I attended my first effective altruism ‘conference’ in 2013 (back then it was 50 people in a house in Oakland.) I was already a start-up founder with a strong entrepreneurial drive, but the effective altruism community helped me orient towards building something for the poorest people in the world. That's when I decided to start Sendwave, and later Wave.
Labor migration — traveling from a poor country to a rich country, making more money, and sending it home — is one of the most impactful ways an individual can change their life and their family's lives. When mobile money became popular in Kenya through M-Pesa, my cofounder and I saw an opportunity. M-Pesa allowed people within Kenya to send money to each other via cell phones, but Kenyan immigrants abroad still had to use old-school services like Western Union, which meant showing up in person with bundles of cash and paying 8-12% in fees.
Our company
Sendwave made international money transfer simple: open the app, enter a phone number, link your debit card, and send money for just 3% in fees. By 2015, we were handling most remittances from the US to Kenya. It was a very fast success.
"The potential impact of building something that millions of people will touch, where their lives will be better — that's so rewarding."
But we realized our biggest bottleneck was going to be mobile money itself. The telephone companies had invented these systems, but they didn't actually care about financial inclusion — they just cared about getting more people to pay for cell phone services. We saw an opportunity to build a better infrastructure, so we started
Wave.
"I've made a much greater impact through direct work at Wave than through donations. Saving people money, giving them a better product, enabling them to save through their phones when they didn't have a way to before — that's much larger in magnitude than the money I would've been able to donate."
My advice to someone who wants to make an impact: consider for-profit entrepreneurship. While profitmaking and direct positive impact are often in conflict, your job as a for-profit entrepreneur is to find the places where they synergize. For example, venture capital is plentiful for fast-scaling companies, and scaling a beneficial product fast is also the fastest path to impact. When those incentives line up, you can achieve tons of simultaneous impact and profit.
