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11 super successful tech leaders who struggled when they first arrived to America

Published by Business Insider on Sat, 18 Apr 2015


More than a third of the top tech companies in the US were founded by people born outside of the country.Their success stories drive many immigrants to come to the US in hopes of realizing the American Dream.But just looking at their success makes it easy to overlook the fact that a lot of the immigrant founders had to overcome other problems ' from language barriers to financial constraints ' to achieve their extraordinary success.Sergey Brin had a very 'difficult first year' in the USGoogle cofounder Sergey Brin was just 6 years old when his family emigrated from the Soviet Union to settle in Maryland. His first memory of the US was of "sitting in the backseat of the car, amazed at all the giant automobiles on the highway," his mother Eugenia Brin told Moment Magazine.She says Brin struggled to adjust to the new surroundings early on. He was bashful and spoke English with a heavy accent, which made the first year a "difficult year for him."We were constantly discussing the fact we had been told that children are like sponges, that they immediately grasp the language and have no problem, and that wasnt the case," she said.It may have taken Brin longer to learn English, but he ended up in Stanford's PhD program in computer science, where he met Google cofounder Larry Page. Now Google is a $366 billion company, and Brin has a net worth of almost $30 billion.Max Levchin lost his accent by watching American TV showsPaypal cofounder Max Levchin was born in Ukraine, but moved to the US when he was 16 years old.Levchin says his family was quite poor when they got here in 1991, and he had a strong accent while speaking English. Although he was fluent in English, Levchin had a hard time understanding all the cultural references people were making at school.To help his cultural assimilation, Levchin relied on American TV shows. He says he found a TV in a dumpster and fixed it to watch all the TV shows he wanted to."That's how I lost my accent and got a crash course on 1990s American pop culture," he told Silicon Valley Business Journal.Just 7 years after settling in Chicago, Levchin cofounded PayPal in 1998 alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. It was acquried by eBay for roughly $1.5 billion in 2002.Chamath Palihapitiya grew up on welfare before becoming a billionaire investorChamath Palihapitiya, born in Sri Lanka, moved to Canada at the age of six.Early on, his father was unemployed and his family lived above a laundromat, relying on welfare.But, being less privileged only motivated Palihapitiya to work harder. He'd obsess over the Forbes' Billionaires List, one day dreaming of making it big.Finally, he got an electrical engineering degree from the University of Waterloo, and quickly became one of the most successful tech leaders at a very young age.He was the youngest VP in AOL's history at the age of 26. He was instrumental in Facebook's growth early on, becoming one of the longest-tenured senior executives there.In 2011, he quit Facebook to launch his own venture capital firm called Social+Capital Partnership, which is now one of the fastest-growing VC firms in the Silicon Valley.See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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