thing Endeavor believed that other [00:06:00] people didn't, was that you could build really big companies from anywhere. Today we talk a lot about this idea of markets that are elsewhere, right? I think talent has always been globally distributed. But what was probably true three or four decades ago was all of that talent, especially when it came to technology and entrepreneurship, it wanted to move to Silicon Valley or it moved to Silicon Valley.
And I think what we see today and what's played out over the last 25 plus years as Endeavor has grown is that today more than ever before, it is really possible to build a really big company almost anywhere. And we had an exit last year in a company called InstaDeep that was acquired for almost $700 million. It's an AI tech company out of Tunisia, and the founder said something really amazing at our annual meeting. He said, "Look, I get it. If you're ambitious and you're from one of these emerging markets around the world, you should move to Silicon Valley. But if you are mega ambitious, you should move back home and build your company where you grew up."
You know, and I just thought that was such a [00:07:00] great thing. That's totally possible in 2025 that wasn't possible before. But to your question, I think the reason largely Endeavor was successful in that first decade is because in that first few years, those first few cohorts of Endeavor entrepreneurs we had selected to support, you got a few companies like OfficeNet and Patagon.com that had exits in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And then you got Mercado Libre which became the first business from Latin America to list on the NASDAQ a decade later in 2007. It then went on to become the first LATAM tech company to become a decacorn and be a $10 billion company. I haven't checked the stock price but it's nearly a $100 billion business in terms of market cap. And that was one of the first Endeavor businesses we supported, right? So this idea of kind of getting people to believe you could build big companies from anywhere, I think owes a lot to our early success in in markets like Argentina and Brazil.
Gopi Rangan: I agree with you that talent is everywhere but opportunity is not equally distributed. [00:08:00] I want to double click on this topic to understand this a little more because you have developed very strong conviction on this and you bet on that concept well before anybody else did and you've been doing it for 10 plus years.
Typically when you look at let's say you want to be an actor, you go to Hollywood. And there are a few hubs in the world for wine. So if you want to be a wine expert, you want to be a sommelier and practice winemaking, you go to one of those hubs. Perhaps in the U. S. it would be Sonoma County, Napa Valley.
Similarly, for startups, Silicon Valley is the hub. But you took the approach that actually, I'm going to ignore Silicon Valley largely, and I'm going to focus on the rest of the world. And let's look at hubs all over Latin America, where at the time, perhaps when you started, there were zero unicorns.
That's still what you do. You go into these regions where the first unicorn is born, and you are there well before those companies [00:09:00] get to that stage. That's a very contrarian point of view, and you have been successful.
Allen Taylor: For sure. I mean, I love the use of the word contrarian. Reid Hoffman the co-founder of LinkedIn, of course, and partner at Greylock, early angel in Facebook.
Reid is the chairman of this fund that I run, Endeavor Catalyst. He's a personal investor in all the funds. And he sits on the board of Endeavor Global, of, of the nonprofit. And when we were starting the fund, he said something very, memorable to me, which he said, "look, we can build a venture capital fund for Endeavor, right?"
We had some particular constraints. We can talk about how we use like a rules based system and some interesting details there, but Reid said, "All you have to do in venture. I'm not saying that it's easy, but it's not complex. It's fairly basic, right? You have to be contrarian and then you have to be right", like in that order.
And it's, it's actually true, right? If you look at venture capital, or when you believe something other people just don't, oftentimes for a very long time, and you look very wrong, or even very dumb, right, for some number of years [00:10:00] until it turns out to be right. In our case, even when we were starting the fund, and we had some good stories, and we had some good examples. You know, we started Endeavor Catalyst, I mentioned a little over a decade ago, it was around 2012, 2013. Most folks said to us, when we were pitching for LPs and things, "Okay, I kind of believe that there's entrepreneurs in these places, but are you really going to be able to make money there? Like, can you make venture capital style returns in these markets?" And Gopi, we were talking about this before, but the remarkable thing now, 12 years later, is that first little beta fund that people were skeptical of it's an 8. 6x cash on cash, right? Like, fully realized, like, DPI fund. And the exits, we made money in Argentina, in Turkey, and in Brazil. The answer's a resounding yes. Like you can absolutely do this, but you know, you also alluded to the fact that as a result of this, Endeavor is essentially a household name in a place like Brazil or in Turkey, and almost nobody in the United States [00:11:00] has ever heard of it, right?
