Startup Investing Isn’t Just Local Anymore

**Originally published 11/18/2013

Many people still prefer to primarily invest in companies located within their local ecosystem. Their reasons assume that the geographic proximity of the founding team to their office enables better communication in helping build, scale and fund the company through its rounds.

At Promus Ventures we are geographically agnostic as to where we invest, choosing to back best-of-breed companies regardless of where they are domiciled. We strongly believe in the power of distributed teams and the flattening of the global corporation. We think this reality applies to venture investing in addition to building companies.

In today’s age, we can efficiently “sit” with our founding teams over video conferencing at a moment’s notice, and see how excited and confident they are about their business. We can view virtual hardware models and prototypes over our screens and touch them using 3D printers. We can recruit talent from all over the world, and interview candidates in the early stages just as well over fiber than physically in our office. Our ability to provide a global network of corporate and talent relationships to our community of startups (hopefully) helps them in all areas of bus dev, recruiting, strategy and fundraising.

Not being married to any location gives an investor (and founding team) remarkable flexibility and freedom. The global landscape continues to change dramatically, and the next great company can be born anywhere. While we do believe there is value in physically being with a team, from our perch in Chicago we can make day-trips to any city in the US if needed (and we do). We are seeing great startups being hatched in many different markets, and we currently have investments outside of Chicago in SF, LA, SD, Boulder, NYC, Boston, Waterloo, London and Helsinki.

Returns follow success, and it is our job to help build great companies. This means working hard to see as many great companies as possible, regardless of location. Limiting our scope to mostly one region would severely impact the myriad of founders that we are fortunate to talk with each day.

So may the best startups win, wherever you are!