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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Sprache: Englisch
Unlock the principles that drive the remarkable success stories of immigrant entrepreneurs from around the world
In Pioneers: 8 Principles of Business Longevity From Immigrant Entrepreneurs, academic, entrepreneur, and consultant, Neri Karra Sillaman, delivers a one-of-a-kind exploration of the remarkable success of immigrant entrepreneurs. The author writes about how immigrants, often starting with limited capital and connections, have built iconic and enduring businesses. Sillaman combines rigorous academic research with compelling case studies and personal experience and narrative to uncover the principles that drive these stunning achievements.
Pioneers offers a blueprint for business leaders seeking longevity, profitability, and sustainability in the contemporary marketplace. You'll find:
- Strategies for building resilient businesses that embrace diversity and inclusion
- Explanations of the power of community and how you can leverage it for business growth
- Stories of the importance of creating a legacy that goes beyond mere profit
- Techniques and actionable advice to turn past failures into future success
Exploring the dramatic immigrant success stories powering such well-known brands as Chobani, WhatsApp, and BioNTech, this book is a must-read for entrepreneurs, business leaders, and anyone else interested in the dynamics of immigrant entrepreneurship. Pioneers is a transformative and inspiring business guide that will help you build a company that stands the test of time.
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Seitenzahl: 420
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface:
Entrepreneurs Will Change Your Life
Notes
PART I: Departure
1 The Myths and Reality of Business Longevity
Budapest, Hungary, 1956
Why the Conventional Wisdom on Business Longevity Gets It Wrong
The Eight Main Myths of Business Longevity
Immigrant Entrepreneurs and the Real Principles of Business Longevity
Lincolnshire, England, 1837
Notes
2 Immigrant Entrepreneurship and the American Dream
New York, New York, 2017
Liberty Comes to New York
Who Are Immigrant Entrepreneurs? Defining Migration Around the World
Johan, Mohamad, and the American Dream
But Why Are Immigrant Entrepreneurs So Successful?
Notes
3 Who Are Immigrant Entrepreneurs?
Necessity Entrepreneurship
The Skills, Resources, and Capabilities of Immigrant Entrepreneurs
Personality Traits
The Influence of Family
Ethnic Ties and Networks
The Big Gap in the Literature: Why Are Immigrant Entrepreneurs So Successful?
Notes
PART II: Exploration: The 8 Principles
4 Principle 1: Be a Bridge Across Cultures
Beauvais, France, 1994
Bridging Cultures: The Superpower of the Immigrant Entrepreneur
Opportunity Identification and Development
Building Cross-Cultural Connections to Take Advantage of the Opportunity
Inflection Points: “How to Read Tomorrow's Newspaper Today”
Notes
5 Principle 2: Build from the Past Forward and the Future Back
Kapıkule, Turkey, 1989
The Importance of Vision
Mountain View, California, 1992
The 3-I Framework for Vision: Identity, Intention, and Imagined Future
Notes
6 Principle 3: Forge Connections Based on Identity and Authenticity
North Massapequa, New York, 2006
Of Milk Bottles and Birds: What Titmice and Robins Can Teach Us About Immigrant Entrepreneurs
The Value of Social Capital
Social Capital: Turning Weakness into Strength
Heritage, Experience, and Value Homophily
Building Deep Trust and Family-Style Ties
A Caveat: The Danger of Overreliance on Family-Style Ties
Notes
7 Principle 4: Generate Profit the Right Way
Guatemala, 1980s
The Rules of the Game Have Changed: Milton Friedman Is Outdated
How Immigrant Entrepreneurs Make Profit with Purpose
Altruism and Philanthropy
Notes
8 Principle 5: Build Community
İliç, Northeastern Turkey, 1970s
The Essence of Community: From Breaking Bread to Sharing Roots
External Community
Internal Community
Notes
9 Principle 6: Reframe Rejection
Atlanta, Georgia, 2013
Cambridge, England, 1996
The Roots of Fearing Failure: From the Savannah to Social Media
What Is Reframing and Why Are Immigrant Entrepreneurs So Good at It?
