Peter Thiel – known for his investments in Paypal, Facebook, AirBnB and Palantir – spoke in Saudi Arabia about his strong views on the topic of ‘the future of tech’ this week.

He believes tech will increasingly be created outside the US and California has lost their monopoly.

This reinforces the views we have long held here at Cooper & Co that while California led the way for decades and wrote the tech startup playbook initially, in the future global tech startup formation will increasingly align with population distribution that has education, capital and a thriving local tech startup ecosystem.

Asia is the world’s largest population region and has many of the fastest growing economies in the world.