Immigrants: The Builders Behind Tom Szaky, Randall Pich, Safwan Shah and Sheila Marcelo

Tom Szaky

Founder & CEO, TerraCycle — Trenton, NJ

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · X

Tom Szaky was born in Budapest in 1982, the only child of two doctors, in a communist Hungary where, as he tells it, the first television he ever saw was sitting in the garbage.

When he was four, the Chernobyl disaster destabilized the region, and his parents seized the opening: the family left as political refugees, hopping around Europe seeking asylum before finally landing in Canada, where Tom grew up in Toronto surrounded by a strong conservationist culture.

At Princeton, a fall-break trip to Montreal introduced him to friends feeding kitchen scraps to red worms — and to the astonishing fertilizer the worms produced. In 2001, as a freshman, Szaky founded TerraCycle to build a business on waste itself: “eco-capitalism,” profitable and planet-healing at once.

He won business-plan contests to fund it, and then did the thing founders are never supposed to do — he turned down his biggest prize, a $1 million investment, because the money came with strings that would have bent the mission. He dropped out of Princeton in his sophomore year to run the company full-time.

"Growing up in Canada and around the strong conservationist movement sparked my interest in environmentalism."

TerraCycle grew from worm fertilizer in used soda bottles into a global recycling company headquartered in Trenton, New Jersey — running brand-sponsored collection “brigades,” turning unrecyclable packaging into new products sold at major retailers, and expanding into reuse systems.

The refugee kid who marveled at what North Americans threw away built a career on a single heresy: there is no such thing as waste, only raw material in the wrong place.

Wikipedia — “Tom Szaky”
IMD Business School — “TerraCycle: Outsmarting Waste” (case study)

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Thai Lee  ·  Tope Awotona

Randall Pich

Founder & CEO, LiveFit Apparel (LVFT) — Long Beach, CA

Official links: Website · Instagram

Randall Pich's parents fled Cambodia's Khmer Rouge genocide and rebuilt in East Long Beach, where Randall grew up amid poverty and gang culture — Section 8 housing, food stamps, and a neighborhood that swallowed plenty of his peers. His way up was the gym.

While studying kinesiology at Cal State Long Beach, he worked as a personal trainer at Bally Total Fitness — and then Bally filed for bankruptcy and sold off hundreds of locations, and the job was gone.

Six credits short of his degree, Pich made the call his mother opposed and every founder recognizes: he dropped out to bet on the apparel brand he had been building on the side, LiveFit, which he had started with $300. “Make it or break it,” as he tells it — and he made it.

LiveFit grew from a trainer's side hustle into a multimillion-dollar international apparel company, sold in more than a hundred countries by its own account and worn by a loyal fitness community that treats the brand's motto — live fit — as a creed. The kid from the Long Beach streets built the uniform for people escaping their own.

Pich, a Wilson High School graduate, still trains, still posts, still sells the same message he needed at nineteen: your block is not your destiny. LiveFit's rise from $300 is documented in his interviews across the fitness-business press — Commune Capital's “Against All Odds” profile title says it plainly.

Commune Capital via Randall-Pich.com — “Against All Odds”
Orange County Register via Randall-Pich.com — “Apparel Company's a Perfect Fit for Founder”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Raj Sardana  ·  Safwan Shah

Safwan Shah

Founder & CEO, PayActiv — San Jose, CA

Official links: Website · X

Safwan Shah comes from a three-generation engineering family in Karachi, Pakistan, and he likes to say the career chose him.

He earned his bachelor's in electrical engineering at Karachi's NED University in 1985, came to the United States in 1989, and took a master's and a PhD in aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder — then went to work designing experiments for the U.S. space program and researching artificial neural networks, including autonomous control systems for NASA's BioServe Space Technologies.

In Silicon Valley he founded Infonox, a payments company behind widely used casino payment technology and the first biometric ATM; TSYS acquired it in 2008.

A rocket scientist had become a payments man — and the payments man had noticed something nobody in either world could unsee: workers were being financially punished by the calendar itself, paying overdraft fees and payday-loan interest on wages they had already earned. In 2012 he founded PayActiv to fix the timing.

