Preface
Entrepreneurs Will Change Your Life

Picture the scene: It was my freshman year at the University of Miami in the late 1990s and I was staring wide-eyed in amazement at a mysterious and magical contraption in the corner of the room while my roommate from Alabama was staring open-mouthed in equal amazement at me.

"Don't they have computers where you come from?" It was a genuine question, but her distinctive drawl also carried more than a hint of scorn.

She was right to ask though. They didn't have computers where I came from. Born into a persecuted Turkish ethnic minority in communist Bulgaria, my family had fled from our little town, Asenovgrad, when I was just 11. Entering Turkey with only two suitcases to our names, I spent the rest of my childhood first in a refugee camp, and then in a rough and rundown neighborhood of Istanbul.

Living in communist Bulgaria and then in Istanbul, we sometimes caught glimpses of colorful places outside the confines of our own grid of streets: a discarded can of Pepsi that was treated by the local kids like a fallen piece of the moon; a video of Michael Jackson dancing that seemed beamed in from outer space. But never in the 18 years before I arrived in Florida had I ever seen this machine whose rows and rows of keys opened doors to an infinite variety of new worlds.

That computer was far from the only thing that was new to me when financial aid took me straight from our modest apartment in Istanbul to the palm-tree-lined streets of Miami. Some days it seemed like everything was unsettlingly new, from the slick cars my classmates drove to the confident and carefree ways they joked with the professors. Much like the discarded Pepsi can, I felt as if I'd been dropped out of the sky onto another planet-where the sun always seemed to shine but could never fully pierce the dark clouds gathered around my heart.

Some things in Miami filled me with fascination; other things filled me with anxiety; many things did both at the same time. And underlying everything always were the host of voices in my head that undermined me at every opportunity: "You'll never speak English like the rest, you'll never fit in, how stupid you were to ever dream of making it in America. You are simply not good enough."

It was in the computer lab where my fears seemed most acute. Where my classmates, who all had PCs at home, seemed most at ease and I least. Where my struggles with a new language were compounded by my struggles with new technology as I typed with furrowed brow and one finger on the keyboard and watched unfamiliar words appear on the screen.

Our professor tried to help; he was a kindly, elderly man who delighted the students with his countless stories and an anecdote about how his best friend helped inspire Seinfeld. But their laughter only made me feel even more alienated-I didn't have a clue who or what Seinfeld was.

But then one day, in the same computer lab, I made a startling discovery that changed my life. My unease around the computer was gradually turning to a fascination with it and its "World Wide Web" which could answer any conceivable question, provided you had the patience to wait 20 minutes while the page loaded.

And as I tried to find out more about computers, I slowly started to discover how they worked. And that's when I learned that the chip inside them that was making all their magic happen had been developed by a man named Andrew Grove whose work for Intel had made the personal computing revolution possible.

But what was the best thing I discovered about Andrew Grove? That he was an immigrant, just like me.

If the creator of the very device that was confounding me had also come here from elsewhere, why couldn't I master it and make it in America too? I was inspired, and in the weeks that followed, it was as if I was breathing in new air and finally able to exhale the clouds that had built up inside me.

Discovering Andrew Grove's story was a transformative moment. Much of my subsequent success, from teaching at some of the world's leading universities to founding a multimillion-dollar fashion label, can be traced back to the confidence boost that it gave me.

But the impact of that discovery was about much more than just boosting the confidence of a young immigrant; it inspired me to look deeper into the whole world of immigrant entrepreneurs, and through those studies, I discovered that there is something going on within immigrant entrepreneurship that the rest of the business world urgently needs to know about. Stories of immigrants building successful brands are not merely feel-good tales of triumph over adversity, nor are they just evidence of the enormous economic contributions migrants make; they also contain lessons from which everyone trying to create a business that lasts can learn.

Consider these simple facts: Immigrants make up 13% of the U.S. population but 28% of its entrepreneurs.1 Among the Fortune 500 companies, 45% were founded by immigrants;2 80% of billion-dollar startups have a founder or leading executive who is a first- or second-generation immigrant.3 And despite often starting with limited resources, immigrant-founded companies grow faster and survive longer than those founded by natives.4

In a world in which 90% of startups fail,5 the success rates of immigrant businesses are striking. And at a time when the old rules of business longevity, derived from studying hoary companies created in centuries gone by, no longer apply, we need to explore how immigrant-led startups are disrupting every industry with innovations that work in the 21st century.

In Pioneers, I draw on my own experience, my academic career, and my interviews with prominent immigrant entrepreneurs to chart a route to business longevity based on the unique skillsets and strategies deployed by the most successful businesspeople in the world: immigrants. Along the way, we'll both explore the history of immigrant entrepreneurship and meet the migrants behind such modern-day success stories as WhatsApp, Duolingo, Chobani. BioNTech, Calendly, and the Cronut. Filling a huge gap in the current literature, this is the first book to reveal how immigrant entrepreneurship creates sustainable businesses from the perspective of immigrant entrepreneurs themselves.

Through their stories and the evidence accumulated through empirical research into their endeavors, I will present the eight principles that underpin the success of immigrant entrepreneurs. Each of these principles can be applied by any entrepreneur, irrespective of whether they have migrated or not and regardless of what resources they have at their disposal. So, if you want to learn from the world's leading experts about how to build a business that lasts from scratch, then this book is for you.

But I want to conclude this preface with an important caveat, explaining who this book is not for. In Pioneers, I focus on building iconic, sustainable brands-one of the central obsessions that has driven my career. But if your idea of business longevity is simply about producing profit year after year after year, then the principles in this book will not help you do that. That's because my research into the immigrant entrepreneur experience consistently reveals one key element that is at the heart of real business success: the desire to build a legacy that transcends profit.

By my definition, a legacy is most definitely not just the bank balance that you pass to the next generations. A legacy is something that you can be proud of, that changes the world in a beneficial way, something that you can look back on at the end of your journey and say, "It was all worthwhile." Because real longevity does not come from the money you take but from the difference you make. That's why, when I think about Andrew Grove, I don't picture Intel's balance sheet but rather how his computers revolutionized our world. The best of immigrant entrepreneurs understand that true longevity is a positive legacy and have found the ways to turn that principle into a reality. Pioneers explains how you can join them.

Notes

1. 1.  Cesar Maximiliano Estrada, "How Immigrants Positively Affect the Business Community and the U.S. Economy," American Progress, June 22, 2016, accessed November 7, 2024, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-immigrants-positively-affect-the-business-community-and-the-u-s-economy/.
2. 2.  American Immigration Council, "New American Fortune 500 in 2023," https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/new-american-fortune-500-2023 (American Immigration Council, August 29, 2023), accessed November 7, 2024.
3. 3.  Stuart Anderson, "Most Billion-Dollar Startups in the U.S. Founded by Immigrants," Forbes, July 27, 2022, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2022/07/26/most-us-billion-dollar-startups-have-an-immigrant-founder/?sh=392311086f3a.
4. 4.  Sari Pekkala Kerr and William Kerr, "Immigrant Entrepreneurship," Harvard Business School, June 2016, https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/17-011_da2c1cf4-a999-4159-ab95-457c783e3fff.pdf.
5. 5.  Bernhard Schroeder, "How to Avoid Being in the 90% of Entrepreneurial Startups Who Fail. Six Insights on How to Find Real Problems," Forbes, June 20, 2023,...