The consensus in venture right now runs roughly as follows: the best founders have already found their way to Silicon Valley, and the biggest outcomes are built in one place. Don Stalter has built a fund on the conviction that both are wrong. He arrived at the Jefferies Private Growth Conference fresh off a flight from Tokyo, where he had just backed the grandson of Sony’s founder, exporting Japanese culture from a $700-a-month office near Ginza.
History is on his side. Morris Chang left China for the US and founded TSMC in Taiwan at 55; it is worth some $2.2 trillion today. Jensen Huang arrived from Taiwan (Nvidia, $4.7 trillion). Sergey Brin from the Soviet Union (Google, $4.4 trillion). Elon Musk from South Africa ($3.4 trillion). Eduardo Saverin from Brazil (Meta, $1.5 trillion). Ilya Sutskever, born in the USSR, co-founded OpenAI, reportedly near $1 trillion. Immigrants found companies at roughly 80 percent higher rates. The trillion-dollar industries keep being built by outsiders, and in the AI era they are being built faster than ever. (Figures are public market caps and reported valuations as of July 2026.)
Stalter is the Founder and General Partner of Sunshine Lake, a venture fund backing international founders at their breakout moments. His cheques have been some of the earliest money behind the founders of Checkr ($5 billion), Fundamental.tech ($255 million raised, out of stealth in February), Duranta, the new company from the founder who built the $4 billion Aurora Solar, and Entire, from Thomas Dohmke, who ran GitHub, which Microsoft bought for $7.5 billion. He is a Databricks investor as well ($188 billion this month, Coatue leading), and Sunshine Lake’s advisors include a professor from the Berkeley lab that gave birth to it alongside co-founder Ali Ghodsi, born in Iran and raised in Stockholm. The pattern is the thesis itself: Checkr was built by French-Syrian founders; Duranta’s founder is Kenyan-born; Fundamental by two French founders; Dohmke grew up in East Germany. He sat down with Jefferies’ Evan Osheroff, Managing Director of Software Investment Banking, to explain how he finds them.
A Fund Built Around a Core Conviction
The philosophy is autobiographical. Stalter grew up across France, Belgium, Germany, the UK, and Tokyo; his father took a business public and global when he was a child. He helped build Groupon and Airbnb internationally, then spent a decade backing the archetype he knew best: the immigrant founder with global ambition. His first investing seat was at a private equity growth shop in London in 2008, where he issued a term sheet for Klarna’s Series A and met Unity Software’s founder, then an unknown Icelandic coder raising his first round through an advisor; Unity is a roughly $14 billion public company today. Just Eat’s early round was pulled together by an advisor too; it became a multi-billion-dollar public company, later sold to Prosus for €4.1 billion. The lesson stuck: amazing advisors can be amazing deal leads. “Those opportunities come from everywhere,” he says. Osheroff has already sent several his way, most recently a remarkable founder out of Southern California, with more to come.
It helps that the institution across the table sees the world the same way: Jefferies operates as one collaborative team across dozens of offices worldwide, Athens to Tel Aviv to London to Silicon Valley. Sunshine Lake itself is a four-person pre-seed and seed fund whose LPs include some of the world’s top venture funds, who take its founders to dinner for first sight of the Series A. The ideal investment is an international founder who already built and sold one business, perhaps for $30 million, and realized they left too early. “They come back with a chip on their shoulder,” Stalter said, “and they want to build a multi-billion dollar business.”
Two Bets That Tell the Story
The purest recent example is Fundamental.tech, the large tabular model company that came out of stealth in February with $255 million in total funding, a $225 million Series A led by Annie Lamont at Oak HC/FT, and whose NEXUS model has since been picked up by AWS, SAP, and MUFG. Stalter wrote an angel cheque when it was two founders and a vision. The deal reached him founder to founder: Jeremy Fraenkel had just landed in San Francisco, exactly the profile local investors miss. The two bonded in French on long walks around Jackson Square, and with his fellow French co-founder Gabriel Suissa, Fraenkel built across borders from day one: research in Barcelona, commercial teams in San Francisco, deployment in Japan.
The Entire story started five years ago, on a scavenger hunt in Hawaii at an event packed with top unicorn founders, where Stalter met Thomas Dohmke. The East German-born engineer went on to run GitHub for nearly four years; today he is building Entire, a distributed Git network for the moment when billions of AI coding agents hammer the world’s central code repositories. “If you’re not distributed, you’re not worth using,” as Dohmke puts it. Entire launched with a $60 million seed, the largest ever for a developer-tools startup; Stalter was there early.
On AI, TAMs, and Prediction Markets
Companies once pitched $3 to $7 billion TAMs, Osheroff noted; today hundreds of billions is the norm, and AI makes the next jump, to genuine trillions, credible for the first time. “When AI does the work,” he said, “you are no longer just buying software.” On jobs, Stalter cut through the standard debate: “I think it is an equalizer. It affords people the opportunity to find what they love.”
On prediction markets, he drew a parallel to crypto: written off in 2013, now major banks tokenize deposits to compete with stablecoins. “There is demand,” he said. “These markets are here to stay.”
What Sunshine Lake Is Watching
Today, Stalter points to two bets that rhyme: the former Chief Strategy Officer of Boston Dynamics on dynamic creatures, robots aimed at everything from the loneliness epidemic to theme parks; and Duranta, from Samuel Adeyemo, who built Aurora Solar and wrecked the curve in Stalter’s calculus class at the University of Chicago, a bet that a Figma can be built from the sky. “We want founders who have a psychology to change the world,” Stalter said. The best of them come from exactly the places the Valley is least likely to go looking.
