Why Do Silicon Valley Investors Miss non-Bay Area Companies?

Aydin Senkut thinks Silicon Valley investors miss companies outside the Bay Area because backing the Silicon Valley version is much easier. You do not have to work as hard. There is less risk, and nobody is going to blame you if it goes wrong after you back amazing Silicon Valley founders. Who is going to say you were stupid to do that?

He found Adyen because even Google and Meta were having major issues in countries like Brazil and could not process payments. The financial system was too complicated. Adyen was the one company that had figured out how to do it, and most people did not know about it because it powered Braintree in the US. When Adyen was first getting announced in the US, he called the Wall Street Journal. Wall Street said they did not have the company in their database and did not even know it existed.

The Adyen team had a hundred years of payments experience. Taking the Google approach, a lot of payments were all old rails, and nobody wanted to change the old rails. They built the new rails and a new breed of FinTech platform they had always wanted to build and could not build in the old FinTech companies. Investing outside the Bay Area takes more risk, more work, and more faith. The journey is the reward.