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Universities Aren’t Commercializing Innovation, They’re Taxing It

Friday, 19 December 2025 by
Everywhere I go lately experiences at some point, the same conversation. Different city, different state, different accents and startup hype, but the same whisper once the doors close and University administration is out of the room.  I was just in Phoenix, sitting with startup operators and ecosystem builders, and within minutes we were right back
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Why Riyadh and Saudi Arabia Are Rapidly Becoming a Global Startup Powerhouse

Wednesday, 17 December 2025 by
Riyadh didn’t become a startup ecosystem overnight. It’s rooted in a long history of adaptation and reinvention; a story about shifting from desert trade routes and tribal politics to oil wealth and now trying to crack the code on innovation-led diversification. To understand why Saudi Arabia, and Riyadh startups in particular, is increasingly attractive to
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Chicago Startups Industrialized Innovation

Thursday, 11 December 2025 by
This is a city that burned to the ground and responded by inventing the skyscraper. It turned its geography into the nation’s freight yard, its politics into a machine, and its universities into research engines. It engineered futures markets, modern cellular telephony, and now wants to industrialize quantum computing. If you’re trying to understand how
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New Mexico Didn’t ‘Find’ Startups, It Built the Future: From Nukes and UFOs to Quantum Capital

Monday, 08 December 2025 by
If you still think of New Mexico as a quiet desert between Texas and Arizona, you’re about 80 years behind. This is the state that built the atomic age, test-flew the rockets that defined the Cold War, turned a supposed UFO crash into a tourism engine, and is increasingly the heart of quantum computing. New
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Why Startup Ecosystems Fail at Scale: The Economic Development Playbook for Capacity Building

Friday, 05 December 2025 by
Cities everywhere are doing a lot for entrepreneurs, often sincerely and impressively, and what I’m finding in city after city is that the greatest opportunity is not in another startup program or even fostering a new investor but building capacity. They are supporting some founders, but not more founders. They are helping some investors, but
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There Is No “Era of the Bootstrapped Startup,” There’s Math, Memory Loss, and Better Advice

Tuesday, 02 December 2025 by
Every few years, someone declares a new epoch in entrepreneurship. We’ve had the “Era of Lean,” the “Rise of the Micro-VC,” the “Democratization of Innovation,” and (God help us) the phase where every city believed a coworking space with a yellow logo and a couple late career bankers counted as a “startup ecosystem.” With AI
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Thailand: The Startup Ecosystem Rising from Centuries of Ingenuity

Friday, 21 November 2025 by
A nation whose cultural DNA has been entrepreneurial for over seven hundred years, Thailand startups didn’t just suddenly wake up and decide to build a startup ecosystem because it saw Singapore building skyscrapers to the heavens; traders, artisans, inventors, and diplomats, long before “ecosystem” was a word policymakers could spell, have held Thailand as a
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