Originally published 02/06/2025
This is the start of a long correspondence.
If you are receiving this email, you are either a future investor in The Realistic Optimist or are interested in its progress.
These monthly letters are an outlet to share my thoughts, update you and crowdsource answers to my dilemmas. Do answer these emails if you wish to engage.
I started fundraising for The Realistic Optimist a little over a month ago. I’ve gathered around ~80K in verbal commitments, out of the 300K targeted. I aim to close the round by the end of August. I recently finalized the company’s incorporation (in France) and opened its bank account. I should receive the first investments this week.
The fundraising process has been instructive. A recurring theme has been confusion about the scope of RO’s ambition, which I intend to clarify here.
Some misconstrue the fact that I’m not raising VC money as a lack of ambition. I’m not raising VC money because VC’s hyper-growth imperatives don’t mix well with the slow, meticulous grind that scaling a paid publication is. That doesn’t mean my ambition is capped.
Quite the contrary. I aim for the RO to become one of this century’s most important publications. The Financial Times has around 1.25 million paid subscribers. I believe the RO can surpass that, given enough time and resources. By “enough time”, I mean multiple decades. That’s how long it takes to build generationally-relevant publications. VCs have shorter time horizons. We aren’t aligned and that’s okay.
I come bearing evidence justifying this ambition.
The RO’s fuel
The RO’s potential is fueled by two simultaneous trends.
Trend 1: more and more people work in startups, globally
The tech startup phenomenon has globalized. While mostly an American peculiarity two decades ago, tech startups now exist in Libya, Mexico, Indonesia, Italy… If we take VC funding as a proxy, the trend is striking.
As a result, a growing number of people globally (founders, investors, policymakers, corporates, consultants, researchers) work in startups. The global rise in VC funding proves that trend, but that trend isn’t reliant on VC funding.
VC funding will fluctuate, but global demand for digital services will not. Founders will continue building and find ways to meet their capital needs. Questioning the relevance of tech startups every time VC funding oscillates is short-sighted. The genie is out of the bottle.
Countries with a market economy and growing internet penetration will continue seeing flourishing, local startup ecosystems in decades to come. People, regardless of where they live, want to improve their lives with technology.
It’s reasonable to assume that:
Both an Egyptian and a Pakistani person prefer doing their banking online rather than wait hours in line.
Both a Mexican and a Saudi SME face working capital challenges and are eager to receive loans digitally.
Both a Jordanian and a Bangladeshi student want an app that helps them study for their exams.
Both a German and a Nigerian homeowner are keen to switch to cheaper solar energy.
The global market for what startups build is growing, irrespective of VC funding’s vicissitudes. Therefore, the number of people working in startups will continue growing globally.
Trend 2: these people are realizing they need to think global
People working in startups are gradually recognizing the value of thinking global. The problem facing one’s startup, fund, or ecosystem has probably already been faced and solved somewhere else. That “somewhere else” can be geographically distant, but insights aren’t any less salient. Some examples:
A Pakistani founder struggling with currency depreciation might learn from how a Nigerian founder handled the same problem.
A Syrian policymaker setting up their country’s startup ecosystem might learn from how Tunisia set up its own governmental startup initiative.
An Uzbek VC might want to understand how bus-hailing startups fared in Egypt, because they’re assessing a similar deal locally.
A Brazilian founder building a fertility startup might want to learn from the successes and mistakes US fertility startups went through.
A fintech founder in the Caribbean might learn from an Iraqi fintech founder, because both markets display socio-economic similarities.
It boils down to “relevant benchmarks”. People working in startups need to learn about what’s going on abroad. They might get inspiration from ecosystems that are ahead, practical advice from ecosystems that are at a similar stage, and an edge in ecosystems that are a little behind.
The Realistic Optimist is a paid publication covering the global startup scene. By virtue of those two trends, the RO will experience a boom in its potential number of readers as well as a gradual awakening to its editorial thesis’ pertinence.
A global-first publication
My vision is for the RO to be the no-brainer subscription that people working in startups (founders, investors, policymakers, etc) from Buenos Aires, to London, to Jakarta have.