How to Reframe Past and Present Failures
Immigrant Entrepreneurs' Reframing Superpower: The Community
Notes
10 Principle 7: “Fry in Your Own Oil”
Cali, Colombia, 1985
The Importance of Frying in Your Own Oil
Frying in Your Own Oil When First Starting a Business
Frying in Your Own Oil as Your Business Grows
Balancing Financing Needs with Sustainable Growth
Maintaining Quality as the Workforce Grows
Notes
11 Principle 8: Dare to Play Your Hand
Recognizing Luck: Serendipity Is a Capability, Not an Event
Maximizing Luck: Timing, Location, and Daring
Persevering Through Bad Luck: The Crucial Importance of Grit
The Role of Luck in Business Longevity: Passivity Versus Action
Notes
Conclusion: Our Future, Together as One
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface: Entrepreneurs Will Change Your Life
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Conclusion: Our Future, Together as One
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
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Praise for Pioneers
“In an era where we're all pioneers navigating unfamiliar territory, Karra Sillaman's Pioneers serves as an essential guidebook for thriving in our rapidly evolving world. Whether you're crossing geographical borders or adapting to seismic shifts in your industry, this book will show you how to design your own path in a world that's new to us all.”
—Ayse Birsel cofounder, Birsel + Seck, and author of Design the Life You Love
“At a time when immigrants are being viewed with suspicion in many parts of the world, Karra Sillaman's book comes as a breath of fresh air. She has brought together inspirational stories of immigrant entrepreneurs from around the world shining a light on their tenacity, appetite for risk, and capacity for hard work, and how it translates into success. This book is not just for immigrants though. All entrepreneurs would do well to read it.”
—Kamal MunirPro-Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Strategy and Policy, University of Cambridge
8 PRINCIPLES OF BUSINESS LONGEVITY FROM IMMIGRANT ENTREPRENEURS
PIONEERS
NERI KARRA SILLAMAN
Copyright © 2025 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved, including rights for text and data mining and training of artificial technologies or similar technologies.
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Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © Claire SullivanAuthor Photo: Andrea Sunderland
To those who came before us:
Şehri and Halil Karaoğlu
Bedriye and Fahri Yaşar
Mary Ann and James Sillaman
Ilona (Helen) and Peter Tellocolo
PrefaceEntrepreneurs 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
. 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
. 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
. 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
. 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
. 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,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernhardschroeder/2023/06/15/how-to-avoid-being-in-the-90-of-entrepreneurial-startups-who-fail-six-insights-on-how-to-find-real-problems/
.
PART IDeparture
The Refugee
1.
Every minutehas its countless citiesand skies,briefly illuminated clouds,windows lit by the sunset…Every minutehas its secret corridorsleading to dark rooms.
Who lives there?What would we have said to each other?How would we have lived there?I don't know.
Every minute I passendless doorsto eternal life….
2.
My soul,we have guilty knowledgeof our loneliness, of the end.And our guilt keeps usfrom Paradise.
The clock is that cherubwith two swordswhich guardsthe paths of minuteswe might have traveledto Eternity.
—Vladimir Levchev
Courtesy of Vladimir Levchev
1The Myths and Reality of Business Longevity
During the 20th century, more than 100 million people were forced to flee their countries; this is the story of just one of them …
Budapest, Hungary, 1956
“Andris, you must go!”1
András Grof, a lean and striking 20-year-old student, looked up from his book and his half-empty coffee cup with a shiver of shock. Of course, he'd been expecting to hear those words for weeks now as the noose tightened around his city, his home, his neck, but there is a world of difference between living in a nightmare and discovering it is real.
The young man didn't always hear everything well, a bout of scarlet fever when he was four having left him with ears severely damaged and an unusually active imagination. But he heard these words with piercing clarity and instantly felt their weight, a weight that came from the identity of the speaker: his Aunt Manci, the only member of her family to return from Auschwitz, a hell that had shriveled her skin till it clung tight to her bones. Manci understood the darkest corners of the human heart and had come to tell Andris, as his family called him, that it was now his time to flee.
It was far from the first time that András's young life had been in danger; indeed, he was born into hatred, a Jewish baby in Hungary's homegrown fascist dictatorship. When he was seven, his homeland was occupied by Hitler as the Third Reich entered its death throes and its “Final Solution” intensified. To avoid persecution, he and his mother assumed false identities and hid in friends' houses, but his father was not so lucky and was taken to a labor camp, tortured, and barely survived. András would not see his father until after the war ended. Shortly after his eighth birthday, he endured the Soviet Union's siege of Budapest, and his life since then had been lived beneath the boots of a series of repressive Communist regimes, which targeted András's family as bourgeoise entrepreneurs because of the modest dairy his father had run before the war.