Because it's a very different place that we focused and built brand and, and built community. We are doing some work here now. You know, in addition to our global offices in New York and San Francisco, we've started to work with entrepreneurs and what we'll call kind of the underserved parts of the United States.
So we have some founders and some companies we're helping in Detroit and in Louisville, Kentucky, and in Northwest Arkansas and markets like this. And in many ways, the problems we're solving are, are fairly similar around access to the right knowledge and know-how and expertise and, and mentorship and networks and smart capital. It's very interesting to see.
Gopi Rangan: Contrarian and be right. That's important to be successful in venture capital. The art of venture capital is about finding underdogs who will become successful in the future. And you took the role of, you know, "I will be the underdog and defy all the leaders in venture capital who focus on certain other things" and they are largely [00:12:00] ignoring the regions that you're focused on and you have become successful. Kudos to you for showing the world that it can work.
Allen Taylor: Thank you. That's very kind of you to say. But I think of your analogies of thinking about things like winemaking, or, you know, we think sometimes about professional sports, right?
Like amazing athletes end up in the NBA or in professional soccer. They come from all over the world, right? But if you're born in West Africa or Western Australia or the South of Argentina, you end up playing in the NBA if basketball is your sport, right? In the United States, you end up playing in, I don't know, for Barca, if it's soccer or in the premier league. And I think for decades, that's how technology also worked, right? You ended up here in California in Silicon Valley building companies. And there's all the stats you can look out of immigrant founders and people from elsewhere. So the talent being global is not a new thing.
What I think is new, particularly for technology today is in the [00:13:00] last 15 or 20 years, we now have dozens of examples of billion dollar, $10 billion, a hundred billion dollar companies being built from elsewhere. Right. And, and I was at an event in Montreal, Canada last year, and Canada's a new market Endeavor. The founder of Shopify stood up and said, we wanted to show the world we could do this from Ottawa, Canada. And we did it right. They built a hundred, $150 billion market cap, whatever it is, business and, and you know, credit to Jeremy Levine and the guys at Bessemer who said, "Okay, we believe you. Like, we'll do your series A and you can stay in Ottawa and we're not going to make you move to Silicon Valley," you know. It's a really interesting idea.
Gopi Rangan: Just like the comparison to sports, to be successful as an entrepreneur in the startup ecosystem, mainly, you need access to computers and software. And that access is available ubiquitously throughout the world these days.
So anyone in the world can build successful software companies. [00:14:00] They don't have to be in hubs like Silicon Valley. Very, very valid point indeed.
Allen Taylor: What's interesting on sports is that still today, I would argue, if you're a basketball player and you want to play with the best in the world, you come to the United States and play with LeBron James.
It's actually fascinating. I mean, I'm a little bit of a sports nerd, so I was looking at it. Look at the last few years, like the top five vote getters and like the MVP voting for the, for basketball. They're all born outside the United States. So the best players in the world are actually coming from other places, but they're still coming here to play.
The analogy, if you were to use it, is maybe someday there will be really elite basketball leagues in Argentina or in, you know, Eastern Europe or in some of these other markets. So who knows, we'll, we'll see where it all evolves to.
Gopi Rangan: An entrepreneur staying in their home country and comfortable region gives them that whole home field advantage.
They have the ecosystem, they have the support system around them, they have families, [00:15:00] they can focus more on building the business. There are advantages to Staying where they are. Perhaps maybe at later stages, they could think about having a stronger presence in innovation hubs like Silicon Valley. I want to ask you about how you make investments, how often you make investments, how many investments, what kind of startups uh, are a good fit for Endeavor Catalyst.
