Immigrant Entrepreneur: Magie Cook Magie was born in an orphanage where she spent 18 years of suffering. She had 68 brothers and sisters at the orphanage and at times she had to hunt for her food with her own bare hands because there was no food at the orphanage. Holidays were celebrated very seldomly, if they were celebrated at all. The shoes that they wore to school were hand made by her "parents". In this episode she explains why she doesn't call her parents, "parents" and how she found baske...
Mar 24, 2021•1 hr 10 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Lauren Cohen Although Lauren is Canadian, her immigration process was still lengthy and she had to fight for a better visa status. Lauren's passion for immigration law came after her then-husband was deported after their honeymoon to Thailand. She was confused, lost and devasted. She knew that there were other people fighting the same battles and she went looking for better answers. Lauren is an immigration lawyer in both countries and is the only true concierge ancillary...
Mar 22, 2021•47 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Prateek Joshi Prateek's interest in machine learning/artificial intelligence came early on when he was growing up in India. Since there was lack of clean water where he grew up, he knew that there had to be a solution for this. Every so often their family had to go to a place to get drinking water and do it over and over when supply was getting low. He started learning about water sources and machine learning early on and he grew such a passion for it. When he came to USA...
Mar 19, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Kate is an immigration lawyer who does an amazing job by helping and serving the immigrants of America. Immigration is an international law which means that she can help anyone, regardless of their location in America. Kate provides some tools on how to make the immigration process smoother, why the immigration process takes forever, and she goes over some of the mistakes that she normally sees when reviewing applications and assisting immigrants through the citizenship process. Kate has appeare...
Mar 16, 2021•35 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Marie Capita Marie immigrated from Haiti when she was very young. She started her entrepreneurship journey after getting her law degree and starting her own practice with a business partner. Her entrepreneurial career didn't end there. She left the practice and started a bakery business with her husband. Since they went through a divorce, she decided to give that up as well. Although she got a County job and worked a desk job, she wasn't giving up on her entrepreneurial s...
Mar 12, 2021•40 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Spoorthi Kumar Spoorthi is a native born, but she left to India with her family at 5 years old. She eventually came back to the States to study I.T. but she didn't like her job out of college. She ended up quitting her corporate job and wanted something more for her life. She had absolutely no plans, no plan A, no plan B but she went searching for it. In fact, she didn't even have any side hustle income coming in. Starting a coffee shop with her business partner was somet...
Mar 09, 2021•49 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Liubov Lomonosova Liubov grew up with humble beginnings. Living in Ukraine, her family couldn't afford to live in a house. In fact, living in a house was considered a luxury, so they lived in a very small apartment complex. While she never imagined living in United States, she immigrated at 30 years old when her husband was moved out here for work. They barely knew anyone and started their lives fresh. She had to take English classes, and thought that getting a job will b...
Mar 06, 2021•41 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Alina Trigub Alina grew up in Ukraine when anti-semitism groups were complete widespread. As a Jewish she and her mom feared for their lives. It was out of pure safety that they realized they had to move out to a better place and that's when they immigrated to United States. Alina had several jobs out of college, but her side gig really only started out of curiosity. She started researching and learning everything there was about real estate syndication. Alina found that ...
Mar 03, 2021•40 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Amine Rahal Amine immigrated from North Africa, Algeria at the age of 12 years old with his family to Canada. They came initially because his parents wanted to relocate to another city where French was spoken. His parents came to give their kids better opportunities and a better life. Amine was always interested in software since he was a young boy. All because, back in Africa they had a computer when they were growing up. So he naturally gravitated towards anything relat...
Feb 24, 2021•58 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Veronica Moya Veronica had many odd jobs when she came to the United States at 21 years old. She worked at different cafe shops, as an au pair, at a health club but during this time she was always auditioning. Her dream was to become and actor and that's what she wanted to do in New York. Even after being fired from several jobs, she was still persistent to find her passions. Her entrepreneurial drive really kicked in when she was getting married. She found out that she n...