Today PayActiv — a certified B Corp and the pioneer of earned wage access — serves millions of workers through more than a thousand employers, with partners including Walmart, ADP, Visa and Uber.

"The timing gap between work and wages is the main reason workers get hit with punitive late fees, overdraft fees and other penalties."

Shah has also taught at Berkeley's Haas School and UC Santa Cruz, and his company won a first-of-its-kind federal approval for its earned-wage-access model — regulatory recognition that the category he invented is real. The engineer from Karachi looked at the American paycheck, found the design flaw, and redesigned it.

PakAlumni — “Karachi's NED University Alum Raises $100 Million for Silicon Valley FinTech Startup”
University of Colorado Boulder — “Safwan Shah (PhD AeroEngr '94)”
ATM Marketplace — “Who's Who: Safwan Shah, the Man Behind the Software”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Randall Pich  ·  Sheila Marcelo

Sheila Marcelo

Co-founder & CEO, Ohai.ai; Founder, Care.com — New York, NY

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram

Sheila Lirio Marcelo was born and raised in the Philippines and came to the United States for Mount Holyoke College, where she graduated magna cum laude in economics — and had her first child during her undergraduate years.

She added a Harvard MBA and a Harvard law degree, had her second son, and entered the workforce with a problem no credential could solve: she could not find reliable care for her children and her ailing parents. In 2006 she founded Care.com to fix it.

Investors were skeptical that care could be a technology business; Marcelo raised more than $111 million in venture capital anyway, took Care.com public in 2014, and built it into the world's largest online marketplace for caregivers — the default answer for millions of families hunting for a babysitter, a nanny, or an aide for a parent.

She served as CEO and chairwoman until the company was sold to IAC for about $500 million, in a deal announced in 2019 and closed in 2020. Along the way she became the youngest recipient of Harvard Business School's Alumni Achievement Award.

Marcelo's next act is Ohai.ai, an AI assistant company she co-founded — the care problem, attacked with a new generation of tools, from a base in New York. The Filipina undergraduate mother who couldn't find a sitter has now spent two decades building the infrastructure of care for everyone else's family.

Startups.com — “Sheila Marcelo”
Milken Institute — “Sheila Marcelo” (speaker bio)
Wikipedia — “Sheila Lirio Marcelo”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Safwan Shah  ·  Suneera Madhani

Suneera Madhani

Founder & CEO, Stax — Orlando, FL

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · X

Suneera Madhani, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants, was working inside the payments industry when she brought her employer an idea: charge businesses a transparent subscription for payment processing instead of burying them in percentage markups. Her employer rejected it.

So in 2014 she founded Stax — originally Fattmerchant — on $50,000 raised from friends and family, and built the thing herself. The early years were the usual founder's gauntlet, and four years in came the test that defines her legend: a term sheet worth roughly $17 million, the kind of validation most founders frame.

Madhani read it, trusted her gut over the paper, and turned it down. Stax kept growing — past $100 million in recurring software revenue, past $23 billion in payments processed, to a valuation above $1 billion that made it one of the rare unicorns founded and led by a woman, with a team of more than 300.

The idea her employer threw away became a billion-dollar company in Orlando, far from the industry's usual zip codes. That rejection, she tells founders now, was the best market research she ever got.

Madhani also founded CEO School, a community and podcast coaching women founders, and is building Worth AI alongside Stax. The rejected employee became the industry's case study in pricing honesty — and in the founder's discipline of saying no to the wrong yes.

Oak Cover — “How Suneera Madhani's Rejected Pitch Led to a Billion-Dollar Startup”
The Foundr Podcast via ListenNotes — “599: They Rejected Her Idea”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Sheila Marcelo  ·  Tam Nguyen

Tam Nguyen

Chairman, Advance Beauty College — Garden Grove, CA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · X

Tam Nguyen was one year old in 1975 when his family fled Vietnam among the 125,000 refugees of that spring — his mother separated from his father in the chaos, the family reunited by the American Red Cross after three months.

