Out-Innovate: How Global Entrepreneurs Are Rewriting the Rules, Alexandre Lazarow

Interesting interview with Alexandre Lazarow, the author of Out-Innovate, which we recently reviewed.

What is your own background briefly?

I have been focused on the intersection of investing, innovation, and economic development my whole career. I presently work with Cathay Innovation, a global firm that invests across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, and was previously with the Omidyar Network. Outside of my day job, I teach impact investment and entrepreneurship at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

I am a Kauffman Fellow, completed my MBA from the Harvard Business School and have a B.Comm from the University of Manitoba. I grew up in Winnipeg on the Canadian prairie and live today in the San Francisco Bay Area with my family.

Does it seem like a logical background to what you do now?

While I’ve never been an entrepreneur or a CEO myself, I’ve had the opportunity to work with or serve them in many capacities, be it as an investor, advisor or coach today, or as a strategy consultant, regulator or investment banker previously. My work has always been global – I’ve had the good fortune of living or working in over twenty countries and traveling to over 80. This afforded me a unique vantage point about the unique challenges as well as the similarities across innovation ecosystems around the world.

How was the last 12 months? What were your big wins?

The last year has been one of the most important in my life. Of course, the more recent event was the launch of my book: Out-Innovate: How Global Entrepreneurs – from Delhi to Detroit – Are Rewriting the Rules of Silicon Valley with HBR Press. However, the life changer was that my wife and I welcomed a baby daughter, Artemis Eve.

Whoever said it was a good idea to launch two babies during a global pandemic, however, was absolutely wrong 🙂

1 min pitch for what you are doing now?

Everything we think we know about startup best practice is rooted in a time and a place: Silicon Valley, and today, and for a very particular type of asset-light software based startup. Yet around the world, many of the leading entrepreneurs are not only challenging conventional wisdom, in many ways they are reinventing the playbook.

I believe the best entrepreneurs operating in Bangalore, Sao Paolo, Budapest and Detroit, have more in common with the best entrepreneurs in Jo’burg and Nairobi than they do with those in SF. Yet no one is telling their stories or sharing their best practice. So I did.

Why did you get involved with writing this book & entrepreneurship from non US locations?

When teaching my entrepreneurship classes at MIIS, I kept assigning my students books on innovation best practice. However, everything that was available was Silicon Valley centric. Yet, most of my students were planning to leave Silicon Valley to either return to their home regions often from the midwest like where I grew up, or to an emerging market to build a social enterprise or startup. I always had to contextualize what I was sharing with them. That was the genesis of the idea.

Why do you think it is such a powerful idea?

Innovation is arguably the most powerful force today. In the US, 40% of publicly traded companies (representing 60% of market cap and 80% of R&D budgets) were once venture backed startups. They hold the promise not only of job creation but solving some of our thorniest problems. Innovation has gone global. There are over 1.3m startups around the world in over 480 startup ecosystems. To succeed, global entrepreneurs must understand what it takes to scale in their regions.

We are in a moment of crisis globally. The lessons to solve our most pressing challenges will not come from Silicon Valley but from learning from those on the front lines operating in ecosystems that face constraints – and how these entrepreneurs turned these constraints into advantages.

How transferable are these insights from one area to another?

The world cannot simply be divided into categories of “Silicon Valley” and “Not Silicon Valley.” The reality is that the Frontier is much more nuanced. For simplicity, I focus on two particular dimensions. The first is economic—factors unrelated to the startup ecosystem that reflect the general level and stability of the environment. The second dimension is the strength of the local startup ecosystem. Mapping ecosystems across these dimensions demonstrates how many differences there are.

The book covers geographies as expansive as the Frontier itself. Each of these locations has both its own unique political, economic, and social contexts and its own distinct ecosystem intensity. Still, entrepreneurs operating at the Frontier have much more in common with each other than they do with their counterparts in Silicon Valley. To juxtapose extreme differences between Silicon Valley and the Frontier, I provide examples from the toughest ecosystems and to explore particular nuances of the Frontier, we visit other ecosystems.

As an investor yourself, how do you decide who to invest in and who not to?

I am deeply focused on support entrepreneurs that create industries, and tackle the world’s hardest problems. I resonate particularly with multi-mission athletes that weave social impact into the very fabric of the business and inextricably tie it to the operational success.

Would you say there are now more opportunities for interesting innovation and investment in Asia and Africa rather than the US?

I believe some of the most compelling entrepreneurs are Creators. While Silicon Valley is focused on disrupting established industries, at the Frontier, innovators must create new industries because often there are no established industries to disrupt. They must build entirely new sectors that offer customers a range of products and services that Silicon Valley takes for granted, such as education, health care, financial services, energy, and even infrastructure. We find many more creators in emerging markets which is one of the reasons I’m excited about the rise of startup ecosystems around the world.

How can people find out more about you personally & your work?

You can sign-up for my newsletter at alexlazarow.com, or follow me on Twitter @Alex_Lazarow or on Linkedin. My book is Out-Innovate: How Global Entrepreneurs – from Delhi to Detroit – Are Rewriting the Rules of Silicon Valley and available anywhere books are sold.

Who and where do you get inspiration from?

I open the book with one of my favorite quotes by THEODORE ROOSEVELT:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds;

who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

It is the men and women in the arena who inspire me.

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