Feb 21, 2021•1 hr
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Sid Mohasseb Sid's journey to United States started when he was 16 years old when he attended a boarding school. He always had a curious mind and launched his very first company after 5 years of being in the States. He was only 21 years old when he launched his very first business. Although he had several different businesses in his immigrant entrepreneur journey, he's focused his last several years being a venture capitalist. Sid focuses on investing, mentoring, speaking...
Feb 19, 2021•1 hr 10 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Donizete (Donny) Minchillo Jr. Donny's journey to entrepreneurship was definitely not a straight path. He initiallly dabbled with selling random things on eBay and that's where he got hooked. He had several different businesses along the way, one was a furniture company, another one was something similar to Groupon but in the end he launched Pineapple Development which helps customers with Magento and Shopify platforms. He didn't stop there! Shortly after, he acquired ano...
Feb 19, 2021•43 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Abdulhamid Ali Growing up in Somalia, Abdulhamid had a great childhood, but after the Somalian's pressident got assasinated he had to grow up very quickly. His father went to prison several times and his mom was left with 6 kids to care for. It turns out that his mom became extremely entrepreneurial and made the best out of what they had. If you wanted to go to college in Somalia, the goverment told you want you were going to study and you had no other choice. The decisio...
Feb 15, 2021•41 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Igor Krasnykh Igor immigrated from Russia at 17 years old.. He didn't know much of any English and the English that he did know wasn't helping him much. He was always interested in software, and the IT world so he started several different businesses on the side. Some of them failed but he didn't stop there. He is a college dropout and one of his side hustles that he started (PowerSync) allowed him to grow that company all organically and without much of any advertising. ...
Feb 13, 2021•58 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Gurhan Demirkan Gurhan grew up in Turkey where his dad always said that he will be living in America one day. He also constantly encouraged him to become an entrepreneur and to be your own boss. That was instilled in his brain at a very young age. He immigrated at the age of 18 and didn't know any English at all. He decided that if he was going to learn English, living with his brother is not going to help him. So he decided to live on campus at college. His background is...
Feb 12, 2021•49 min
Laura Kinser is a startup clinic consultant that has a wealth of experience with startups from the Silicon Valley. In this episode she goes over the step by step process of what it takes to open a startup in 2021 for immigrants. She also provides an extensive amount of resources that will guide you in the process. She is highly intelligent in the startup businesses and works with plenty of entrepreneurs in their startup journeys. Show notes...
Feb 06, 2021•41 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Vladimir Vasilenko Doctor Vasilenko is a very special guest on my show. He immigrated from Russia to Canada and had a very pleasant immigration process. In fact it took him less than 4 months for all the immigration to be completed and finalized. He founded Global Warming Solutions out of survival and needed to get the renewable and energy efficient products out there. He took his company public shortly after creating his company and there is a reason for that! Doctor Vas...
Feb 01, 2021•56 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Eddie Garcia Eddie traveled on foot from Mexico with his older brother and his father when he was 5 years old. He had no idea what was going on, and was totally oblivious to the fact that his dad carried their clothes in zip loc bags. On that journey, that came in handy! When they crossed the sewer water, they had to change their clothes and that's when his dad whipped out fresh clothes out of the zip loc bags. He was on track to be an employee and his dad always pushed h...
Jan 28, 2021•53 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Fiona Gilbert Fiona immigrated to United States in her early 20s and landed in Silicon Valley. Shortly after coming immigrating she fell tremendously sick. She was so sick she had to get a service dog that helped her move around. She tried many different treatments and nothing helped. But with her sickness came a blessing. She was able to find something that allowed her to feel absolutely amazing, and Quanta Therapies was born. Not only that, her creativity launched her t...
Jan 26, 2021•1 hr 1 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Irina Alexander Irina met her husband in China while working abroad on a summer tour program. She never initally wanted to move to America, but because she married an American (while in China) she moved to Texas in her early 20s. She didn't have any family or friends in Texas, and on top of that, her husband had to go to work - overseas. She was left all alone. There were many struggles in her immigrant journey from handling basic phone conversations, to driving to the gr...
