Founders outside the coasts don't lack ambition. They lack a way in. There's a common (unstated) assumption, that founders in "flyover" states are less ambitious, less hungry, or less capable. This couldn't be more wrong. The deficit isn't in the founders, it's in the infrastructure connecting them to capital and networks.

Strong networks are 1000x more impressive when they were built, not inherited.

80% of venture capital sits in a few zip codes, but 80% of the economy sits everywhere else. Today we’re launching the connective layer: Roots. We're LinkedIn + Luma + Apollo + a CRM, with an LLM on top. - Query your network like a database. - Map intro paths through shared roots. - Host events that get the right people in the same room. Join free: roots.build

If access to networks were merit-based and available to anyone who worked for it, you'd expect great founders to emerge randomly across geography. Instead, outcomes are still heavily predicted by where someone lives (SF, NY, Boston produce disproportionate unicorns), which is evidence that networks aren't actually a fair, compounding meritocracy, they're gatekept by location. We're working to fix this.

Software ate the world. It never ate the country club. Venture likes to think of itself as the disruptor class while still operating through the most pre-internet, gatekept social mechanism there is. Networks should be OPEN SOURCED.

Proximity and relationships compress timelines that would otherwise take a lifetime to build alone.