But this time, the threat to András was both imminent and somehow crueler because it was coming in the immediate wake of hope. Just weeks before, in the early autumn of 1956, Budapest was full of falling leaves and the scent of revolution was in the air. Students, wired on strong Hungarian coffee and the wild optimism of youth, debated outside cafes long into the night about the new world that would dawn after the long Soviet night had melted away. Incredibly, the students' dreams seemed to be turning into reality; protests outside the parliament building had escalated into the overthrow of the Russian-backed regime, the appointment of a new prime minister, and the dissolution of the hated secret police.
But those autumnal dreams were soon to die. Responding to the danger, the Soviet Union reacted in the only way it knew how: lashing out with the full force of “the People's Army” to crush the people. Russian tanks encircled Budapest once again and began the process of strangling the newborn revolution.
The students outside the cafes dissipated like the steam from their coffees. And the lights across the city went out as an eerie autumn fog descended, pierced only by the harsh headlights of the tanks on the city's grand boulevards and the flaming arcs of burning bottles thrown in response from the darkened side streets; their lights both as bright and as brief as the doomed revolution they sought to defend.
Every life has tipping points, where a decision that takes seconds to make profoundly alters everything that follows. For András, the choice was both deceptively simple—stay or go—and infinitely complex, to lose every aspect of the life he knew in the hope of finding a new world in the utterly unknown spaces beyond the Iron Curtain.
Even the act of escape contained the chance of losing everything he had, but András remained determined to control his own fate. So, in the face of those who would stamp on him for the rest of his life, and with his family's encouragement ringing in his ears, he chose to risk the 120-mile journey west to the Austrian border and freedom.
Every yard of that journey contained danger. Boarding a steam train from Budapest alongside his closest school friend, András resolved to take it as close to the border as he dared, each turn of the wheels taking him further from his old life and deeper into an uncertain future. Throughout the journey dark rumors swirled: police checkpoints blocked all routes; Soviet forces bound Hungary's borders and detained anyone trying to escape the country's fate. Their insides gnawed away by paranoia, András and his friend made a desperate decision. Leaving the train, they placed their lives in the hands of a hunchbacked smuggler who promised to lead them to freedom via obscure paths unknown by the invaders.
Hours later, after night had fallen, András lay in the cold, dark mud of a field in the middle of nowhere. Even with his broken ears, he could still hear above the beating of his own heart the boots marching on the twisted lanes surrounding the fields and the dogs howling at the moon. Or were they howling at him? Suddenly a shout cut through the darkness, a voice barking at him to identify himself. The worst thing: the question came in Hungarian. The blood in András's veins froze in fear and overwhelming questions raced in his mind: Had their guide betrayed them? After 120 miles of terror, had they been caught within yards of freedom?
Summoning the remains of his spent courage, András replied with the question of a man cut loose from all the bindings of his life: “Where am I?” The answer consisted of a single Hungarian word: “Ausztria.”
András's new life was born that second, but it would take many more years and struggles before it reached maturity. Despite being penniless and barely able to speak English, he set himself a goal of reaching the United States, where he had relatives in New York City. Rejected for admission to the United States at an initial interview by representatives of the International Rescue Committee in Austria, he refused to take no for an answer.
Securing himself a second interview the next day, the panting and profusely sweating András threw every English word he knew at the interviewer in a semi-coherent torrent that he hoped would secure his passage across the Atlantic. Incredibly, it worked. Unknown to everyone, the interviewer's decision to take pity on the desperate Hungarian chemistry student changed the world.
Arriving in New York, the young András found employment as a busboy, helping waiters clear tables and wash dishes. But he never lost his passion for learning and his determination to succeed in his new home. Despite his hearing problems, he mastered English and his success at university earned him a mention in The New York Times in a brief article entitled “Refugee Heading Engineers' Class.”2
Many more mentions in the press were to come. By 1968, the young engineer became the third employee of a tiny tech startup making semiconductors from its base in Mountain View, California. By 1987, he had risen to be the CEO of the company, which by then was ranked the tenth biggest in the world in its industry. Under András's leadership, it rose to number one. By 1997, Time magazine named him its “Man of the Year,”3 describing András as “the person most responsible for the amazing growth in the power and the innovative potential of microchips.” The man who had fled the violence following a failed revolution in one country was now leading a peaceful revolution around the whole world.
