The Next Wave of AI Will Come From Elsewhere

The culmination of Endeavor Week every December is the Gala, where founders, VCs, experts, and leaders from around the world come together to connect bold ideas and redefine what’s possible in entrepreneurship. Linda Rottenberg, Endeavor’s co-founder and CEO, took the opportunity to urge us to look beyond the standard map when it comes to true AI innovation. Read her full speech below.

It was the call everyone was waiting for. Throughout 2025, we’ve been told that the fate of our entire global economy rests on just two places, Silicon Valley and China. Fifteen days ago, a key Silicon Valley player, Nvidia, seemed to reinforce this message.

On the company’s heavily anticipated quarterly earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang confidently boasted about off-the-charts revenue and full expansion mode. Yet within 54 hours, Nvidia’s valuation swung by $1T. The world couldn’t decide whether AI is unstoppable or unsustainable in the midst of this rollercoaster. 

At an internal all-hands, Jensen acknowledged the pressure facing the company. If we delivered a bad quarter, the whole world would have fallen apart, he went on. You should have seen some of the memes on the Internet. We’re basically holding the planet together. If a trillion-dollar whiplash is our plan for survival, maybe we need a new plan.

Maybe we need a map with more than two points. I say it’s time we redraw the map. My colleague, Allen Taylor, likes to say that Silicon Valley is not a place, it’s a mindset. And that Silicon Valley mindset loves to remind us that it represents the center of the universe.

In 2013, Endeavor brought 80 of our entrepreneurs from Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa to Silicon Valley. The highlight was meant to be a fireside chat with a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. But when asked what founders in the room could do to secure an investment with his firm, he paused, confused, then said, “Nothing. I don’t want to meet any of them now. If their companies ever get big enough, they’ll move here to Silicon Valley. And then maybe we’ll invest.” 

Marcos Galperin, from Mercado Libre, was sitting next to me. Without a word, Marcos stood up and walked out. 

That silent act of protest captured exactly what I felt. The venture capitalist was wrong about the world of entrepreneurship. Talent lives everywhere. New ideas can grow anywhere. The future begins Elsewhere. What is Elsewhere?

• Elsewhere is Aerobotics, founded by the son of African citrus growers, turning satellites and drones into tools that help farmers predict their harvests.
• Elsewhere is Altibbi, a Jordanian telehealth platform offering a 24/7 Arabic hotline and a chatbot named Sina to improve medical outcomes throughout the Middle East.
• Elsewhere is Coins.ph, issuing stablecoins to enable the large Filipino diaspora to remit money faster, cheaper, and more safely back home. 
• Elsewhere is Cashea rebuilding credit and trust for eight million Venezuelans after hyperinflation. 

Elsewhere is also a mindset, a belief in opportunities where others see limitations. Elsewhere is how Endeavor describes the missing points on the map. Markets that are too often overlooked by capital, yet where ambitious founders solve real-world problems at scale. 

In September, at the Athens Innovation Summit hosted by Endeavor Greece on the slopes of the Acropolis, I interviewed the Greek Prime Minister along with Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind and a 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry. I asked Demis why he chose to build DeepMind in London rather than relocate to Silicon Valley as his investors initially insisted. He said, “AI will affect every corner of the world, every part of society. The world deserves a say in how these technologies develop, not just a small part of California or China.”

In October, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to three researchers for the theory of sustained growth through technological innovation and creative destruction. At Endeavor, we celebrated the news. The Nobel committee’s choice validated our work of building entrepreneurial ecosystems in over 50 countries. 

We also noted the warning the committee chair issued along with the prize: only societies open to new ideas and the entrepreneurs who drive them will continue to thrive. The rest will return to stagnation. We heard this warning as a clear call to empower founders everywhere.

And what I’ve learned in my travels throughout the year is that our conversations around AI focus almost entirely on the initial infrastructure layer. The companies building foundational AI models — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek — are based in Silicon Valley or China. And this is probably why we believe that the entire fate of our planet rests on just a handful of companies in just two places. But the application layers where AI meets lived experience are also being developed Elsewhere.

AI from Elsewhere is a self-taught engineer in Tunisia launching an early warning system for COVID at InstaDeep, which sells to BioNTech for nearly $700M — Africa’s largest deep tech exit. AI Elsewhere is three Ukrainians struggling to learn English abroad, creating Preply to link up language learners in 180 countries with 100,000 human tutors. AI Elsewhere is two engineers from Warsaw, frustrated by movies with terrible Polish dubbing, who quit Palantir to found ElevenLabs, now the world’s leading voice AI company. 

These Endeavor founders did not set out to build AI. They set out to use AI to solve problems that matter. That’s how real breakthroughs happen. AI became their tools, not for creative destruction, but for creative renewal. AI for logistics, AI for agriculture. AI for healthcare, AI for financial inclusion. Why is no one telling these stories? Where are these stories?

Starting tonight, we are telling them. This evening, Endeavor unveils the first print edition of Elsewhere, our new magazine. It’s beautiful. It shares inspiring examples of entrepreneurial heroes in unexpected places. You can think of it as The New Yorker, if New Yorkers believed that the world extended north, south, east, or west of where we sit tonight in New York City. 

No one represents the potential and power of Elsewhere better than our 3,130 Endeavor Entrepreneurs from more than 50 countries. Collectively, these founders generate $100B in revenue, create millions of jobs and sustain entire communities. 

When we launched Endeavor in 1997, 90% of global venture capital went to Silicon Valley. Today, 70% goes to Silicon Valley and China, while 30% goes Elsewhere. That’s not parity. But it is progress. There’s still work to do. Fourteen years ago, we created Endeavor Catalyst to help fill this funding gap. Soon, we will have raised over $800M to co-invest in our entrepreneurs.

Now, as we chart Endeavor’s Vision 2035 to double our footprint to 100 markets, I ask you to join us as ambassadors of Elsewhere. Together with top founders and Endeavor’s global network, we are remaking the map. Because the future isn’t being built in two places. 

The future is being built everywhere.