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AI labs are buying data from dead startups to train their models
By Matthew King | MIT Technology Review Magazine | Nov-Dec, 2026 Issue
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When Keelan Miskell began winding down his crypto startup this year, he didn’t think its data was worth much: the users were anonymous, the company just a few years old. But he’s since turned the firm’s digital archives into real money. He’s netted roughly $25,000 for his code base and a still-pending amount (likely around $15,000) for the workspace data in Google, Notion, Figma, and Slack. “At least all that stuff we were doing for two and a half years is worth something to someone somewhere,” he says.
The sale was brokered by a company called SimpleClosure, part of a new growth sector in tech: businesses catering to dying startups. Estimates from Carta and AngelList show shutdowns rising between 26% and 56% annually in recent years, and an end-of-life ecosystem—including coaches, “death doulas,” and firms that help handle the legal, tax, and operational headaches of going belly-up—has emerged. Now tech undertakers are selling the data remains to AI labs.
SimpleClosure added data sales to its services in April. Its Asset Hub platform helps founders sell their code and workspace data—emails, chats, documents. Buyers include foundation AI labs, vendors that construct simulated workspaces for AI training, and mature tech companies building their own models. Asset Hub has handled over 150 deals and expects to return over $10 million to startups by the end of 2026. CEO Dori Yona has seen these transactions, once rare and “somewhat taboo,” become increasingly routine, with 47% of SimpleClosure deals now including code or data sales.
Demand for defunct companies’ data emerged suddenly last year, as AI training labs hit the limits of public and synthetic datasets. Surge AI, for example, buys data to build “reinforcement-learning gyms” where clients’ AI agents practice tasks—think debugging a complex IT architecture or drafting appellate briefs.
Real archives avoid common errors in synthetic worlds, such as references to dates that don’t exist, but the extent of performance gains remains unclear. No company has yet released tests comparing results of real-world data training with the alternatives. Pricing reflects this uncertainty: Buyers quote wildly different numbers.
That hasn’t stopped bigger deals from happening. This past August, as part of Spirit Airlines’ bankruptcy, Google outbid the AI data company Mercor to buy the carrier’s decades of data, including 100 million emails, 500 million Teams messages, and 176,000 employee records. The price tag: $10 million. And Bloomberg reported in September that SpaceX’s AI unit is weighing buying data from struggling startups.
Legally, this all could get iffy. Spirit’s flight attendants’ union objected to the sale on privacy grounds, and Greg Ewing, an attorney who advises AI startups, has called such data “legally radioactive.” Suppliers employ data scientists to scrub personally identifiable information and exclude HR records, and buyers say they scrub too.
There’s also the question of who profits from these windfalls. The proceeds typically flow to senior creditors and investors—not employees. To Ifeoma Ajunwa, a law professor at Emory University and author of The Quantified Worker, this represents a form of “captured capital.” Legal precedent allows for monitoring to help workers do their jobs, but once a firm is out of business, that justification vanishes.
While many see this new market as a chance for failing businesses to recover some value, these wind-down sales also have limitations. Founders have little to no visibility into who is buying the data and what they plan to do with it. Plus, there’s little assurance they’re getting a fair offer. Data prices will likely stabilize in the coming year, though, unless an AI bubble pops first. Either way, tech’s new undertakers will be there to appraise what’s left.
3 key takeaways from the article
- A new growth sector in tech has emerged: businesses catering to dying startups. Estimates show that shutdowns rising between 26% and 56% annually in recent years, and an end-of-life ecosystem—including coaches, “death doulas,” and firms that help handle the legal, tax, and operational headaches of going belly-up—has emerged. Now tech undertakers are selling the data remains to AI labs.
- Demand for defunct companies’ data emerged suddenly last year, as AI training labs hit the limits of public and synthetic datasets. Real archives avoid common errors in synthetic worlds but the extent of performance gains remains unclear.
- While many see this new market as a chance for failing businesses to recover some value, these wind-down sales also have limitations. Founders have little to no visibility into who is buying the data and what they plan to do with it. Plus, there’s little assurance they’re getting a fair offer. Data prices will likely stabilize in the coming year, though, unless an AI bubble pops first. Either way, tech’s new undertakers will be there to appraise what’s left.