It's hard to identify another company that has had more influence on creating our modern age than the computer firm that András helped to found and later led. That company is Intel, whose chips still power two-thirds of all computers today (including the one on which I am writing this). And András Grof, who died in 2016, is known to history by the name he adopted upon arriving in America: Andrew Grove.
America was the country that made him, but Grove also helped to make America the world tech leader that it is today. And he never lost his gratitude to his adopted home or forgot his immigrant roots. “It is a very important truism,” he once told Esquire, “that immigrants and immigration are what made America what it is. We must be vigilant as a nation to have a tolerance for differences, a tolerance for new people.”4
On one level, Grove's story is exceptional, but on another, it is illustrative of the broader phenomenon of immigrant entrepreneurship. Few people from any background achieve his level of success, but the fact remains that immigrants, despite all the odds stacked against them, are more likely than native-born citizens to succeed as entrepreneurs. This book is about explaining why that is and showing you what you can learn from immigrant entrepreneurs so you, too, can build businesses that succeed and create an impact in the long term. But before turning to that, let's start by trying to understand why debates about business longevity to date have failed to focus on the crucial lessons that immigrant entrepreneurs can teach.
Why the Conventional Wisdom on Business Longevity Gets It Wrong
As a refugee from a communist country myself, an entrepreneur, and a professor of entrepreneurship, I've long been fascinated by the question of business longevity: Why do some brands survive and thrive when so many good ideas die young? Growing up in Bulgaria in the 1980s, where brands simply didn't exist, meant that when I finally arrived in America in the late 1990s, I was utterly in thrall to these brash and bright companies that seemed to dominate the corporate world. And so I studied them, obsessively, to learn their secrets and see what I could take away to guide the building of my own brand: the business back in Istanbul turning discarded bits of Italian leather into bags and accessories that my family and I were dreaming of making into a global luxury brand.
Studying the literature on business longevity was at first a dizzying experience. Classics of the genre like Robert H. Waterman Jr. and Tom Peters's In Search of Excellence5 turned my head with their promise that the principles of business success could be distilled into a blueprint that would work anywhere and anytime it was applied. It was thrilling to read, and its successors, like James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras's Built to Last,6 inspired me to believe that I, too, could build a business that would stand the test of time and achieve the iconic status of the designers whose work I loved. And when I found myself facing struggles, books like Collins's Good to Great7 reassured me that the timeless principles of business success had now been revealed, and all I needed to do was follow them to make the leap from mediocrity to longevity.
But soon I came to feel like something wasn't quite right. For some reason, the situations and strategies recommended by these bestselling classics didn't seem to match up to the real-life scenarios that Neri Karra, the company, was facing on the streets of Istanbul. Companies like Philip Morris, Walmart, and Disney, it turned out, had little to teach a tiny, refugee-founded company in Turkey struggling with a lack of resources and forced to find ways to get the maximum value out of everything we had. (“You have to fry in your own oil,” my grandfather never tired of reminding me, which wasn't advice that I could find from reading about the likes of 3M, IBM, or General Electric.)
Like me, it seemed like the authors of the famous bestsellers had been seduced by the glamor of the biggest brands and consequently were focusing on companies whose day-to-day dealings bore no relation to the struggles of startups equipped with little more than dreams and ideas. Could it be that the “timeless principles” of success were hard to apply when it came to the contexts in which my family and I, and millions of others like us, were trying to build our businesses?
The more I studied the business longevity literature and measured it against my own lived experience, the deeper my disillusionment grew. I started to realize that the bestselling classics, and much of the rest of the academic research, simply didn't reflect what was going on in the real world. The deeper reasons for this disconnect slowly started to dawn on me, and they were not just due to the authors focusing on giant firms that inhabited different ecosystems. Researchers could only pontificate about firms' long-term successes when they looked at companies that were started a long time ago. But the past, as L.P. Hartley famously wrote, is a foreign country,8 and it's becoming more and more foreign by the day as the pace of change accelerates further and further. In a world characterized by constant disruption, how could we imagine that what worked even as relatively recently as the 1980s could be transposed into the twenty-first century?
And the flaws of the business longevity literature were not even just restricted to size and time. Space was an issue, too. Specifically, many of the studies, I came to realize, were overgeneralizing the experiences of particular places, confidently proclaiming, perhaps implicitly, that what worked in the U.S. Midwest would equally work in the Middle East. Similarly, stories from particular industries, from tobacco to tech, were being sold as universal answers to the challenge faced in very different contexts.
