Founders Across Borders: Why Global from Day One (and what that means)
About the Event
Most founders treat "going global" as a milestone they'll deal with later. By the time they get there, the product, the team, and the company are already built around one market — and changing that is expensive, sometimes impossible without starting over.
This session makes the case for the opposite approach: building global from day one, before you think you need to.
What you'll learn:
Why "initial market" is a more useful mental model than "home market", and what changes when you adopt it.
How product, team, and culture decisions made in the first few months determine how hard international expansion will be later.
The legal and entity structure decisions that are nearly impossible to undo once made.
What fundraising looks like when you're building for multiple markets from the start.
A worked example of a company that built global from very early — and what it cost them.
Who should attend:
Early-stage founders who suspect international expansion is in their future, even if it's not imminent.
Founders who have already made early decisions (team, tools, entity structure) and want to know what to revisit before it's too late.
Anyone building a company they don't want confined to one market.
You're still working full-time, curious, with an idea you haven't committed to yet.
This is the first of a three-part series. Session 2 covers timing — when a company is actually ready to go global. Session 3 covers market selection, with guest speakers from Japan, the US, and Europe.
Speakers
Karen Onuma — Co-Founder & COO, GlobalDeal
Japanese-German by background, Karen works across founders, VCs, accelerators, and public organizations in Japan, the US, and Europe — bringing direct experience of what it takes to architect a company for more than one market from the outset.
Matt Ainsworth — Founder, Global Day Zero
Matt Ainsworth helps early-stage founders build global from day zero, designing their idea to travel from the start rather than retrofitting it later. Over 20+ years across product, sales, marketing and tech, much of it spanning Australia and Japan, he's helped founders get their idea clear, prove it's real, and design it to travel. He's the founder of Global Day Zero.
About GlobalDeal
GlobalDeal is an AI platform that executes cross-border market entry end to end — from strategy through partner identification, outreach, regulatory navigation, and ongoing operations. Built for deep-tech startups and SMBs in sectors like life sciences, renewable energy, advanced materials, and agritech, where ecosystem complexity makes expansion harder to get right. GlobalDeal works across the US, APAC, and Europe.
About Global Day Zero
Global Day Zero provides a sprint program for early-stage founders built around the same idea this session covers: that "global" is a design decision made early, not a retrofit done later. The 8-week Global Day Zero Sprint takes a home-shaped idea and makes it clear, validated, and built to travel.
Matt has spent 20+ years working with founders and VCs across Japan and Australia, mentored 150+ founders, and built a community of 13,000+ across the AU-JP corridor.