Two weeks ago, I walked into a venue in Baku, Azerbaijan, and the room had almost 200 founders, investors, corporate innovation directors, and government officials — talking to each other like they actually wanted to be there.
A founder and a government official exchanging numbers in the corner. Someone who showed up for the first time and stayed three hours. A conversation I overheard between a startup team and an innovation team that would never have happened at a conference.
ONE IDEA I’M SITTING WITH
I'd gone to see my friend Alper Celen, the Founding Partner of Enhance Ventures and the driving force behind Enhance Azerbaijan — a venture studio focused on building companies across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Caucasus. Alper had invited me to speak at Innovation Wednesday, a monthly gathering he's been building in Baku. The premise is simple: Get founders, investors, government officials, innovation teams, and operators in a room together, every month, without waiting for the perfect moment or a big enough audience.
They've done it more than eight times now. People who came once kept coming back. Founders find investors. Investors find companies. People find jobs. The room keeps growing.
I'd also gone because of what the data was starting to show. Baku was just named Startup City of the Year in the 2025 StartupBlink Global Startup Ecosystem Index — the fastest-growing ecosystem in the South Caucasus, with nearly 45 percent growth. Azerbaijan climbed six spots to rank 74th globally, marking the fastest year-on-year improvement among Central Asian nations.
But the rankings are the lagging indicator.
Richard Florida is an urban theorist and author of The Rise of the Creative Class. He wrote one of my favorite books on how cities and ecosystems actually work and argues that thriving innovation ecosystems need three things: Talent, Technology, and Tolerance. Creative people don't follow jobs. They follow places.
The room at Innovation Wednesday had all three on a Wednesday night in Baku.
In a speech to the group that night, I said something I hadn't planned to say.
Alper didn't build an event. He created the conditions for the Talent, Technology, and Tolerance in Baku to physically manifest. The room doesn't fill because of a press release or a policy initiative. It fills because someone decided to keep hosting something with the same intention, every month, without waiting.
Most of the organizations in this network are already in cities with real talent, real technology, real openness. The three T's are there, or close. The question is never whether you have them. It's whether anyone is holding the room.
And Alper and his team hold the room, every month, without waiting for the perfect moment.
With love and trust,
Pat
TWO THINGS I’M SEEING
Close to 60 percent of all global venture capital last year went to companies raising $100M or more. Capital is concentrating around perceived winners — mostly AI, mostly late-stage, mostly already-known. The first-time founder, the emerging market founder, the founder without a Stanford connection — the programs serving them aren't just nice to have. For a lot of those founders, they're the only on-ramp.
Seed funding is getting bigger but harder to access — more dollars per deal, fewer deals overall. The bar is higher, but the pipeline is starting to move again. The job right now: Help the founders in your portfolio build toward a bar that keeps moving, and make sure they know someone in their corner understands the difference.
THREE THINGS I’M READING
I just finished Richard Rohr's Falling Upward — a book about navigating the two halves of life — for the third time. It keeps finding me at the right moment. If you're somewhere in the middle of a turn, first half winding down and second half not yet clear, it's worth your time.
On the flight home from Baku, I listened to Richard Florida in conversation with Harvard Business School on The Rise of the Creative Class. The part that stuck with me: Creative people don't follow jobs — they follow places. Two hundred people in a room on a Wednesday night in Baku is that argument looking back at you.
And finally, what actually happens when you quit coffee for two weeks? A University College Cork study published in Nature Communications found that cutting caffeine reduced impulsivity and strain, and switching to decaf improved memory and sleep. I've been running on four cups a day since Baku. I felt personally targeted.
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