A perceptive piece by Nick Forster in the Journal of Business Perspective neatly summed up what I was realizing about the business longevity literature.9 Despite being well-written, inspirational, and seemingly full of solid advice, it was based on research with too many methodological flaws to be valuable. In addition to the problems related to size, space, and time already mentioned, Forster also skewered other fundamental flaws, ranging from a lack of longitudinal data to failures to account for external variables—factors like market conditions, changing technology, and geopolitics that have more influence over our businesses than we'd like to believe. As Forster concluded, inconsistent definitions of success led to conflicting recommendations about how companies should act. And because the books' suggested strategies were rarely tested in different cultural or organizational settings, they left serious questions about the extent to which a route to success in one place can be replicated in another.
Taking a look around at what had happened to the companies lionized in the bestsellers in the years since they were held up as examples to the rest of us also produced some interesting insights. Of the 30 exceptional enterprises featured in In Search of Excellence in 1982, only 9 were performing above average 20 years later (and the same number were outright failures).10 Similarly, of the 18 firms featured in Built to Last in 1994, only 8 were performing above average in 2014. And of the 11 companies celebrated in Good to Great in 2001, only 6 were bigger in 2023 than they were when the book was written, 2 were in major trouble, and 1 had gone bankrupt, which didn't seem all that, well, great (or even particularly good).11
My general disillusionment with the business longevity research coalesced into a realization that it was selling easy answers and, in the process, propagating myths that could be, ultimately, harmful to budding entrepreneurs like myself. I've compiled a list of these myths below, alongside a description of the reality that each one obscures.
The Eight Main Myths of Business Longevity
Myth 1:
You don't need a great idea to start a company
Reality: While many researchers have argued against the importance of individual big ideas in business, reality tells a different tale. Compelling initial ideas that address specific market needs often form the cornerstones of long-lasting businesses. It's true that adaptability and continuous improvement are indispensable for survival and growth, but dismissing the impact of the foundational idea oversimplifies the complexities of entrepreneurship. These original ideas, which stem from unique insights into unresolved problems, disrupt industries, redefine norms, and create lasting legacies.
Myth 2:
Business longevity is about maintaining stability at all costs
Reality: True longevity comes from balancing stability with adaptability to changing market conditions, customer needs, and technological capabilities. Many venerable firms have faced near-catastrophic challenges, with some teetering on the brink of bankruptcy before pivotal adaptations spurred recovery and renewal. My own research shows that business longevity isn't about constantly finding calm waters in which to sail but rather about being able to navigate fierce storms; adaptability and evolution in response to challenges are key.
Myth 3:
Only companies with large capital and resources can achieve longevity
Reality: Endurance in business isn't solely dependent on starting big. Many long-lasting companies have started small and grown over time through strategic decisions, customer loyalty, and organic growth. In fact, starting a business with an abundance of resources may not always be a good idea as it can stifle creativity. Small companies thrive by leveraging their limitations as strengths, using their small size to maneuver swiftly and respond to changes more effectively than their larger, more cumbersome counterparts.
Myth 4:
Continual growth is a must for longevity
Reality: Sustainable growth is more important than continual growth. Companies that focus on sustainable practices tend to last longer because they manage resources wisely, avoid overextension, and maintain financial health. Sustainable growth is strategic and measured, prioritizing long-term stability over short-term gains. It involves making decisions that are economically, socially, and environmentally responsible, ensuring that the business does not exhaust its resources faster than they can be replenished.
Myth 5:
You must be successful in the market where your business is founded first
Reality: Historically, the big companies that tend to feature in the business longevity literature, like Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and Levi's, proved themselves first in their local markets before expanding internationally. But this no longer needs to be the case. Modern technology and the shrinking of the world have enabled firms to be global from day one (a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “born global”), making their abilities to build bridges across cultures and countries a business superpower.
Myth 6:
The best companies are always the top players in their market
Reality: Being a market leader is less important than having a solid strategy for resilience and adaptability. Many enduring companies thrive by carving out strong niches or comfortably maintaining a second or third position in their industries. These companies often benefit from “the giant's shadow” effect, where being slightly less visible allows them more flexibility to innovate without the constant scrutiny faced by market leaders. Operating in niche markets can help companies develop deep expertise and strong customer loyalty.