And then we'll talk more about what is the best way to present it to you. But let's start with how many startups do you invest in? At what stage? What's your sweet spot?
Allen Taylor: Yeah. So these days we've, we've scaled a lot, obviously. That first little fund we were talking about before was a 20 million fund a decade ago.
Today we're investing out of Endeavor Catalyst Fund 4. It's 292 million. We make around 30 to 40 investments every year at series A, B, and occasionally C stage, right? About 80 percent of our investing is series A and B. Um, and a little bit of it is, is later. [00:16:00] And we have a very tiny new business doing a bit of seed investing, but in very unique situations, which is founders we've backed before.
We've already gone on a decade long journey with, and they have an exit. We'll actually back them kind of automatically again in their next company as well. But the, the interesting features are we are effectively a captive fund to the Endeavor community, right? So Endeavor Catalyst only invests in Endeavor entrepreneurs and to become an Endeavor entrepreneur, you have to go through a pretty rigorous long selection process.
That these days, actually, we've managed to figure out how to run it in a very dynamic, you know, can even be pretty fast way because basically we're getting better and better at identifying who these very special founders are. But it takes a set of conversations and a panel at a country level and then a panel at an international level.
And in the end, only about one, one and a half percent of founders from the top of that funnel actually become Endeavor [00:17:00] entrepreneurs. Um, but when they get in and we're selecting the numbers, there are, you know, 80 to a hundred new companies a year from the whole world joining the Endeavor network, they are effectively automatically eligible for our support with fundraising, for our advice, for introductions, for our network of, you know, 300 investors around the world.
We work with very closely and for a co investment from our Endeavor catalyst fund, and so that's the way we position it. We're not a lead investor. We don't write term sheets. In fact, we try to sit on the same side of the table as our founders to negotiate the term sheets with, you know, the investors in that way, we're essentially negotiating against ourselves, if you think about it for our fund, but in long term kind of enlightened self-interest, we think getting the best deal for those great founders is going to motivate them to really outperform. But the way we make the commitment is we say, Hey, once you're in Endeavor, the next time you go raise a priced equity round.
And again, that's usually the A or B round will automatically come in for 10 percent of [00:18:00] it. up to a couple million dollar check, provided we find a professional fund to lead, right? And then we'll, work together on trying to find who that best lead investor might be.
Gopi Rangan: Now, you have a very unique situation.
Often investors commit to investing, get on the cap table of a startup, and then start adding value if they can. And in your case, you actually start adding value first through the community. And then you decide to invest later.
Allen Taylor: Yeah, there have been funny names people have given us over time sort of nicknames like oh, I get it you are upside down venture capital or reverse venture capital or years ago, before we started this fund, people in Silicon Valley who understood Endeavor's model, they'd say, "Okay, I get it. You're basically venture capital without the capital. Like, you're the very best help and support you give a company, but without putting the money in." Now we just put a little bit of money in with it.
Gopi Rangan: The advice and value add is the essence of venture capital and capital happens to be a part of that [00:19:00] equation. Without capital it's hard to do just advice but I think you've proven that advice comes first and then you can choose to add capital on top of it or not.
Allen Taylor: It's interesting. Some of our best investments are actually companies that bootstrap for four or five, six, seven years, right? Like we go on these long journeys with them, post product market fit, post revenue, like to scaling the companies, which Endeavor, we are not specialists in the zero to one, right?
We're not competing with Y Combinator or whomever else for that stage of company building. Once you have product market fit, we can really help you scale, right? With lots of programs and mentoring. And expertise on go to market and on expansion and on building your team and all those things. But oftentimes, and this is cyclical and it goes up and down, but, you know, we see lots of very good examples of companies that don't raise outside money for a long time. They don't need to, right. It turns out they just built a profitable business from the beginning, but once [00:20:00] they do eventually decide to take on capital, we're right there to your comment. I mean, sometimes we have a relationship of four or five years already before we invest. But those turn out to be very, very good investments.
