a global network without borders

Maya Middlemiss • Sep 21, 2023 • 5 min read

E-⁠resident Lars Willemse is co-founder of Vivel, a community bonded together by a borderless mentality and remote collaboration

Vivel co-founders Mine Dedekoca and Lars Willemse are building a community for remote collaboration — E-residents and Vivel co-founders Mine Dedekoca and Lars Willemse

Over many years of explaining and advocating for Estonian e-⁠Residency, I have come to quickly place people on a spectrum of understanding, based on their initial reaction and questions.

There are those who could sit through an hour-long presentation with 50 slides, and still shake their heads - I don’t get it, what’s the point, it’s easier to work things out and do business locally even if it takes longer or costs more, etc. They’re happy with the traditional ways of doing things, and that’s fine.

Then at the other end of the scale, there are people like Lars Willemse, co-founder of Vivel.

People who instantly understand, and whose eyes you see light up with the sheer potential that e-Residency has to offer the first time they hear about it. They immediately grasp the possibilities that being an e-resident of Estonia unlocks. But it's a smaller group who understand they can capitalise on direct and rapid collaboration with a global community of entrepreneurs without borders.

It acts as a powerful filter for finding your tribe, and figuring out who you would like to do business with. People already committed to the concept have already passed vetting by the Estonian Police and Border Guard Board (PBGB.) Not to mention, e-⁠Residency accelerates the timeline to company formation, wherever potential partners are located.

As Lars put it: “Imagine you’re at an event, and you come up with an idea, you have an authentic connection, and you want to build a business together.

“If you’re already both Estonian e-residents, you can just get started, even if you’re in different countries. And the fact they already understood this and invested in the process to get e-Residency, you already know they share your picture, of what a business with no borders should be.”

Borders don’t make sense for someone like Lars, who is originally from the Netherlands, but moved to the US on a sports scholarship, then to Bulgaria, and joins my call from Medellín, Colombia. This international background informed the vision that Lars and his co-founder Mine Dedekoca are building upon with the Vivel network, a new community for online connection, remote collaboration, and face-to-face events.

Vivel values quality over quantity, dialogue over monologue, and collaboration over competition. So, fittingly, it’s a partnership that Lars and Mine created through e-⁠Residency. “Mine was already an e-⁠resident at the time, and I had to get to Ankara to collect mine.” Lars was living in Bulgaria, but had no pick-up point there.

“Afterwards, everything became very easy, though. It didn’t matter that we were from different countries and not even in the EU, we could sign everything online, open a bank account for the company, and do all the shareholder arrangements without too much hassle and lawyer work.”

The “Burning Man” for remote collaboration

“The foundation of Vivel is the connection between people,” Lars explained, “not what they can add to your life from a business perspective, and straight into the one-minute pitch. We want to give people more time, and the feeling they’re in a safe space, to explore the borderless mentality that we like to have.”

Attendees of Vivel's event on remote collaboration and borderless business in Turkey — Happy attendees at the Vivel event in Turkey

Their first face-to-face event in Turkey earlier this year was a great success. “You set the bar quite high, when you do a sunrise with hot air balloons!” Lars explained. “And we took all the feedback and advice from those who attended in Cappadocia, and incorporated that into our upcoming plans for Sevilla, so we can facilitate more and even deeper connections.”

Mine continued, “That’s why we’re bringing people together in groups of under 100 people, who share similar values, and morals, and ways of relating to each other. Not coming along for a business card exchange.”

“We’re offering Sevilla with the possibility to come with someone else,” Lars explained, “So we limited it to 50 tickets sold. So this way we can move between groups of 6 at meals, to 15 at workshops, to 50 or 100 at music events and conferences. This way we have a great dynamic, where people can feel safe in smaller groups, and at the same time have a shared memory with the bigger group.

“That’s what people can expect from our next event, in November.”

Fluid connections within the larger network

So as projects and collaborations and enterprises come and go as needed, the community underpinning it all remains the constant - providing connection and relatedness, in a world of constant change.

There are plenty of parallels with e-⁠Residency itself, as the founders see it. Transcending geographical boundaries to focus on shared values of borderless business and lifestyle is one. Remote collaboration and the desire to build, connect, and create is another.

“We’re going to be doing this for the next 10 to 15 years,” Lars reflected. “We want to grow the community, but very slowly and organically, really focusing on the people already inside, and making sure new people add value to the existing network.

“We could grow online as big as we want, but in person we want to stay very much focused on smaller numbers.”

The organic and spontaneous feeling carries over into the plan for growth, as Mine concluded, “we are continually listening, and learning from our community. Each time we do a new event, it’s going to be different and better, because we are evolving and growing with the synergies it’s creating.”

This sounds like a positive plan for the growth of any network.