Myth 7:
Having more customers always results in a longer-lasting business
Reality: The quality of relationships often trumps quantity. Businesses that last tend to focus on deepening relationships with existing customers through excellent service rather than just increasing customer numbers. This focus on customer satisfaction creates a solid foundation of loyal clients who are not only likely to continue doing business but are also inclined to become advocates for the brand. As online reviews become increasingly fundamental components of success, such advocates are crucial drivers of business growth.
Myth 8:
Business longevity is mainly about competitive advantage in products or services
Reality: Enduring success is as much about corporate culture and employee engagement as it is about products or services. Companies that invest in their people and foster a positive work environment are more likely to be innovative and efficient and thrive in the long term. These businesses understand that employees who feel valued and see their workplace as a supportive community perform better and remain with the company, reducing turnover and building institutional knowledge.
Immigrant Entrepreneurs and the Real Principles of Business Longevity
At the same time as I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the mythical nature of the business longevity literature, I was becoming increasingly inspired by what was happening in my own life in the real world of business. Neri Karra the company was taking off, and my family and I were achieving success by doing things that none of the big business books talked about or that they actively discouraged. We were going straight from our base in Istanbul to working across cultures on the international stage, we were focusing on building community rather than chasing profit, and we were prioritizing sustainability in every aspect of our operations rather than chasing growth (“Frying in our own oil,” much to my grandfather's delight).
And, crucially, these things were working. We employed 750 craftsmen in our factory in Istanbul, opened another manufacturing operation in Bulgaria, and expanded very rapidly across Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. At the time I was working on my PhD thesis, and when I mentioned that we simply trusted our distributors and did not ask for money up front when building the business, this came as a surprise to my professors. It was not how one did business. And that's when I realized something that had been missing from all the literature that I'd been reading on business longevity. The things that we were doing were those things that came naturally to us as immigrants. They derived from our experiences and the particular worldviews and survival strategies that having to rebuild our lives in a new land had taught us. It all seemed so simple and so obvious. People who are survivors are better placed to build businesses that survive. People who have shown the resilience and adaptability to move to new countries and start again from scratch are better able to weather the inevitable storms of entrepreneurship and start businesses that last. And people who have experienced deep hardships in their lives are more likely to want to create companies that have positive impacts and leave a better world for all.
I was reminded of the story of Andrew Grove, which had inspired me when I first moved from my adopted home of Turkey to study in Miami. And revisiting his story, I was struck by how it contains some of the reasons for the remarkable success of immigrant entrepreneurs. In his own writing, Grove talked about the importance of “strategic inflection points,” those key moments at which businesses must adapt or die; parallels can be drawn, of course, between the decision faced by Grove himself in Hungary, and by hundreds of millions of refugees the world over, when the choice was between life-threatening danger at home and the risk of starting again from nothing abroad. Even those people who emigrate in peaceful times, rather than fleeing as refugees, still must make bold decisions at a strategic inflection point when they choose to surrender their old life and risk all the pain associated with birthing a new life in an unfamiliar place.
The story of Grove's subsequent escape from Hungary to Austria and, ultimately, the United States correlates to the key decisions businesses have to make to survive. Just like Grove, they must know when the time is right to change, set a clear vision of where they wish to go (in his memoir, Grove tells how during his escape from Hungary he didn't take his eyes from the lights that the smuggler tells them to be Austria “and trudged towards them as if they were a magnet”), and plan methodically how to achieve that vision while also retaining the flexibility to improvise rapidly when circumstances dictate (as Grove did by choosing when to leave the train heading to the border and throwing his life into the hands of the smuggler who offered him a new route to freedom). Any entrepreneur needs to know, just as Grove did, when to call on the help of others, like the friend who joined him on his escape and his family in New York who welcomed him there. And immigrant entrepreneurs, like Grove, generally understand much better than their native counterparts the enormous importance of community for success because it's only when you lose something that you truly realize its value, and it's only when you are starting anew with nothing that you come to appreciate how every connection increases your strength.
Thinking about my experiences and Grove's, I was inspired to look deeper into the stories of other immigrant entrepreneurs and to further research the whole phenomenon of immigrant entrepreneurship itself. And that's when I discovered the facts that provide the foundation of this book.12
Immigrants are more than twice as likely as native-born residents to be entrepreneurs.
Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants.