Gopi Rangan: I usually ask investors what startup is a good fit for you. What do you look for? And I think in your case, that's very clear, but let's talk about which kind of startups are a good fit for Endeavor. How do you choose?
Allen Taylor: Yeah. Good question. On paper, we can show you this triangle that we draw that says, "Hey, we're looking at the founder and we're looking at the business opportunity.
You know, is it really a scalable business? And we're looking at the timing, right? Is this kind of the right inflection point in the company's own growth? In many ways though, you can think about Endeavor has some filters on it already, right? We first sliced and diced the world and said, these are the markets we're going to work on.
So today, if you're a founder from Uzbekistan, we don't have a program for you, yet. Right? I mean, Endeavors in [00:21:00] 45 countries. We have set a pretty ambitious goal to get to a hundred countries in the next decade as we expand that footprint. And we're, we're pushing forward, right? We've opened up in the last couple of years in markets like Poland, Pakistan. We made a very bold decision last year, actually, to open an office in Ukraine and said, Hey, look, the founders need help.
We, we recognize what's going on there. You know, we read the news. We're aware. But we think there's great Ukrainian entrepreneurs. And if you take kind of a multi decade bet, there's no better time to go in and, try to really be helpful to them. But our first cut is really the lens of geography of saying we're going to work on founders.
from these markets are focused on these particular markets. And, you know, that is not Silicon Valley and it's not London and actually it's not India or China, right? And we can come back to that if you want, but Endeavors made a choice to say, okay, India and China are fairly well served in their own way.
Let's really focus on this concept of elsewhere and helping entrepreneurs from all these other. [00:22:00]
Gopi Rangan: I want to focus on that as well. I'm personally curious why not India and China? They're two vastly different types of markets. I understand that there's quite a bit of activity and enough investors focusing on those areas, but there's a very large segment of ignored markets within those sectors.
Yes. Especially India, where I focus on. Yeah. You are in Indonesia. You're even in Miami, perhaps because of the LATAM connection, but you're not in India. Why?
Allen Taylor: So there is a few parts to that story. One of them, and you can go read a, I think it's a Harvard Business School case study on this, but we did have an India office in 2000 and 2008, 2009. I went to India a couple of times. We worked over there, but at that exact moment, we did not find the exact right product market fit for Endeavor's work in the market. And so it's the only time in our history that we opened a chapter. We ran it for a couple of years and we [00:23:00] closed it. Now, interestingly, had we gone two or three years later, it might've been exactly the right time in the market.
So, you know, it's an interesting, just kind of quirk of history. But since then. We've chosen to really focus on trying to cover as many different regions and countries as we could. As you mentioned, or as we talked about at the beginning, you know, this was Latin America in the beginning. We now work all across the Middle East.
We work in key markets in Sub Saharan Africa. We work in Southeast Asia, emerging or dynamic Europe, right? That's central and Eastern and Southern Europe. And then some of these underserved regions of the U S. My hunch, and this is not the official company line at this point, but as we will probably come back around to India at some point, particularly if this work we've been doing in the United States is effective, because the U. S. project is the first time. We're not addressing a country as a whole, but we're addressing sort of a region at a time. And that model is actually likely to be the better model for [00:24:00] India. Like you say, there's tens, hundreds of millions of people in India who are left out of the success story that is happening in Bangalore and other places.
And I think Endeavor will have to get kind of innovative and creative around how we address that someday.
Gopi Rangan: I think you'll find it fascinating as you explore India for the second time, because it's a very different country with complicated culture. The top five cities in India have more than 10 million people, but the next 25 cities have more than a million people.
And you don't find that kind of tier two high quality infrastructure in most other countries. In any of those 25 cities with more than a million people, is comparable to a Sydney in Australia or Istanbul or Buenos Aires. It is the same kind of vibrant ecosystem that's possible in many areas within India.
You don't necessarily have to be in Bangalore, but perhaps you could start exploring other cities.
