Born or Designed?

Some say entrepreneurs are born, and entrepreneurship is a personality trait or wired into our DNA. While I think that is true to some degree, I also believe entrepreneurs can be “designed” based on the necessary skill sets and life experiences one seeks out in the primordial soup of the universe.

My journey began as an 18-year old when I landed at JFK Airport after a 10-hour flight from Moscow. My whole life was packed into one suitcase, and my future in America was stuffed into one thin envelope containing $140 and a tourist visa. My grand plan to succeed in the U.S. amounted to little more than . . . TBD.

As I stood in the airport, I inventoried what I had going for me. My calculus concluded that I had one Yes and three No’s. Yes, I could speak English. No, I didn’t have any family or acquaintances in the US. No, I didn’t know how to go about finding a job. And no, I didn’t have a college degree.

None of those no’s discouraged me. From the age of 14, I felt as though I was born in the wrong country. Even at that young age, I could feel the oppression and controlling nature of a socialist and dictatorial country. I could see the lack of human rights and the brutality of the Russian police. I knew that if I was to have any chance of living the life I imagined for myself, I had to leave Russia.

Not surprisingly, there was no red carpet rolled out for me in the “land of opportunity.” I definitely did not expect a 3-year stint washing dishes in a Mexican restaurant, selling OJ door-to-door, selling balloons in a party supply store, or being a babysitter for an Orthodox Jewish family. But that, nevertheless, was the path.

It was clear to me that to become self-sufficient I would need a college degree. Of course, there was that tiny little detail of finding $150,000 to pay for college, so I began applying for every scholarship, loan and grant I could find. As might be expected, a fat 3-ring binder that I bought to track my applications filled up fast with rejections.

At 21, after 3 years of working “immigrant” jobs and being rejected by one tuition funding source after another, my patience ran out. As a result, I became bolder and more creative with my solutions. One morning, I simply pretended I was a college student and walked onto a college campus. I wanted to attend classes just to “feel what it was like to be a student”.

Not long after I began my career as a pretend student sitting in on classes uninvited, an engineering professor saw my binder of rejections. After asking about them, he introduced me to his entrepreneur friend who was now a venture capitalist. The venture capitalist recognized my grit and determination, and offered to pay for my college education. There was one condition though to my accepting the money - I had to one day do something significant for someone else, as he was doing for me.

As grateful as I was for this lucky break, I wanted to make the most of it, so I daringly approached the Dean of the Graduate School and made a proposal. I wanted to get a Master’s degree in Engineering rather than an undergraduate degree. "If I got A’s in every class - I proposed - could I get the master’s degree rather than the undergraduate degree" Intrigued by my determination, he took it to the college’s board of advisors and they approved. As long as I could keep my GPA above 3.9, I could earn a master’s.

Not only did I achieve that, but I did it in a year and half rather than three years, which later catapulted me on to Harvard, where I earned my MBA.

In the few short years I was in the US, my tenacity, hunger and determination powered my drive and success. Perhaps as a natural-born entrepreneur, these are qualities that are coded into my DNA. But after graduating from Harvard, I made a conscious choice that would help to design a more rounded entrepreneur. I joined a Wall Street firm to learn finance to later enable myself to raise capital as a founder. I then learned how to build product, close early sales and get traction. I was then ready by design.