Endeavor

Relive the launch of our fifth Global Hub! 🇸🇬 Singapore has become our new home in Asia Pacific, our first hub in the region. For over 25 years, Endeavor has backed high-growth founders building Elsewhere, places outside Silicon Valley and China, connecting them to the capital, mentorship, and networks they need to scale. Singapore becomes the newest bridge in that network: a gateway linking Southeast Asia and Asia Pacific to Endeavor's global community, and bringing global founders, investors and talent into the region. We celebrated the launch at Jewel Changi Airport with entrepreneurs and ecosystem partners, including remarks from Minister of State Alvin Tan and Endeavor Entrepreneurs like ShopBack's Henry Chan and Thunes' Peter De Caluwe, all rallying around one idea: When a founder's success multiplies, so does an entire ecosystem. Thanks to our partners at Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB) and Enterprise Singapore for their support and collaboration. #EndeavorEntrepreneurs #Founder #GlobalHub #AsiaPacific #Singapore

Quick exercise. 10 seconds. ⏱️ Rate 1 to 10 how much real support you're getting from each of these right now: co-founders, team, investors, board/advisors, mentors, peer network, family, friends, spouse/partner, coach. Now be honest: how many of those are just people who tell you you're doing great? Endeavor & Markus Bihler built a framework for this called the Wheel of Support. Most founders I've shown it to have a wheel that's full on two or three spokes and empty everywhere else, usually empty exactly where the hard, honest conversations should happen. I fill that specific gap for a handful of founders right now. Not an official board seat. Not just a cheerleader. The person who challenges you AND is in your corner, at the same time, which turns out to be the rarest combination there is. If your wheel's lopsided and you want a second opinion on where, send me a DM. Happy to do the exercise and go for a quick sparring session with you.

First Global Entrepreneur in Residence at Endeavor 🚀 After a decade in the Endeavor network as an Endeavor Entrepreneur, mentor and International Selection Panelist, Markus Bihler is adding a new role. In this new seat, he takes on a question many founders are left to answer alone: how do you build a board that adds real value? He will be working with Endeavor's Entrepreneur Experience team globally. Markus has been working with entrepreneurs, mentors, board chairs, and directors to develop practical guidance on choosing the right members, bringing in independent perspectives, evolving a board as the company grows, and making meetings genuinely useful. He is also building a program to prepare experienced Endeavor Entrepreneurs to serve as independent directors on the boards of fellow founders. Swipe through to meet Markus and learn more about the work ahead. Here’s to a new chapter with Endeavor, Markus 👏

Most founders spend their careers trying to make the work easier. Jason Wenk spent his taking on bigger problems. He grew up in rural Michigan, the son of a single mom raising three kids on wages that never left anything to save. That was the whole motivation: help people get more out of the money they had. It took four companies to reach the root of why that was so hard, and each one hit the same ceiling. However good the advice, he was always renting his technology from the legacy custodians that controlled the industry. We had the privilege of accompanying him along the way, from the mentors he met through our network to the Outliers community he came up in. Watching founders like Bending Spoons' Luca Ferrari run something five times his size and stay hungry challenged Jason to imagine how much further he could go. So in 2018 he stopped renting and built the layer underneath: Altruist, a modern custodian for independent advisors. Today, Vanguard, which manages around $12 trillion, announced plans to acquire it in a deal valued at around $4 billion. Altruist will keep running as a standalone business under its own leadership, at more than double what the company was valued at just last year. In 2024, Jason wrote for us about the lesson behind his journey. Nothing gets easier, you just take on bigger problems. Congratulations, Jason! #Endeavor #Entrepreneur #Founder

A company in Kyiv has been shipping apps that 170 million people have downloaded across more than 170 countries 👾 Most of the revenue comes from the US, but it never opened a US headquarters. It never had to. That company is Headway Inc, building learning apps out of Ukraine. More than 80% of this year's 238 Endeavor Outliers operate beyond their home markets. The fastest-scaling ones stay rooted where they started and build the routes outward themselves 🚀 Swipe to discover who they are! #Elsewhere #EndeavorOutliers #Ukraine #Founders #Endeavor

Last week, over 150 Endeavor Entrepreneurs and their C-level leaders spent five days at Stanford University Graduate School of Business Executive Education for the Endeavor Innovation and Growth Program. This year we doubled the cohort, bringing together founders and senior leaders from 50+ markets, including a dedicated Ukrainian cohort, for five intensive days, taught by the same faculty who lead Stanford's MBA and executive programs. Our entrepreneurs sat in sessions with Abrahams, Halevy, Klein, Kraus, and DeMarzo, then took those frameworks into small learning groups where they worked on the problems sitting on their desks right now. That is the part you can't get from a case study. One line stuck with a lot of our entrepreneurs, from Matt Abrahams: structure is a map. With a map, it's hard to get lost, even when you're speaking off the cuff. Deep gratitude to George Foster, the program's director, to Sarah Soule for welcoming our group, and to every entrepreneur who showed up ready to be a student again. #Endeavor #StanfordGSB #ExecutiveEducation #Founders #Elsewhere

I have been in Dubai for 20 years. When the region destabilized during the US-Israeli war on Iran, expat founders didn't flee. For the people who had been here for years, leaving didn't even cross their minds. They'd built their companies here, their families here, their lives here. Expats are 80% of the population, and they're here to stay. That loyalty is what makes Dubai one of the best places in the world to build from. I wrote about what's really happening on the ground in Dubai for Endeavor's Postcards from Elsewhere,  including an interactive map of where the ecosystem actually comes to life. If something is missing, let me know in the comments! #ElsewhereMarkets #BuildingElsewhere #Dubai #Entrepreneurship

Linda Rottenberg spent years studying founders who build without a safety net at Endeavor. Just one of the learnings she shared in our LatAm Goes Global Report: "Constraint and chaos are the friends of an entrepreneur. Abundance and stability are the friends of the status quo." Volatility used to be an "elsewhere" problem (like LatAm). Well, it's everyone's problem now. And the founders who trained on chaos are the ones with the edge. Different markets, same muscle. That's the Latin America Goes Global Era. Read our full report: https://lnkd.in/gTDc8nkR