These executives grew up in entrepreneurial families. Now they’re helping a new generation of global business owners

09/18/2024, 8:12 AM
fastcompany.com

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.

This is a tale of two executives with remarkably parallel stories. John Caplan is the CEO of Payoneer, a platform businesses use to send and receive cross-border payments. Matt Oppenheimer is the cofounder and CEO of Remitly, which helps individuals send money to people in other countries.

Both leaders see their companies playing an important role in supporting entrepreneurs. A big chunk of Payoneer’s customers are small companies that are able to do business internationally and sell in local currencies without setting up foreign bank accounts or needing to manage currency conversion. Some of Remitly’s customers earn their money from microbusinesses or send money to support a small business to which they have ties in another country.

A worldwide SMB legacy

The two leaders’ commitment to helping small businesses stems from their own entrepreneurial roots. Oppenheimer’s grandfather started Oppenheimer Companies, a diversified company based in Boise, Idaho with operations spanning consumer packaged goods manufacturing to real estate. Caplan’s family founded Oscar Heyman & Brothers, a fine jewelry business in New York, in 1912. “If you scratch me, I bleed SMB,” says Caplan, using a shorthand term for “small and midsize businesses.”

Caplan, whose relatives immigrated to the U.S. from Latvia, is especially passionate about serving business owners outside the U.S. Many of Payoneer’s customers can grow only if they sell to customers outside their home markets, requiring them to make and accept cross-border payments. “Most people have no idea that there’s 80 million business owners around the globe and trillions of dollars of market opportunity in building a business account for those people, but we do. And what we do makes a pretty big difference,” he says.

Oppenheimer started Remitly in 2011 after a stint working on mobile and internet banking initiatives for Barclays Bank in Kenya. While living and working in Nairobi, Oppenheimer says he saw how hard it was for Kenyan friends to receive funds from family working abroad—money that represented a significant portion of their income. Oppenheimer, meanwhile, was paid by Barclays in British pounds, covered his day-to-day expenses in Kenyan shillings, and had to convert money back to U.S. dollars, a process he found complicated, inconvenient, and expensive. Remitly’s mobile app simplifies and automates many of the manual aspects of traditional international money transfers, such as forms, codes, and even agents.

In testimony before Congress Oppenheimer has called Remitly’s customers “heroes,” saying, “They sacrifice to provide a better life for their families.” He told me customers also use Remitly to “send money for their small businesses or foundations, or to support causes in the communities they love and want to support.”

The American dream across generations

Both companies recently reported strong growth. Payoneer says third-quarter volume rose 25% to $20.4 billion, while Remitly’s third-quarter volume climbed 42% to $14.5 billion.

And while it may be a coincidence that two CEOs in the cross-border-payments space come from entrepreneurial families, the fact that they themselves are entrepreneurial should come as no surprise. Research shows that parental entrepreneurship increases the probability that children will become founders by about 60%. Studies conclude that children of entrepreneurs succeed not because they inherited their families’ businesses or had easier access to capital but because they had good role models for entrepreneurship.

“My passion for entrepreneurship comes from the fact that when my grandparents arrived in New York in 1904 and started a company in 1912, they built a family-owned business that my cousins and I are still on the board of,” Caplan says. “I grew up knowing that if you work hard and you’re curious, you have a chance to achieve your dreams.”

Caplan says entrepreneurs in emerging markets don’t necessarily have the same prospects due to issues ranging from societal pressures to geopolitical conflict. “Brilliance is evenly distributed around the globe, but opportunity is not,” he says. “Payments may not be the biggest problem these people have—they have bigger problems. But if we can make 10 minutes of your day better, that adds up.”

Are entrepreneurs the result of nature or nurture?

If you’re a founder or an executive who grew up in an entrepreneurial family, what skills and attributes did you learn from your relatives, and which qualities are all your own? Send your experiences to me at [email protected]. I’d love to publish the best examples in a future newsletter.

This is also a last call for nominations for Modern CEO of the Year. Any chief executive officer—your company can be based anywhere in the world and be any size—is eligible. You may submit your nominations via this form. The deadline for submissions is November 22.