Allen Taylor: I think [00:25:00] that's exactly right. The same way Endeavor is not focused on Silicon Valley, but on Detroit and markets in the center of the country. I think there's an analogy there. And, you know, if we're being very honest, there's something here, which is, you know, it's our own human biases of understanding the lines we've been looking at on the map for so long around nation states, you know, people look at India and they look at Africa. And it's like, this is one country and this is 54 countries, right? And then Endeavor says, well, we want to be in a hundred countries.
So we better get to Africa, right? India only counts as one. But if we were, if we were to abstract that away a little bit and just try to think about serving the world's population with what we're doing. I think finding city level ecosystems or regional ecosystems to work in in India would be very rewarding for us.
Gopi Rangan: Have you seen threads of commonality across all these regions how entrepreneurs work? What's your advice to founders or perhaps even one step before, what is challenging for [00:26:00] founders when they're not in one of these big hubs of innovation?
Allen Taylor: Yeah. So the first part of the question is a resounding yes. We see tons of similarities and patterns across markets, and it turns out building a company in Buenos Aires and building a company in Istanbul is way more similar than you would imagine in terms of the challenges and things you encounter. And in fact, internally, there's a bit of a joke about like when you get in the time machine, because it's very true that certain ecosystems you go to, you say, "Oh, this looks just like Brazil seven years ago". And you can kind of see which businesses are popping up and which problems are getting solved.
And so that time machine theory is actually a real observable thing. But in terms of the challenges, it all comes down, these days mostly, to people and some of the kind of softer skill sets that go with building and scaling companies. More and more access to technology, access to [00:27:00] innovation, access to hard skills like coders it's pretty global, right? So people have access to a lot of the same tools, but I think Silicon Valley still has a very large percentage of the people in the world who really understand how to go from a 500 person company to a 5, 000 person company and how to scale the infrastructure of the organization to do that, or how to go from a hundred million dollar revenue team to a billion dollars of revenue. That hasn't happened very many times yet in very many other places. And so finding the people and the skillsets who can do that, I guess one way we think about it is Endeavor in some way is founded on this idea of, you know, I'll call it the remarkable individual theory of societal change, right?
There's these special humans. Those are the founders, right? They're the awesome, very unique one in a million, one in 10 million type individuals. But as they grow and scale a company, they can only take it to a certain level without having a layer beneath them of really talented people, oftentimes with [00:28:00] expertise and experience.
And sometimes, you know, you referenced like the first unicorn in a bunch of these countries. Sometimes you're just building that talent in house, right? It's homegrown. There's all these like versions of blitz scaling universities like being run, you know, in, inside the companies to scale the talent. But as we see ecosystems start to develop, you know, Brazil's a good example, right?
Brazil, you went from zero unicorns a decade ago to 22 today. So if you're starting a new company now, you do have a pool of talent of people who have at least seen this movie one time before, right. And you can kind of try to try to scale that together, but you know, a lot of the challenges are similar and just, you know, it's hard to go fast when there's lots of obstacles in the way, right.
And then, you know, they publish this. People look at this worldwide sort of ease of doing business index and all these things. But availability of smart capital, availability of good talent and ability to kind of move fast without getting things that slow you down every [00:29:00] step of the way. Those are pretty much the same challenges everywhere.
Gopi Rangan: What are regions you're excited about?
Allen Taylor: I'll name a couple, but for different reasons, I'm extremely excited about Latin America. I'm excited about the Middle East, and I'm excited about some of the key markets in Sub Saharan Africa. And they're, and I list them in an order because they're at different stages of development.
For Latin America, where we've already been working for two decades, we already have seven big U. S. listed public companies out of LATAM. We talked about Mercado Libre. A lot of people now have heard of Nubank, right? You can build real companies. In the next three to five years, we're gonna get an an additional five to 10 to even 15 US listed businesses from Latin America.
