startups Archives - Startup Economist

American Pie and the Moment Every Founder Loses the Music

Tuesday, 03 February 2026 by Paul O'Brien

Don McLean’s American Pie is usually shared as an elegy for rock ’n’ roll and American innocence. It’s a song with tremendous meaning to me, sung as a group while my high school class graduated, I went to study the lyrics and history in college, teaching myself how to build and website (then with notepad,

Published in Fun, Startups

9 Comments

New York Isn’t a Startup Ecosystem, It’s a Set of Sector Machines

Friday, 30 January 2026 by Paul O'Brien

With such a substantial and dense population, it’s difficult to say that New York City has a startup ecosystem as though a monolithic slice of the economy and yet, it’s precisely because of New York’s urban density that it’s a leading example of an advanced startup community. New York is a rotating set of sector-specific

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Published in Regional Development

10 Comments

The Startup Pitch Mistakes That Tell Us You’ll Fail Before You Start

Thursday, 22 January 2026 by Paul O'Brien

A startup pitch is not a sales pitch; no one in the room is buying, we are not your customer and we’re not even deciding whether your idea “will work.” What we’re doing is much simpler and harsher: we’re deciding whether what you’re doing creates enough perceived value to justify our time, reputation, and risk

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Published in Startups

22 Comments

Only 10% of State and National Governments Distinguish Startups from New Businesses

Tuesday, 20 January 2026 by Paul O'Brien

A practical startup economic policy framework for governments that want venture-scale companies Governments around the world love the word entrepreneurship. They put it in press releases, name departments after it, fund “innovation hubs,” and cut ribbons in front of coworking spaces that end up being networking clubs for service providers seeking customers. What almost none

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Published in Startup Ecosystems

15 Comments

Why Riyadh and Saudi Arabia Are Rapidly Becoming a Global Startup Powerhouse

Wednesday, 17 December 2025 by Paul O'Brien

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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Published in Regional Development

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Better Startup Idea Validation

Wednesday, 10 December 2025 by Paul O'Brien

Despite countless articles and every startup program explaining how to validate a startup idea, one of the (surprisingly) still frequently most asked questions is how to validate a startup. Reading the tea leaves, that tells me not that people actually don’t know (conventional wisdom is “talk to customers”) but rather, that that advice is less

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Published in Startups

3 Comments

New Mexico Didn’t ‘Find’ Startups, It Built the Future: From Nukes and UFOs to Quantum Capital

Monday, 08 December 2025 by Paul O'Brien

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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Published in Regional Development

21 Comments