Mauro Repacci is the CEO and co-founder of Boundless Life, an integrated platform for globally mobile families that combines turn-key homes, an education centre and a built-in community in walkable towns. Founded in 2021 with Rekha Magon, Boundless opened its first location in Sintra, Portugal in January 2022 and now runs eight destinations across three continents, from Syros and Tuscany to Bali and Kamakura, with a team of around 300 and more than 5,000 people served.
Born and raised in São Paulo, Mauro moved to Canada in 2007, started in finance at Air Canada, moved into M&A at a PE-backed company, and then built and exited two startups before Boundless. He holds Brazilian, Italian and Canadian nationality and lives between countries with his wife and three daughters.
What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?
My days change country every few months, so the routine is the constant. A fixed morning: workout first, then the same question before I touch email: “What are the three things that will actually move me forward today?” Everything else is noise until those are done.
I work in sprints, not marathons. Ninety-minute deep-work blocks, headphones on, Slack closed. Our team is spread across more than ten countries, so I use the time zone instead of fighting it: creative work happens while most of the team is asleep, calls happen in the overlap. School pick-up and family dinner are blocked before anything else goes in the calendar. When I’m with my daughters the phone is in another room, not face down. They can tell the difference.
How do you bring ideas to life?
I start with a cohort, not a business plan. Boundless Life existed as an idea for years before it existed as a company. What made it real was a group of founding families who said “we’ll come” before we had a single house. That forced us to launch Sintra in January 2022 with no office, running the company from a café, doing IKEA runs and buying up the town’s bedsheets days before the first families arrived.
The rule I’ve learned: ask “who” before “how.” Most ideas die because the founder tries to do every piece personally. Find the people who are better than you at the specific thing, give them the outcome and the context, and get out of the way.
What’s one trend that excites you?
Real life becoming an asset class. The better AI gets at imitating connection, the more actual connection is worth. Investors are starting to see it: walkable towns, in-person communities, places where people know your name and your coffee order. I grew up in São Paulo surrounded by 20 million people and felt lonely. I spent 14 winters in Montreal and it took years for the neighbours to invite us over. The next decade of value goes to whoever can rebuild the village, not whoever builds the next feed.
What is one habit that helps you be productive?
The energy audit. Once a quarter I go through my calendar and score every recurring meeting and task on one question: does this give me energy or drain it? Anything that consistently scores low gets delegated, automated or killed, even the things I’m good at. The things that score high get blocked first the following week. It sounds soft. It’s the single most useful thing I do, and it’s how I noticed I’d stopped caring about my last company long before I admitted it.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Take the scary bets early. Your twenties are for risk, not defense. The startup, the industry switch, the move abroad: do it before mortgages and school fees lock you in. My grandfather died at 69 having postponed every enjoyment to “later.” There was no later. I’d also tell myself that skills get you in the door and relationships get you everything after that, and to protect 30 minutes a day for learning. Nobody gives you that time. You take it.
Tell us something you believe almost nobody agrees with you.
That moving your kids between countries every three months gives them more stability, not less. Everyone assumes stability means the same house, the same street, the same school for twelve years. I think stability is a family that is actually together, parents who aren’t commuting two hours a day, and a community that shows up. Our daughters have lived in Portugal, Greece, Italy, Bali and Japan. What stays constant is us, the rhythm of the week and a group of families who took the same leap. The address is the least important part.
What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?
Put your phone in another room three times a day. Not on silent, not face down. Gone. I started doing it because my daughters called me out on the “one sec” that never ended. It fixed my presence at home, and as a side effect it fixed my focus at work. Your attention comes back fast when nothing is fighting for it. Most people will never try it because it feels too simple to matter.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
I stop filling the calendar. Jeff Bezos calls it puttering time: unhurried, no agenda, no output expected. When I’m overwhelmed the instinct is to do more, and the fix is almost always the opposite. A walk in the town we’re living in, a padel match, an afternoon where nothing is scheduled. The best decisions I’ve made at Boundless came when I wasn’t “doing” anything. Then I come back to the three-things question. If I can’t name three, the overwhelm is really a priority problem, not a workload problem.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?
