Winning a Place: How Migrant Journeys Fuel an Entrepreneurial Mindset

Are migrant entrepreneurs doing things differently? Well, plenty of evidence suggests that companies led by founders who have crossed one or more borders may well outperform their native counterparts. To take just one example, a 2021 survey by the Open Political Economy Network found that eight out of 23 UK unicorns were started by at least one entrepreneur from elsewhere in the world.

But is there anything about the experience of migrants that contributes to building great businesses? At the end of March, I spoke to Ramzi Rafih, founder of No Label Ventures, a venture capital fund created to invest in migrant-owned businesses. According to him, the experience of making long and often difficult journeys tends to foster an entrepreneurial spirit and a will to succeed.

It was a compelling story, but I was eager to learn more about it from an entrepreneur's perspective. Is there an X factor and if so why?

So earlier this week, I had the opportunity to speak with Mesbah Sabur, co-founder of Circularise, a Dutch business-to-business startup enabling supply chain traceability. Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Sabur moved to Europe in the late 1990s. Although he has since taken the perhaps conventional route of going to college and then starting a business, he says his journey as an earlier migrant played an important role in shaping his approach to life and business.

At least in the beginning, finding a new home in the Netherlands was not easy. "It was a long journey," he recalls. "In times of war you can't just cross borders and there were dramatic scenes when we crossed countries."

Once in the Netherlands, the family faced a five-year wait in a migrant center while the authorities decided whether to grant asylum. "That kind of thing lives with you," he says.

From that point on, Sabur's life took on a more conventional course. He completed his school years and continued his studies at university. But it looked like he was traveling without a map.

"One of the things you find is that there's no one to tell you what you should do," he says. So while other students' parents were aware of post-graduate career paths and might, for example, advise their children to study hard and then join a big consulting firm, Sabur's parents were outside of it. this loop.

But in a liberating way. No one gave me advice. I had a blank sheet. I started a business in my second week of college. It seemed like an unusual choice. While participating in extracurricular activities, Sabur and his partner Jordi de Vos developed software.

Sabur was also aware that he didn't quite fit in. “As a migrant, you will never be a local,” he says. “The best thing to do is earn your place because you won't be accepted by default. And you'd better make a positive contribution to society."

You could say that Circularise - also co-founded with Jordi de Vos - represents this positive contribution not only because it is a company - and therefore creates jobs - but also because it is part of of a movement towards greater environmental sustainability. The software allows companies to track materials and components that move through the supply chain and end up in products. This creates a transparency that makes it easier to recycle and reuse materials.

Sabur and de Vos started by identifying a problem that didn't have a solution - at least not one they had - and started researching it. Commercialization of the solution itself began in 2016, with the help of funding from the European Union's Horizon program. In the years that followed, the company continued to benefit from EU support while creating its own sources of income. In 2022, it's...