Whatever my brother and I built, we built on a foundation generations of Americans had laid long before we arrived.
When people hear that we built a company that eventually went public on Nasdaq and surpassed a billion dollars in value, they often focus on the outcome. I think about the beginning.
The first time a venture capitalist called our office, I had to ask others what “venture capital” meant. My brother and I were unlikely participants in Silicon Valley’s success story. We had no Ivy League degrees (including Stanford in there), no warm introductions, no mentor who had done it before, and no safety net. I had arrived in the United States in 1988 as a refugee from Iran with little more than hope and didn’t speak English yet.
A decade later, the two of us would take a company public.
For years, I assumed we succeeded despite everything we lacked. I’ve come to believe the opposite. Many of those constraints became strengths. More importantly, we were fortunate to build in a country where reinvention is possible, where risk-taking is encouraged, and where two immigrants with no road map could still find an opportunity to build something meaningful.
Here is what we learned.
Your first investor is your first customer
When you have no funding and no fallback, there is only one source of money that requires no one’s permission: a customer who pays you. So that is where we started. Not with a deck. Not with a round. With a product someone would pay for that week.
This sounds obvious, but it is not how most well-funded companies behave. Capital lets you defer the hardest question in business: Will anyone actually pay for this? We couldn’t defer it for a day. Customer obsession wasn’t a value we printed on a wall; it was how we made payroll. Build for the person paying you, and revenue funds your growth. Miss it, and no amount of funding saves you.
Scarcity is a better teacher than capital
Here is the honest part. Because we didn’t fit the mold, we raised money at a fraction of the valuation our peers commanded for comparable businesses. That stung. But in hindsight, scarcity taught us lessons abundance never could.
But scarcity made us disciplined in a way money never would have. When you can’t afford to be wrong, you get very good at being right cheaply. We tested before we spent. We stayed what founders now call “default alive”—able to survive on our own revenue—long before it was fashionable. We answered to no one but the customer and the math. In the end, that was freedom.
You can’t inherit a network: you have to earn one
The warm introduction is the quiet engine of Silicon Valley, and we had no access to it. Nobody made a call on our behalf. Every relationship we built, we built cold—by delivering, then delivering again, until the work itself became the introduction we couldn’t get any other way.
It’s slower. It is also more durable. A network you are handed can be taken back. A reputation you earn, deal by deal, compounds.
Trust is the outsider’s edge
When you can’t offer the comfort of a familiar résumé, you can offer something better: certainty. We made a discipline of doing exactly what we said we would, especially when it cost us. People who had no reason to bet on two immigrants bet on us anyway, because we were predictable in the one way that matters. Trust is the cheapest competitive advantage available to anyone—and outsiders, who have the least to fall back on, tend to guard it most carefully.
None of this is unique to us. America has a remarkable habit of turning outsiders into contributors. Immigrants have founded or cofounded 59% of America’s billion-dollar-plus companies, and many of those founders, like me, arrived as refugees. We are not an exception to the American story. We are one of its recurring chapters.
But I want to be careful with the word built. My brother and I did it together; I have never done anything alone. And neither of us truly started from nothing. We started on a foundation we did not lay: the rule of law, open markets, and the plain kindness of strangers who gave two immigrants a chance—a country and a system built by generations who worked for it long before we arrived and never saw what it would become. We didn’t make the ground. We were only lucky enough to build on it.
So if you are building without the network, the capital, or the map, I won’t pretend the field is level. It isn’t. But don’t waste energy playing the insider’s game with a worse hand. The constraints you resent are teaching you to build something sturdier—and whatever you make, you’ll make it on a foundation someone else laid. That alone is reason for humility, and for gratitude.