(Copyrigh lies with the publisher)
Topics: AI and Society, Technology & Society
Strategy & Business Model Section
The Risks of Scaling Too Fast
By Benjamin Hallen | Harvard Business Review Magazine | November–December 2026
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Tales of startups that have raised staggering sums with little more than marketing hype have become part of entrepreneurial lore. Consider WeWork, which secured billions of dollars from top-tier investors on the strength of audacious claims about its plans to “elevate the world’s consciousness” through the “reinvention of work.” The founders insisted it wasn’t simply another real estate venture and deserved a technology-style valuation because of its proprietary WeOS. That argument succeeded—until the company suddenly came crashing down.
Headline-grabbing stories like that point to a deeper and more pervasive rot in startup culture: the belief that the rules of business—especially the need for a viable business model—somehow don’t apply to entrepreneurial ventures. Yet even companies with enviable top-line growth often collapse under the weight of their own economics. In 2025 the authors studied more than 1,000 startups that had achieved unicorn status over the past decade and found that fewer than 150 had become prosperous public companies. In many cases the problem wasn’t bad luck—it was bad advice.
Over the past decade, the authors studied high-growth entrepreneurship in depth, conducting more than 250 interviews with founders, investors, and board members across consumer marketplaces, online fashion, drones, clean technologies, financial services, and edtech. Although their insights emerged from studying venture-backed startups, they have seen the same pattern—and the same mistakes—play out in small and midsize firms and in large companies launching new businesses.
Paradoxically, they have realized, the key to long-term, profitable growth across all these contexts isn’t chasing growth. It’s the opposite. Enduring growth is usually the result of hewing to a business fundamental: solid unit economics. That often requires intentionally slowing down, taking the time to build the right foundation, and only then scaling up. In contrast with the dominant “growth first” approach, the authors call this approach “foundation first.”
The Growth Trap. Why does chasing growth sabotage startups’ long-term success? Because in their rush to reach scale, entrepreneurs often settle on flawed business models with weak unit economics. They may find a path to sales growth or product-market fit. Yet since they neglect the underlying economics, their businesses may never be viable. Technically speaking, unit economics are the incremental revenues and costs associated with each additional sale. They go beyond traditional accounting margins to consider a variety of per-unit costs, including customer acquisition and customer support. When unit economics are ignored, startups often focus on expanding the market for a product that customers love—but do so at a price below what the product costs to produce and sell.
Founders also sometimes assume that network effects (when a product or service becomes more valuable to its users as the number of customers using it increases) will save a growth-first business. Once the business grows very large—the thinking goes—it will become an essential service. While that logic is alluring and might work for some companies, it often rests on a misunderstanding of unit economics.
Experiment Broadly to Understand Deeply. Founders are taught—correctly—to run rigorous experiments to size up demand, pricing, and willingness to pay. What’s missing is the same rigor on the cost side. The foundation-first approach treats cost structure not as something to optimize later but as a set of hypotheses to be explored early on, alongside revenue potential.
In practice this means conducting tests across the entire business model. Which activities truly require human labor, and which can be simplified, automated, or delegated to artificial intelligence? Which design choices quietly lock in high variable costs? And which cost drivers improve—or deteriorate—as volume increases? Most founders already know they need to run tests to assess minimum viable products and potential pivots, but their experimentation is focused almost exclusively on demand and growth. Foundation-first entrepreneurs instead probe both revenue and cost drivers with an eye on unit economics. This broader approach is slower and more laborious, but it typically yields a simpler, more profitable business model with real product-market fit and a clearer strategy. By experimenting across many elements of the business—including customer acquisition channels, service levels, operations, and target segments—founders uncover not only what works but also how different levers interact.
The other guidelines are: Simplify to Scale, Go Slow to Go Far, and Ventures Beyond Startups.