This sounds exciting, but still theoretical. Except that it isn’t. The RO has laid the first bricks of that plan.
I launched paid subscriptions around two years ago. Since then, the RO has assembled a petri dish of its potential audience. Paid subscribers (past & present) have included:
Startup founders in Libya, Senegal, Iraq, Venezuela, USA
VCs in Pakistan, Peru, South Africa, Egypt, UK, Lebanon, USA, Nigeria
Executives from Visa, the Mastercard Foundation, Endeavor
People working at startup incubators in Palestine, Ivory Coast, Egypt
The current paid subscriber pool is small. Around 100 B2C paid subscribers* and 9 B2B paid subscribers (companies who bought annual subscriptions for their teams). The RO is also an official Harvard Business School resource which, although unpaid for now, merits a mention.
This petri-dish shows the geographical and topical diversity of what the RO’s subscriber pool could be, at scale.
The RO is a global-first paid publication. That is revolutionary. I’ve proven that paid subscribers from around the world pay for the same articles and derive similar value from it.
Legacy, financial publication such as The Financial Times, The Economist, Bloomberg are Western-focused, content-wise. It’s reasonable to assume that means they aggregate a mostly Western audience.
The RO offers a novel model: a founder in Tripoli, a corporate executive in Dubaï and a VC in London pay for a deep-dive on a Venezuelan startup.
Combined with the fact that the RO covers what is (arguably) this century’s most important economic sector, I believe the RO’s total addressable market for paid subscribers is larger than the FT & co’s.
It’s a matter of execution now. But the raw potential is glaring, fueled by the macro-trends the RO is riding and proven by the paid audience “petri-dish” the RO has assembled.
That’s for the RO’s economic prospects. I’ve shown that the RO can be one of this century’s largest, most global paid publications and that I have initial evidence supporting that claim.
But why do I want the RO to be massive? Being big for the sake of being big is vapid. I have an ulterior motive.
The bigger case for the RO
Tech startups fuel socio-economic progress.
They shake up sleepy industries (or create new ones), bettering the lives of consumers, the industry, or both. They create economic value, growing economies, creating jobs, and generating fiscal revenue. They invigorate policymaking, by presenting governments with new ways of doing things and asking them to keep up.
Tech startups do that by leveraging a potent mix of technology (which grants them speed, sophistication, and an endless ceiling for both) as well as a unique ethos, which imbues them with enough delusion to reshape seemingly-fixed realities.
As a result, the global startup scene heralds a tidal wave of global socio-economic progress.
That lofty statement, which remains true, introduces a flurry of complexities, dilemmas and open-ended questions.
Because startups are influenced by their markets’ intricate social, political, and economic undercurrents.
Because startups can harm people they were supposed to help.
Because startups aren’t always the answer.
Because building startups without a clear societal, philosophical North Star is a pointless endeavor.
Because building startups for the benefit of few and the detriment of many is a dangerous endeavor.
The RO’s mission is to mold tech as a global force for good, by making sense of the global startup scene.
The RO does that through vigorous, human-led reporting, scrutiny, and analysis. It embraces complexity and ambiguity, while doing its utmost to be clear. It practices intellectual honesty, explaining what it can and flagging what it can’t. It counters dogma and caricature with reflection, research, and nuance. The RO doesn’t pontificate: it retrieves, restitutes and sensibly interprets what comes from the ground.
Finally, the RO isn’t “pro-tech”. Tech is neutral but holds a Promethean quality that obliges us to direct it towards achieving a free, prosperous, and just society. Badly directed tech can yield just the opposite.
In essence, the RO seeks to help people in this sector make good decisions, ensuring the global startup scene’s potential is both attained and desirable.
I won’t rest until that’s done.
Yours,
Tim
Footnotes
*B2C paid subscribers aren’t charged anymore as I’ve been testing a B2B-only approach. I’ll soon be relaunching a proper B2C offering. I believe the RO needs both, and that a founder in Lagos and Harvard Business School are both potential subscribers to the same RO.