Before arriving in Mexico over the summer, my first year as a student at Cornell’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management pushed me to think about emerging markets through the language of capital, incentives and growth. Even so, I assumed venture capital worked the same everywhere. Banks operate differently across countries, but the fundamentals are largely universal. I expected venture capital to follow a similar pattern. Instead, I learned that every entrepreneurial ecosystem reflects the realities of the economy it serves, and understanding those differences is far more useful than comparing markets to Silicon Valley. READ MORE