His father had been a South Vietnamese military officer; in America the family started with his mother's skills as a Saigon hair stylist, opening Tam's Beauty Salon — “Tam” honoring the family and meaning, he says, heart and empathy. In 1987 his father's vision was realized: Advance Beauty College, a school to train fellow refugees for the beauty industry.

The son's path detoured remarkably — pushed toward medicine, he earned a biology degree and completed medical school, then admitted the dream wasn't his, took an MBA at Cal State Fullerton, and came home to the family business.

Under the second generation — Tam as president, and since 2022 as chairman with his sister Linh as president — the college's two campuses, in Garden Grove and Laguna Hills, have graduated nearly 50,000 students, teaching in English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Farsi. In 2020 the American Association of Cosmetology Schools named it the best beauty school in the country.

"I'm proud of my parents' legacy as part of that network of refugees that launched the modern-day nail professional."

Nguyen also teaches business management part-time at Cal State Fullerton, co-founded Nailing It for America, and serves on community boards across Orange County. The refugee baby of 1975 now runs the school that turns refugees into business owners — his father's idea, at a scale his father only imagined.

Family Business Magazine — “Family Business CEOs to Watch: Tâm Nguyễn”
NPR via North Country Public Radio — “Nailing the American Dream, with Polish”
Shoutout LA — “Meet Tam Nguyen: Community Leader & Family Business Owner”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Suneera Madhani  ·  Thai Lee

Thai Lee

President & CEO, SHI International — Austin, TX

Official links: Website

Thai Lee may be the most successful businessperson in America you have never heard of — and she prefers it that way.

Born in Bangkok to Korean parents and raised in South Korea, she came to the United States at fifteen for high school, then attended Amherst College — in its first class of women — earning degrees in biology and economics. Her father, a prominent economist, was the first Korean to graduate from Amherst.

Lee followed him to Harvard Business School, becoming the first Korean woman to earn its MBA, then deliberately spent her twenties apprenticing — brand management at Procter & Gamble, the corporate card division at American Express — because, as she tells it, she allotted herself that decade to learn business before running her own company by thirty.

In 1989 she and her then-husband, Leo Koguan, paid less than $1 million for a struggling software reseller's tiny division, Software House, and renamed it Software House International. Lee has run it ever since — the only leader the company has ever had.

"My father was a tremendous influence on all of us. He was a man of the world who believed in the power of education. Each of us has followed in his footsteps to achieve our own version of the American dream."

SHI today is a global IT giant: some $16 billion in annual revenue, more than 17,000 customers including Boeing and AT&T, and the distinction of being the largest minority- and woman-owned business enterprise in the United States. Lee still owns 60 percent, never took the company public, keeps her own calendar, and drives herself to work.

The quietest billionaire in tech built one of its biggest companies — organically, privately, and entirely on her own terms.

Forbes — “Thai Lee” (profile)
Dave Lu — “Founder Stories: Thai Lee of SHI International”
SHI International — “About Us” (Forbes profile of Thai Lee)

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Tam Nguyen  ·  Tom Szaky

Raj Sardana

Founder & CEO, Innova Solutions — Atlanta, GA

Official links: Website

Raj Sardana was born in Delhi in 1960 to Punjabi parents whom the 1947 Partition had displaced, and for twenty years the family lived in dilapidated government housing — no refrigerator, no telephone, no television.

He arrived in the United States in 1981 with about $100, bound for a master's degree in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, and paid his way washing dishes in the university cafeteria. Defense work followed — Howmet Aerospace, then Teledyne CAE, where by 1987 he was working on Tomahawk missile engines. Then the Cold War ended, and the job vanished.

Sardana had a mortgage, a six-month-old daughter, and his parents living under his roof. So he did the thing immigrants do: he started. First a print shop in Stone Mountain, then, in 1998, American CyberSystems — the staffing and IT services company that grew into today's Innova Solutions, rebranded in 2022.

The firm now employs more than 50,000 people worldwide, with annual sales reported in the billions. Atlanta magazine readers know the address — a Buckhead mansion. Sardana remembers the government housing.