Jan 24, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Christian Carreon Christian came to the United States when he was 7 years old with his family after losing his sister. His mom was able to regain momentum and strength to launch her own company and they started a new life in California. Life was not always great for Christian. After struggling with constant racism, seeing his parents go through a bankruptcy, he ended up in the hospital fighting for his life. He eventually lost both of his kidneys, but not too long after e...
Jan 21, 2021•56 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Jorge Ruiz Jorge came from Bolivia to the U.S. initially to study in college. His journey brought him back home where he launched several different companies all in completely different fields. With his expertise at Citi Bank he launched the first global solution for financial institutions by connecting them with the top innovative fintech solutions. Financial institutions are in need of digitizing practically everything they do, and it's rapidly growing. That's where Fin...
Jan 07, 2021•40 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Angelica Rivera When Angelica came to the United States, she was only supposed to be here for 6 months to finish high school. Through some rough struggles she was able to stay here past her visa expiration date. At one point she was undocumented and had many limitations that she had to live in. But with her persistence and determination she was able to create not one, but two companies. Her second company was founded with her husband when she was only 29 years old. That c...
Dec 31, 2020•46 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Ahmed Elsamadisi Ahmed came to the United States at the age of 10 with his family from Egypt, all in the name of education. In Egypt the education system is corrupt. The teachers don't teach and they must supplement their income by tutoring. Ahmed's parents brought their children to United States because the education system is proven to be a lot better than in Egypt. Ahmed created his data analysis startup company, Narrator.ai at the age of 25 which allowed him to be fea...
Dec 30, 2020•57 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Camila Pachon Silva Camila and her family had to escape the intense drug war that was happening in Columbia. In this episode she explains how her mom would put tape on the windows to prevent the windows from crashing down during a bomb explosion. There was violence every single day, people would get robbed and you knew what part of town to avoid, what not to wear and do certain things to live your life. She tells me that it was the norm, you had to adapt to that way of li...
Dec 27, 2020•39 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Igor Dobrosavljević Igor immigrated from Germany with his family at 16 years old from Germany. Germany was their first destination as refugees to flee from the civil war that broke out between Croatia and Bosnia. As immigrants in the United States his parents had to start their lives all over, for the second time. Amongst many struggles Igor was able to obtain a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and start his own I.T. consulting company, Grand Consulting. What he's do...
Dec 26, 2020•46 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Nirit Rubenstein Nirit came to the United States when she was 4 years old but she still experienced struggles as an immigrant. Her household only spoke Hebrew and she only picked up English in grade school which made it extremely difficult to connect with other classmates. She remembers her parents talking about how McDonald's was a once a month treat for them and how all of their clothes were second hand. Her dad couldn't get a job for a period of time until he finally d...
Dec 21, 2020•31 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Giacomo Vacca Doctor Giacomo Vacca leaves his hometown at the age of 16 because he always wanted to become a scientist. Leaving your country behind at 16 is not only considered bravery, but beyond courageous. After graduating Harvard, he attended Stanford University to obtain his PhD in Applied Physics. This lead him on a path to getting amazing jobs at different companies including one that was a Fortune 500 company. He quickly realized that he was meant for something bi...
Dec 20, 2020•50 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Doctor Wei Wang Doctor Wei Wang grew up in a communist China without much education options. But against all odds, he managed to get a PhD in structural engineering in New Jersey. When he started his company, Urbantech Consulting Engineering he didn't even know he was running a business. He was doing everything by himself and the very first project that he worked on was a bridge that was outlined on the Discovery Channel. Doctor Wei Wang came to the United States all by h...
Dec 17, 2020•47 min
Immigrant Entrepreneur: Fiona Fiona had no idea that she was ever going to land in the finance world. In fact growing up, she wanted to become a paleontologist but after seeing what her grandparents went through with their personal finances she decided that she wanted to help as many people be financially independent. She bought her house at the age of 23, she started her blog at the age of 25.. during the pandemic! This young lady is about to tear up the finance world before you know it. This e...
Dec 15, 2020•51 min
