Borderless - My next 10 years

Many assume most founders are “accidental.” I’d argue that’s rarely the case. Everything in a founder’s past often aligns with what they’re building. At least, that’s been my experience.

In case you missed it, I’m building Borderless, the infrastructure for global communities. In the simplest terms, we make is very easy for friends and family to invest together, wherever they are in the world.

Unknowingly, this journey began 11 years ago. After two years in my first role in Dublin, I struggled to find people like myself in senior positions, so I looked outward. My first attempt at building a community failed, but I soon connected with others who shared the same goal, and in 2016, APNI was born. Today, APNI is one of Ireland’s largest communities, with over 3,500 members. The fantastic leadership team has helped members find career connections, enabled new job opportunities, and supported professionals in reaching senior roles across Ireland and beyond.

I learned a lot from APNI and brought these lessons to HoaQ in 2020, particularly in people management, community engagement, and building momentum. HoaQ’s growth wasn’t meticulously planned, but we intentionally scaled one investment at a time. Our first ten investments were challenging, but we iterated, improved, and built a model that worked and anchored in trust. We documented and shared what we learned with our network, building a reliable, trusted group of co-investors.

Today, HoaQ has invested over $3.5 million in over 100 startups across ten countries—much of it accomplished manually. We pieced together systems using no-code tools like Stripe, Wise, Zapier, Gmail, and Slack and reached out to folks at various companies to make things work. However, I quickly discovered that these tools aren’t built to support the diaspora’s investment needs. Countless fintechs, yet few, if any, facilitate productive capital movement that fits our needs.

Many have asked how to replicate HoaQ’s model. While we shared our playbook, we soon realised that technology is the best way to scale. Last year, we began building a platform to encapsulate all we’d learned at HoaQ, launching an alpha version with the HoaQ community and gathering feedback from current and prospective community managers.

This gave birth to Borderless.

We discovered that communities struggle to launch because of overwhelming requirements: setting up a company, onboarding members, completing KYC and accreditation, collecting funds in various currencies, handling compliance, and more. Most communities start small and face high costs or give up because the administrative load is too great. This friction limits the flow of productive capital - an issue we can no longer ignore.

This process has never been documented anywhere, especially for the diaspora who want to co-invest anything between $1,000 and $10,000. There are no playbooks for community managers residing in one country, and their members are dispersed worldwide. For context, HoaQ started in Ireland with investors across 37 countries. Sadly, there are no clear structures around how folks from 37 countries can co-invest in an asset in Kenya, for example. We believe that with our access to the internet and how technology has evolved over the past 30 years, geography shouldn’t stand in the way of productive capital mobilisation. So many fintechs and cross-border payment companies are out there, but none seem to solve for productive capital movement. 

A large, addressable market is essential for a venture-scale business. We estimate this market at $25-$30 billion based on various analyses. Traditional market sizing approaches (TAM, SAM, SOM) didn’t yield much data on productive capital flows between Africa and the West. However, around 25% of the $100 billion annual remittance to Africa goes towards investment, with much of it likely in real estate. Another way to consider the market is the African diaspora, which includes 30 million people. If the diaspora were a country, it would have the highest GDP per capita in Africa - $25,000 per person, surpassing even the Seychelles. Considering each individual invests $1,000 or 4% of their annual income, they can collectively invest $30 billion annually.

With the right technology, we can enable more people to invest together, regardless of where they are. Technology is an enabler: Investment has always been about people, and we are leveraging communities as our first go-to-market strategy. This is because the diaspora often organises in communities and has been doing many things together, including investing. 

A meaningful solution has to go beyond remittances. It must handle onboarding, multi-geo KYC, multi-currency funds movement, reporting, disposal, and more. Above all, it must be trusted and borderless - a true enabler, not a barrier, to its users.