Built here.
Born elsewhere.
Nearly half of every billion-dollar American company was built by someone who wasn’t American. The passport is incidental. The hunger is not.
Source: Stanford / NFAP study, 1,078 founders behind 500 US unicorns.
44%
Foreign-born founders
1,078
Founders studied
500
US unicorns
3
Focus countries
Three countries. Three patterns.
Brazil shows up by count. Poland and Egypt show up in the room.
Brazil is the only one of the three with direct US-unicorn representation in the NFAP top-15. Poland and Egypt under-index by birth count — and over-index at the founding tables of companies you already use.
Brazil
The balance — cost + time zone + culture fit
9
founders
Egypt
The cost — ~30% of US senior, strong English
2
founders
Poland
The quality — OpenAI, ICEYE, Klarna alumni pool
5
founders
Brazil count from NFAP / Stanford 2022. Poland and Egypt are conservative direct-count of their founders at US unicorns (OpenAI, Affirm, Klarna, ICEYE; Cloudera, Affectiva). For context: India leads the broader leaderboard at 90.
8 founders · Brazil ships the way US teams ship — in your time zone, at half the cost.
8 founders · Egyptian seniors cost ~30% of US. And ship across MENA, EU, and your morning.
8 founders · When you need senior, deep, get-it-right — Poland is where you look.
Thesis of the house
The common factor isn’t geography. It’s that someone, at 19 or 27 or 34, left. The leaving is the edge.
Stop recruiting by zip code.
Timofi finds the people who would have been on this page, ten years earlier. Pre-visa. Pre-MIT. Pre-the-Series-A that changed their name. If the next Zaremba or Lara or Awadallah is sending résumés from Warsaw, São Paulo, or Cairo right now — we’d like to talk.