And when we get to that critical mass of kinda like two dozen, I think investors in the US are gonna pay attention to Latin America in a very different way. And so, as somebody who's been working on Latin America, literally since [00:30:00] 2002, I'm excited about that. I'm excited about the Middle East, particularly markets like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but also Egypt because I just see a tremendous amount of progress in the last five years, right? The speed at which those places are adopting innovation and entrepreneurship and venture capital. It's really remarkable. You know, we had one of our Endeavor portfolio companies do an IPO in Saudi about two weeks ago. Our local team said, "just you wait, it's the first one of five."
I think that there's a bunch more coming. It's going to be really interesting to see. And for venture, which, you know, venture as an entire industry is only about 10 years old in the middle East. It's going to be the first real liquidity and real exits. And, you know, we've had a few high profile exits, right?
Kareem, the ride sharing business, which is an Endeavor company was acquired by Uber for $3 billion. That's kind of a landmark watershed moment for the ecosystem, but we're going into another one of those in the middle East and then, and I'm quite excited [00:31:00] about it.
The last one, you know, that in some ways gets me the most excited is just working in the markets where you can kind of see what's happening and think what it's going to look like in 10 or 15 years, because it looks like what we were doing in Brazil 10 or 15 years ago. Right. And that, and that is Nigeria. I'll be going to Nigeria this month on a trip. Some of the companies we've backed there and you know, it's, it's nascent, it's early. That ecosystem is still chaotic, but the founders are there and the businesses are there.
And you can think like, you know, these businesses like Flutterwave made a bunch of news for being the first unicorn. Money point is a Nigerian company that we backed really early that just became a unicorn last year. You can just see where they're going. Right. And then, and I feel the same way about Egypt.
I feel similarly about Pakistan, just markets that I think are going to be really interesting over time.
Gopi Rangan: What's your vision for the future of Endeavor? Do you think you will be the Sequoia, Lightspeed, Accel for the rest of the world? Or would you [00:32:00] like to continue to stay as Endeavor and be the underdog for new and emerging markets?
Allen Taylor: It's a great way to frame that question and I'll answer it kind of in two parts. I work for a visionary. So the co founder of Endeavor, who's still the CEO, Linda, she is the visionary, right? She has this incredible vision for what she wants Endeavor to become in the world. In fact, she's been sharing it on these webinars with our worldwide teams, her vision for 2035, right?
What she wants Endeavor to look like 10 years into the future. My vision for Endeavor Catalyst is that we can achieve sort of three incredible things with this venture capital fund. We can prove to people that top decile, kind of top tier venture returns are actually possible elsewhere, right. I think we've already done it with our fund.
One, you know, if you look at the on, on paper numbers of funds, two and three, we're going to do it, right? Our returns will be up there in that same kind of ballpark as some of the names you mentioned, right? As the Sequoias and the Accels [00:33:00] and the Lightspeeds, and we're going to have done it by investing in all these places you might not expect.
So I think that's a really exceptional part of the goal. The second piece though is because it's about building the ecosystem, hopefully we will have helped hundreds and hundreds, you know, at some point, maybe thousands of entrepreneurs and companies to build their companies and to scale their companies and to scale their entrepreneurial ecosystems in their countries.
And I think that's still very much a core part of what we are trying to do, right? It's where Catalyst kind of fits into Endeavor's mission, right? It's not just financial returns. It really is that. And then the last part which has been one of the driving motivations of the project since the beginning is we will actually fund all of Endeavor someday because we donate the carried interest from this fund back to the nonprofit. So we will become, I think, the world's first sort of self sustaining mission driven organization. You know, it takes 50 or 60 million a year today to run [00:34:00] Endeavor. If you project that out over a decade, someday it might take a hundred million dollars a year if we're in a hundred countries and have big teams and things. But if we can pay for all of that with the success of our own venture fund and the success of our own companies, it's like a very, very cool kind of full cycle story.
Gopi Rangan: What you've built is truly amazing. It's a revolutionary way of fueling entrepreneurship all over the world.