Both are true, and the distance between them is the story.

"I started my life from scratch here,"

Sardana's second verified line could be this list's motto: “Survival is the key when you don't know where your next meal is going to come from. But going through all this adversity made me stronger.”

The cafeteria dishwasher who lost his defense job at the worst possible moment built a 50,000-person company — and calls the adversity the making of him.

Buckhead — “Immigrant to Billionaire Tech Tycoon: Raj Sardana Lives Out the American Dream in Buckhead”
Zee News World — “How This Delhi-Born Man Created a Multi-Billion-Dollar Business in the US”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Pasquale "Pat" Mascaro  ·  Randall Pich

Tope Awotona

Founder & CEO, Calendly — Atlanta, GA

Official links: Website · X

Tope Awotona was born in Lagos, Nigeria, into a middle-class family — his father a microbiologist turned entrepreneur, his mother at the central bank. When Tope was twelve, he watched his father get shot and killed in a carjacking, a trauma that left him unable to eat or sleep for six months and with insomnia he carries to this day.

In 1996, at fifteen, he moved with his family to Atlanta. He studied computer science, then business, at the University of Georgia, and became a software salesman — IBM, Perceptive Software, Vertafore, EMC — while starting businesses on the side, the way his father had. A dating website flopped.

A projector company flopped. A garden-tools company flopped. But the salesman's own daily frustration kept nagging at him: the hours burned on back-and-forth emails just to book one meeting.

In 2013 he bet everything on it — emptied his 401(k), maxed his credit cards, poured in roughly $200,000 of life savings, quit his job at EMC, and launched Calendly from Atlanta.

"It could've gone really badly. With my previous businesses, I hedged my bets a little bit and gave myself a way out. With Calendly I flew into a war zone and put in every cent I had. If you're going to do something, you have to go all in,"

Calendly's simple link rewired how the world schedules, spreading from user to user with almost no marketing spend. In 2021 investors put $350 million into the company at a valuation above $3 billion, and Forbes has estimated Awotona's net worth at $1.4 billion — naming the boy from Lagos one of America's wealthiest immigrants.

He says he wanted, from an early age, to redeem his father. Consider it done.

Because of Them We Can — “Tope Awotona Becomes One of America's Wealthiest Immigrants”
Inc. — “This Atlanta Founder's Secret Weapon in Building His Company: Growing Up in Nigeria”
AfroTech — “Tope Awotona”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Tom Szaky  ·  Winston Damarillo

Winston Damarillo

Founder, Talino Venture Studios; Co-founder & CEO, BayaniPay — Manhattan Beach, CA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · X

Winston Damarillo moved to the United States from the Philippines at nineteen, an industrial and mechanical engineering graduate of De La Salle University, and by the early 1990s he was a venture capitalist at Intel Capital — a Filipino engineer inside the room where Silicon Valley decided what got funded.

He drew a conclusion from that seat: his countrymen had the talent to build world-class technology, and what they lacked was mentors, capital, and proof. So he became the proof. He co-founded Exist Global in 2001 and Gluecode, an open-source software company IBM acquired in 2005 — a deal reported at about $50 million.

Logicblaze followed, acquired by Iona Technologies in 2007, and Webtide, acquired by Intalio. Three exits, one thesis, stated by a longtime colleague recalling his mantra at Exist: the company existed to dissolve the notion that Filipinos can only be consumers of technology.

Damarillo then industrialized the thesis — through Talino Venture Studios he builds startups that pair Filipino engineering with global markets.

"Filipino Americans are modern-day heroes,"

His most personal venture is BayaniPay — “bayani” means hero — a financial platform built for the Filipino diaspora, which raised $4.5 million in seed funding and now helps overseas Filipinos pay for property, tuition and bills back home. The Intel venture capitalist has spent thirty years reversing the brain drain, one company at a time.

BayaniPay — “BayaniPay CEO Talks About Creating a Financial Solution for Filipino Americans”
Global Venturing — “Innovative Regions: Philippines”
Positively Filipino — “The Disruptor”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Tope Awotona  ·  Alfredo Duarte