Please give a big applause for Jan.
Jan Koum grew up in a rural village outside of Kyiv, Ukraine when it was still part of the Soviet
Union. It was a tough time to be Jewish so the 16-year-old and his mom decided to move to America.
They packed suitcases with notebooks so they wouldn't have to pay for supplies when they
arrived in Silicon Valley. His father was supposed to join them but never made it. He fell ill
and died a few years later. Koum swept the floor of a grocery store to make ends meet. His mom also
got a job but then she got cancer. They lived off food stamps and her disability payments. She passed
away three years after his dad died. Such a start in life would be difficult for anyone to overcome
yet overcome he did. As a teen, he taught himself about computer networking by reading books from a
used bookstore and returned them to get his money back. He enrolled at San Jose State University but
dropped out when Yahoo! offered him a job as an infrastructure engineer. That's also where Brian
Acton worked. The two got along really well and after almost a decade at Yahoo!, they quit took
a year off to travel all over South America and then applied for jobs at Facebook but got rejected.
That didn't deter Koum. He had enough money saved from his time at Yahoo! to launch his own
venture alongside Acton - a communications app called WhatsApp. The app exploded in
popularity and ironically would go on to be bought by Facebook for $19 billion.
Time and time again, immigrants appear to rise to the top despite the roadblocks.
Why is that? There's a concept called burning the boats before getting to shore made famous by
Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. In 1519, he led an expedition of 600 Spaniards aboard 11 ships to
Mexico to explore and secure it for colonization. Upon arriving, Cortés decided to destroy the fleet -
a way of signaling to his men that there was no turning back. They would either succeed or
perish. Within two years, Cortés conquered the mighty Aztec Empire. It seems the burning the
boats analogy can be applied to immigrants. They're driven to succeed because there's no turning back.
And what leads to their billion dollar idea could very well be the fact that they grew
up in another country. Researchers who studied their success note cross-cultural experience
increases the ability to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities. Koum would have never come up with
the idea for WhatsApp had he not grown up in the USSR. I remember my parents not being
able to have a conversation on the phone. The walls had ears and you couldn't speak freely.
Being shaped by those experiences, it's extremely important to make sure that we provide the level
of privacy and security that people would be able to use our product freely and not being afraid.
His is one of many immigrant success stories. More than half of the top Fortune 500 companies
were founded by immigrants or the child of an immigrant. Without immigrants, there might very
well be no Google. When co-founder Sergey Brin was six years old, his family fled anti-semitism in the
former Soviet Union and escaped to America. While studying computer science at Stanford, Brin met
fellow student Larry Page. The two developed the Google search engine which they called
Backrub. They almost sold it to the web portal Excite for a mere $750,000 but luckily for the
co-founders, the deal never went through because Google is now worth over a trillion dollars.
When Page and Brin stepped back from Google in its parent company Alphabet, they handed the reins
to Sundar Pichai, an immigrant from India. He was a bright student in his native country, getting
himself into the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, where he studied metallurgical
engineering. The US then welcomed Pichai with scholarships to pursue a Master's degree at
Stanford and then an MBA at Wharton. Another reason researchers attribute to the success
of Pichai and others like him is that immigration policies in many economically advanced countries
favor highly skilled individuals, including those with a college degree. Just 11 years after joining
Google, he rose to become CEO. His drive to build and innovate convinced the founders to develop
their own browser, Google Chrome. He once told an audience that the following words by American
inventor Thomas Edison sums up what it means to be an entrepreneur: I have not failed, I've just found
10,000 ways that don't work. That never give up attitude is also at the center of Eric Yuan's
success. He's not a household name but the company he created is being used in nearly every household.
Many of us have been doing our jobs from home during the pandemic thanks to Zoom.
Yuan was inspired by a talk Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates gave in Asia in the nineties about the potential
of the internet. Yuan wanted in on the dot com boom and knew he had to leave China and go to America
to do it. The problem was the US government denied his visa application not once not twice not even
three times. He didn't get the green light - or green card in this case - until his ninth try.
He barely spoke English when he arrived but he did know the language of the internet.
He could code, landing an engineering job with Webex - a video calling software company later
bought by Cisco. His salary was reportedly in the high six figures but he wasn't happy.
He knew the technology could be better so he left to form his own company. Today, Yuan is number
43 on the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest people in America. There also happens to be 43 immigrants
on this list. Holding the top spot is Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos. Bezos may have been born in the US but
his father is Miguel Bezos - a refugee who's not his biological dad but raised him as his own. He fled
the Castro regime in Cuba when he was 16 years old. He was all by himself. I have a hard time even
imagining that. He was a member of Operation Peter Pan, a rescue program for children run
by the Catholic church and heavily funded by the American government. Miguel's mother thought the US
would be really cold compared to tropical Cuba so she made him a heavy jacket from cleaning cloths,
the only material she could get her hands on. It's now framed in his house. When he landed in America,
he couldn't speak any English but figured it out. He got a scholarship to a university in New Mexico
and also took a job at a bank for extra cash where he met Jeff's mom Jackie. Jeff Bezos has spoken
proudly of his father and how much he inspired him because of his determination, optimism, and grit.
That mindset helped the young Bezos guide Amazon through the turbulent dot-com bubble when many other
tech companies folded, and led them to take risks - like offering free shipping to entice customers
even though the math didn't make sense. Such strategies helped grow Amazon into the behemoth
it is today. Psychologist Angela Duckworth is well known for research on the factors that predict
success. She says the key to success - the single most important factor - is how gritty you are,
writing in her book on the topic: Enthusiasm is common, endurance is rare. Someone who knows a thing
or two about enduring is Elon Musk who emigrated from South Africa to the US by way of Canada
where he spent a couple of years as an undergrad. When asked by CBS' 60 minutes whether he considered
packing it in after SpaceX's third launch failed, he responded: I never give up. I'd have to be dead
or completely incapacitated. Thankfully he didn't give up because the fourth flight was a success.
One day, that grit may see Musk arriving on the doorstep of Mars. Many who venture to a
new country are resilient but it's certainly not the only factor that determines success.
They also have the technical knowledge to back up their ambitions. A problem-solving website and
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head to brilliant.org/newsthink. The link is in my description And the first 200 people to use
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Thanks for watching Newsthink. I'm Cindy Pom.