I have one question before we come to the end of this conversation. As you go into these emerging markets, and these markets begin to emerge and the first unicorn comes out, the rest of the leading VCs are beginning to look at that space seriously. What's your advice to them? How should they prepare before they start making new investments in some of these Endeavor companies?
Allen Taylor: I would love to invite them to just come and see, right? I mean, it sounds very simple, but people invest in things they know and people they know in places they [00:35:00] understand. Right. And for the most part, the reason there's not more capital flowing from some of these global funds into these markets is I think they just don't really know what a big opportunity it is and what's happening there. When I first opened this office for Endeavor in California, a little over 10 years ago, you know, I, I had a presentation. I went up and down Sand Hill road with that. The first slide was just a picture of an airplane right. It said, "okay, this is an airplane. You need one of these if you're going to come to Brazil with us and see what's happening." This is not 'I need to be able to ride my bike to the board meeting kind of investing' but it's worth it, I promise. Come on." And, you know, I think to be a little more serious about it today, I think there's lots of ways to get smart on these regions, there's really good publications, right?
The regions themselves, some of the local venture funds or the venture associations are putting out really good data on why investing in these regions is great. I think if you look at Latin America or at the Middle East or at Southeast Asia, they're [00:36:00] welcoming global funds with open arms, right? They're sort of like saying, "Hey, look, we, we want your expertise. You Sequoia, you Lightspeed, you Andreessen, like come and do this with us." And I do think, you know, we've talked quite a bit about Latin America in this conversation, but it is striking to me that if you actually look at those top kind of 10 or 20 premier global venture brands, everybody built a dedicated team and practice for China, and most of them did it for India.
And I think it's striking that even though you've had Mercado Libre and NuBank and all these things already happen, nobody's really done it for Latin America yet. So I guess my advice would be hire a couple of people who speak Spanish and Portuguese and get on an airplane and come see what it's all about. Endeavor will help you, so let us know.
Gopi Rangan: I'm very excited about Latin America as well. We're coming to the end of our conversation and I want to ask you about your community involvement. Is there a non profit organization you are passionate about? Which one?
Allen Taylor: Yeah, so look, Endeavor itself is a non profit [00:37:00] organization. It's probably obvious to folks listening I'm pretty passionate about this one. You can learn more at Endeavor[dot]org. But I will mention one other because it's a very related mission. I sit on the board of the Kauffman Fellows which At its base, it's a nonprofit called the Center for Venture Education.
Essentially what Endeavor does for founders and entrepreneurs, Kauffman Fellows is doing for GPs and for kind of up and coming emerging managers and venture capitalists. Different from Endeavor, Kauffman does this everywhere. Right. So, so also in Silicon Valley, also in the core developed markets, but about 50 percent of every Kauffman class is international and is about building the venture ecosystems kind of outside the United States. And I feel very strongly about the mission. I was a Kauffman fellow myself a decade ago.
I learned a heck of a lot thanks to Jason Green at Emergence and other people who encouraged me and inspired me to do it. And so I joined the board of Kauffman four or five years ago, you know, really to try to do what I think is a [00:38:00] complimentary activity and mission to Endeavor's, which is "let's help the best entrepreneurs build big companies everywhere.
And let's help people build world class venture funds in all these markets as well."
Gopi Rangan: Allen, thank you very much for spending time with me. Thank you for sharing fascinating examples of your investments and your approach to how emerging markets are evolving, how excited you are about those sectors. I look forward to sharing your nuggets of wisdom with the world.
Allen Taylor: Well, thanks for having me, Gopi. Hopefully the enthusiasm shines through, and anybody who's listening who wants to learn more about it, just hit us up. We're happy to help. Thank you, Allen.
Gopi Rangan: Thank you for listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I hope you enjoyed listening to real-life stories about early believers supporting ambitious entrepreneurs.
Please subscribe to the podcast and post a review. Your comments will help other entrepreneurs find this podcast. I look forward to catching you at the next [00:39:00] episode.