Fortune 500 companies founded by immigrants or their children generated more than $7 trillion in revenue in 2022, more than the GDP of every country in the world apart from the U.S. and China.
Four out of five billion-dollar startups have founders or leading executives who are first- or second-generation immigrants.
Immigrant-founded businesses grow faster and survive longer than those founded by natives.
But despite everything I was discovering, when I looked in the business literature for accounts of the lessons that could be learned from immigrant entrepreneurship, they simply weren't there. True, there has been research on immigrant entrepreneurs, but most of it focuses on the weaknesses of immigrants: the things that they lack and the ways in which they compensate. And these are important issues to examine because, as I will argue throughout this book, the strategies immigrants devise to overcome their disadvantages are so successful that everyone can learn from them.
However, solely focusing on immigrants' weaknesses and their compensation strategies diverts attention from an equally important element of immigrant entrepreneurs' successes: the inherent strengths that they bring, which native entrepreneurs can also learn from. These include their greater capacity for innovation, the power of diverse perspectives, and the ability to build cross-cultural bridges in a globalized world, all of which we will also examine in detail in this book.
Finally, none of the business literature has gone beyond looking at why immigrants start enterprises to understanding why they are more likely than their native counterparts to build businesses that last. In this book, I set out to do just that, focusing on what everyone can learn from immigrants' creative ways of overcoming weaknesses and the fundamental strengths that they bring to their new countries.
To inform my conclusions, I have engaged with and studied some of the leading immigrant entrepreneurs of our times, including the people behind such modern-day success stories as Calendly, Chobani, Udemy, BioNTech, Wondery, Duolingo, and WhatsApp among others, to create a rich tapestry of immigrant entrepreneurial stories across a wide spectrum of industries and cultural backgrounds. Their stories are not only inspirational but also filled with actionable insights that I have distilled into the eight principles of immigrant entrepreneurship success that form the core of this book, principles which, when correctly applied, can help any business to improve and last longer.
Mindful of the critiques of the established literature on business longevity, I have been very careful to avoid falling into the same traps as previous authors. To avoid only focusing on big firms, I have selected companies with a wide range of sizes in a variety of different stages of development. To avoid paying too much attention to particular geographies and industries, I have examined a diverse range of businesses that reflect the breadth of the immigrant entrepreneur experience, from traditional craft companies to tech startups. And, perhaps most crucially, to check the practical value of my findings, I have applied the recommendations derived from my interviews with a wide range of leading immigrant entrepreneurs in my work with startups striving to build long-lasting businesses around the world.
In the following two chapters, I set the foundation for the rest of this book. In Chapter 2, I use the story of the Statue of Liberty as a way to introduce the history of immigrant entrepreneurship internationally and explore the contributions that immigrants have made to making the American Dream a reality. In Chapter 3, I use the inspiring stories of two great contemporary immigrant entrepreneurs to reveal what research can tell us about why immigrants are so entrepreneurial and explain how Pioneers goes beyond that to explain why they build businesses that last. This crucial contextual material prepares us for our exploration of the eight principles of success from immigrant entrepreneurs that follow in Part II.
But before we get into the details of my findings, I want to really emphasize two key points, which are absolutely fundamental to understanding the rest of Pioneers. The first point is a quick one that concerns what I am hoping to achieve by writing this book. The second one is a little more complex and concerns what I hope you will achieve after reading it.
Let's take the simpler point first. Unlike some writers on business longevity, I want to make it absolutely clear that I do not believe that there is a simple blueprint for success that can be copied and pasted into any circumstances. Because if the stories of immigrant entrepreneurs teach us anything it is about the importance of adaptability—to new circumstances, new contexts, new countries. So, this book is not about blueprints but about inspiration and ideas that can influence your own journeys and point you toward success. This book is about learning from the world's most successful entrepreneurs—immigrants—and looking at what has worked for them and thinking about how you can apply it to your own business to help it grow, survive, and thrive. In other words, following the advice contained within these pages should help increase the longevity of your business. But I can't give you all the answers; it's down to you to take the pieces that work for you and put them together in such a way that creates success in your context.
The second point concerns the precise meaning of success. And this is crucial because it's my contention that the definition of success is the number-one thing that the literature on business longevity gets wrong. But to illustrate that, let's turn to the story of another immigrant entrepreneur who, more than 100 years before Andrew Grove left Hungary, fashioned a career that exemplifies true business longevity with achievements that still resonate in the world today.