2 key takeaways from the article
- Tales of startups that have raised staggering sums with little more than marketing hype have become part of entrepreneurial lore. Headline-grabbing such stories point to a deeper and more pervasive rot in startup culture: the belief that the rules of business—especially the need for a viable business model—somehow don’t apply to entrepreneurial ventures. Yet even companies with enviable top-line growth often collapse under the weight of their own economics
- The gospel of “growth at all costs” has dominated startup thinking for the past two decades. The authors’ research suggests that it’s time to reconsider this orthodoxy. The foundation-first model—focusing on unit profitability, broad experimentation, and delayed growth—offers a more reliable path for most ventures, whether they’re VC-backed startups, new corporate businesses, or SMBs. Pursuing growth at all costs may have worked for a few outlier successes, but for too many others it’s a trap. The future of entrepreneurship lies in the recognition that the key to long-term, profitable growth isn’t chasing growth. In fact, it’s just the opposite—intentionally slowing down, building the right foundation, and only then scaling aggressively.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Scaling, Strategy, Business Model
When Cultures Collide in Crisis
By S. Amy Sommer and Christine M. Pearson | MIT Sloan Management Review | November 04, 2026
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High-stakes disruptions test businesses’ cultural agility as well as their operational resilience. As supply chains stretch across continents and leadership teams span time zones, cultural agility becomes a business essential. Many crises now unfold across cultures as much as they do across borders, but few executives are prepared for what happens when their best-laid response plans are lost in cultural translation. Even small differences in tone, timing, and language can determine whether leaders are seen as trustworthy or tone-deaf in the moments that matter most. Subtle cultural divides can collapse into relational ruptures, even between neighbors and partners.
Major disruptions magnify hidden fractures, and cultural disconnects are among the deepest challenges that a company can face. Most leaders underestimate the role that culture plays in a crisis in terms of who speaks up, who takes charge, and how quickly teams move when everything is on the line.
Crucially, the meaning of a crisis itself is culturally interpreted. What individual societies expect from leaders in moments of disruption — whether transparency, humility, decisiveness, or restraint — can vary widely. For global organizations, the future of crisis leadership belongs to those who can lead across cultural divides.
How, exactly, does culture interfere with crisis response?
Communication Breakdown. In some national and professional cultures, direct communication is expected: Say it plainly, quickly, and publicly. Others prioritize nuance and saving face: Say it indirectly or behind closed doors. In a crisis, this behavioral gap can be deadly. When cultural assumptions shape how people signal urgency, misunderstanding itself becomes a systemic risk to manage.
Pushback Under Pressure. Across cultures, expectations vary in how, or whether, people lower in an organizational hierarchy tend to question their superiors. In some environments, employees are generally comfortable challenging leaders or raising concerns directly. In others, hierarchy carries stronger expectations of deference, and speaking up without invitation can be seen as inappropriate. These differences become especially consequential during a crisis. If authority is rarely challenged, critical information may never reach senior leaders, even when front-line employees see danger. The risk of critical information being softened, delayed, or discounted is amplified in global organizations due to differing cultural expectations about hierarchy. What appears to be alignment at the top may reflect hesitation or constraint further down. Silence from local teams does not necessarily signal a lack of awareness or agreement but deference and respect. Leaders must recognize when their own style suppresses input. Empowering local voices often requires deliberate outreach and clear decision protocols that make it safe to raise concerns. This is particularly important in more hierarchical cultures, where hesitation to question authority can slow a crisis response.
Timing Misalignment. To some people, every minute counts in a crisis. To others, process matters more than speed, and relationships outrank deadlines. These mindsets can clash hard in emergency situations. The lesson for crisis leaders is not to slow down or speed up but to explicitly surface the issue of tempo before a crisis forces it. How fast is fast enough? Who decides when urgency overrides consultation? These are both operational and cultural questions.
What Culturally Fluent Leaders Do Differently. The most effective leaders prepare before the storm, listen through ambiguity, clarify decision-making authority, and restore confidence by communicating in culturally adept ways. They Prepare for the Unexpected, Decode the Silence, Establish Decision Authority, and Adapt the Message and the Medium.
Fundamentally different assumptions about decisions made under pressure are signals of friction, not of failure. But cultural fluency cannot be improvised in the middle of an emergency. It must be developed in advance and tested through realistic simulations that expose teams to the kinds of cultural tensions they will face under pressure. Organizations that prepare well build cross-cultural and crisis management capabilities before an emergency occurs.