Don’t own the building. In 2008 Marriott nearly collapsed under the weight of the 5,000 properties it owned. It survived by flipping the model: local owners hold the asset, Marriott operates and brands it, both share the upside. Hilton, Hyatt and IHG followed, and the brands that ignored the lesson (WeWork, Selina, Sonder) collapsed under their own weight.
Boundless runs on the same logic. We partner with local real estate owners in each destination and bring the operating system: the education centre, the community, the brand, the families. Capital stops being the bottleneck, so the question becomes “who is the right partner in this town?” rather than “how much can we raise to buy here?” It’s what let a small team open eight locations on three continents in four years.
What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?
My first startup grew to a million users and was still the wrong business. We were consumer-facing, growing fast, and burning cash faster. I’d spent years optimizing a model that was never going to work at the economics we had. The fix was an uncomfortable pivot from B2C to B2B: smaller numbers on the surface, a real business underneath. That version is the one that scaled and exited in 2021.
Three lessons. Founder fit beats product-market fit, because if you don’t care about the space every setback feels like a dead end. Cash flow is oxygen; burn rate and revenue timing should be written on the ceiling above your bed. And if your main goal is to make money, starting a business is probably not the best option. There are easier ways. Do it because you can’t not do it.
What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?
A calendar that counts down instead of up. You get roughly 18 summers with each child before they leave home, and about 940 Saturdays. Most parents have no idea where they are on that clock. Build a calendar layer that shows the number of summers, weekends and school holidays you have left with each kid, blocks them before work can claim them, and nudges you when a quarter goes by with nothing booked. Charge families a few dollars a month and sell it to employers as a wellbeing benefit. The data on regret is unambiguous; nobody has turned it into a product yet. Someone should.
What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
Claude. I use it like a chief of staff. I record a 15-minute voice memo once a month with everything I’m thinking about, and that one recording becomes drafts for LinkedIn posts, newsletter issues, investor updates and internal memos. During the week it reads the long document so I can ask it the three questions I actually care about, builds the first version of the financial model, and plans the logistics of moving a family of five between countries. It’s not perfect yet (it once planned a wonky trip to South Africa), but every month a bit more of my yellow-day admin disappears into it. That’s time that goes back to green days and to my kids.
What is the best $100 you recently spent?
A month of padel at the local club in whichever town we’ve just arrived in. It’s the fastest way I’ve found to go from stranger to local. Within two weeks I know people’s names, I’ve been invited to dinner, and the owner knows how I take my coffee. It’s also how I stay healthy on the road and how I actually spend time with the Boundless community: parents from the cohort show up, we play, and the conversations after the match are where the real connection happens. Fitness is the excuse. Belonging is the return. If you move somewhere new, find the sport everyone plays and show up every week.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast from which you’ve received much value?
Die With Zero by Bill Perkins changed how I think about time. The idea that experiences compound like investments, and that you should spend on them when you can still enjoy them, is the whole philosophy behind Boundless in one book. 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy changed how I run the company: to grow 10x you let go of 80% of what you do, and it’s how I rebuilt my calendar. And Bronnie Ware’s The Top Five Regrets of the Dying is the one I’d hand to any founder who thinks the exit comes first and the family comes after.
What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?
Outlast, the survival competition series on Netflix. I watched it with my daughters, and it was less about the show than the conversations it started. People dropped into the wilderness with very little, and the whole thing turns on how they behave: who shares, who hoards, who holds a team together when it’s cold and nobody has eaten. Watching the girls work out for themselves what survival does to character, and what they’d do in that situation, was worth every episode.
Key learnings:
- Protect your time and attention ruthlessly.
- Start with “who,” not “how.” Ideas become real through people. Boundless launched because founding families committed before a single house existed, and the business scaled by finding the right local partners instead of doing everything myself.
- Build asset-light and treat cash as oxygen. Borrowing the Marriott model, Boundless partners with local property owners rather than buying buildings, so capital isn’t the bottleneck.
- Real connection and community are becoming more valuable. As AI imitates connection better, in-person belonging grows scarcer and worth more.
- Spend time on what matters while you still can. Take big risks early, invest in experiences (the Die With Zero philosophy), and don’t postpone family for “later.”