Chaos has always been the baseline. Some founders just figured that out first.
The global entrepreneurship narrative has long centered on a certain kind of stability, access to capital, predictable markets, and functioning institutions as the prerequisite for building something great. Endeavor Co-Founder and CEO Linda Rottenberg has spent nearly 30 years watching founders disprove that assumption.
In a new column for Inc. Magazine, she lays out why the entrepreneurs winning right now share a single belief: chaos equals opportunity.
The data comes from the Endeavor network itself. Investments in Türkiye during a currency collapse returned 11X. In Argentina, during the economic crisis, nearly 5X. Sidar Sahin raised only $18 million building Peak Games through a period of extreme instability in Türkiye. He sold the company for $1.8 billion. Mario Chady and Eduardo Ourivio rebuilt Spoleto from bankruptcy in Brazil to $340 million in annual revenues, designing their company specifically for resilience. Squire, a barbershop tech platform, used a global pandemic to build community loyalty deep enough to drive 166% growth in signups.
What these founders share isn’t geography or sector. It’s the understanding that stability is not coming, and that waiting for it is the actual risk.
Rottenberg’s article arrives at a moment when the conditions Elsewhere founders have always faced, inflation, tariffs, conflict, and currency volatility, are becoming familiar everywhere. The Elsewhere advantage, the capacity to build without assuming the ground will hold, has never been more transferable.
