The Immigrant Entrepreneur

If you are a host on Airbnb, maybe you would like to get paid before your guests arrive. Then you could beautify that room – so that it is worth what you are charging!

Two Venezuelan/American friends founded Payfully https://www.payfully.co/, to help you do just that!

The early ancestors of Luis Sculls were Quakers from England who came first to America and then later to Cuba. Generations later, when Castro’s communist government took over Cuba, their family with thousands of other Cubans, moved to Venezuela. (No, they did not all come to Miami).

Luis Scull grew up in Caracas, … More

One of Luis’ favorite television shows when he lived in El Salvador was Beverly Hills.  

After he arrived at San Francisco airport his uncle drove him around Pacific Heights, where all the elites live.

Luis, thinking this was what America was like, kept spotting his house.

Then his uncle drove to their actual house at 14^th and Woodward in the Mission District, where Luis ended up in a bedroom with his step-brother, 2 sisters, and grandmother.

By the time, he was 21 he recognized how hard he would have to work to accomplish his dream and that he would … More

Otto Berkes is Chief Technology Officer at CA Technologies, a 4 billion company with 13,000 employees in 40 countries. CA Technologies helps companies build software, run their applications, manage their cyber-security, and much more.

Today he manages engineering teams, people like himself when he co-founded Xbox, the game console on which 40 million people still play hundreds of games today.

Like many engineers, Otto is a curious tinkerer, interested to build, take-apart and put back together again, to not leave a problem alone until he can at least understand it better.

He may have had an advantage … More

Francesca Cavallo and Elena Favilli, wrote and published a children’s picture book, Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, 100 Tales to Dream Big. And they are creating their own story, moving to America to compose a picture book! That is 220 pages long! That has 60 illustrators! And yes, that made crowdfunding history with well over $1 million in purchases

In this interview I asked Francesca not about the technical details of book contracts, and crowdfunding but how she and Elena created their own foundation for over 10 years, Francesca through learning to stand up in theatre, and how … More

Filip Valicia develops products for underwater robots and many other applications. He has also painstakingly laid out the process for you to develop your product. You can see this process at his website, The Product Startup. He also helps those crowdfunding a product – which is how I discovered his service.

Filip escaped from communist Czechoslovakia, with his mother, when he was six years old.

His fate, as a product developer guru was set into motion, when he was in a Greek refugee camp. One day, he found a discarded toy truck, with a missing back axle.  He found … More

Poverty is a hard place to be. Many of us, perhaps most of us, as we started out in life, lived for years one paycheck away from poverty, with no savings. Yet people do rise out of poverty each day.

According to one my interviewees, poverty is big business. Apparently the various levels of government spend over 900 billion dollars every year, to pay for the food, housing, medical care, and other expenses for the poor. Yet the number of poor is not declining. In 2003 there were 23 million on food stamps and in 2012 there were 46 million … More

Chiara Cokieng is a young entrepreneur and copy-writer, in the Philippines who thinks a lot.

She told me she wanted to be an entrepreneur many years before she could spell it.

She lifted herself up above her environment in two ways – she became a champion free style wrestler, and she began entering math competitions starting locally and then going international. She also wrote at quite a young age, a 100 page sales letter for her first employer, to find out if through a mix of storytelling, empathizing, and reason-why copy-writing, they could double their monthly recurring revenue. They did.… More

Eric Siu, my guest today, practices patience like a marathon runner. Patience is simply an understanding that there are laws of nature at work.

Patience is not an excuse to stop working. Quite the opposite, patience pushes you to not give up, when you don’t see immediate results.

This is so valuable for aspiring entrepreneurs and immigrants to add to their understanding of an active patience, a proactive patience, so to speak.

Eric Siu produces a seemingly nonstop stream of content.  So as I record this introduction, on October 12, 2016, at his Twitter account https://twitter.com/ericosiu he published 30 substantial … More

Immigrant refugees appear every day. A dictator claims more power, an invasion occurs, discrimination grows.  Nations that could do something, do nothing.

Some of the people in those countries decide to take their chances on a new land. When they arrive in that new land, some of them are welcome, some are unwelcome, but mostly they are ignored, left to their own devices – that is to say, they must start making a new foundation, and quickly, where they are.

This episode is dedicated to two refugees among the 120,000 Venezuelans who fled to their neighboring country of Colombia, South … More

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Entrepreneurs often spend hours each day working in their home office. Why not enjoy better interior design and make it a positive place! Especially if the design fee is a low, fixed price!

Jaime Gonzalez and his online interior design company, The Man Home (Listen for his discount for you, toward the end of this podcast!)  may be able to help you. Their target market fits the straight-forward business model and pricing: single … More