3 key takeaways from the article
- High-stakes disruptions test businesses’ cultural agility as well as their operational resilience. Many crises now unfold across cultures as much as they do across borders, but few executives are prepared for what happens when their best-laid response plans are lost in cultural translation. Even small differences in tone, timing, and language can determine whether leaders are seen as trustworthy or tone-deaf in the moments that matter most. Subtle cultural divides can collapse into relational ruptures, even between neighbors and partners.
- What Culturally Fluent Leaders Do Differently. The most effective leaders prepare before the storm, listen through ambiguity, clarify decision-making authority, and restore confidence by communicating in culturally adept ways. They Prepare for the Unexpected, Decode the Silence, Establish Decision Authority, and Adapt the Message and the Medium.
- Fundamentally different assumptions about decisions made under pressure are signals of friction, not of failure. But cultural fluency cannot be improvised in the middle of an emergency. It must be developed in advance and tested through realistic simulations that expose teams to the kinds of cultural tensions they will face under pressure. Organizations that prepare well build cross-cultural and crisis management capabilities before an emergency occurs.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Culture, Strategy & Business Model, Communication in Crisis, Strategic Communication
Personal Development, Leading & Managing Section
Bob Bowman on winning: Show up and do your work
McKinsey & Company | October 30, 2026
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When Michael Phelps’s goggles filled with water in the 200-meter butterfly final at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he didn’t panic. He counted his strokes, just as he’d practiced for years, and broke the world record. The coach who prepared him for that moment is Bob Bowman, now director of swimming and diving and the head men’s coach at the University of Texas at Austin. In this conversation, McKinsey Senior Partners Kevin Carmody and Tiffany Burns talk with Bowman about how he defines winning, why he builds every plan backward from a “dream goal,” and how leaders can create a culture where people actually want feedback.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
The power of showing up every day. According to Bob one of the things he thinks is most important in any endeavor is showing up day in, day out, consistently. That’s what really gets you where you want to go. If you wait on motivation or rely on motivation, it’s not going to do it for you.
Winning is really about improvement. According to Bob Bowman when he thinks about winning and tries to come up with one word, it’s probably “improvement.” According to him, my job is to get everybody I have influence over to make as much incremental improvement as possible every day. If you’re doing that over time, you’re going to get from 45th place at the NCAAs to number one. It’s really a process-driven system. I focus on the process and leave outcomes out there because they depend on other people. We focus on the things we control: the process of how we practice and the attitude we bring to our work. If people buy into that and live the right way, they’re going to win.
The right people and the nerve to make the call. It’s all about having the right people in the right positions. If you have the wrong people there, they’ve got to go. Over time, you start defining what you need to carry out the mission, which in this case is to compete at the top level: what events you want to cover and what qualities you want in the people you bring in. Then you decide whether the people you have can do that. If they can’t, they need to find a new place to be, and you bring in the people who can.
About great performance and routine, what he observes in great performers like Léon Marchand, Michael, and Allison Schmitt, people who have won gold medals, is that they’re not amazing in practice every day. But they have a high average level most days. On a scale of one to ten, where one is terrible and ten is as good as you can be, they’re an eight most days. Every now and then they’re a three, and every now and then a ten. Fifteen percent is better than zero. We equated it to money in the bank. Some days you put a big deposit in the bank. Some days it’s a couple of pennies, but you’re doing something every day. Your effort and your attitude are the two things you control all the time. So when you don’t feel like doing something, don’t let that be a limiting factor. Just do it anyway. Do the best you can.
What separates people who can overcome adversity from those who can’t? According to Bob no one has a straight line to success. Everybody who has done anything meaningful will have failed many times. I encourage people to embrace failure. If you’re going to fail, fail big. That means you’re trying. Go for it. When you have something like that, try to take the emotion out of it, focus on what you can do, and control the controllables.
Start with a dream goal, then work backward. According to Bob Bowman, first he wants to have a very long-term goal that isn’t very specific but has an emotional component that drives the whole process. He calls it a “dream goal.” Then we start working back. Working back, we get to the most important goal, which he calls the immediate goal. The most important decision any of us is going to make is: What are we going to do in the present moment to carry us through these other goals?
Coaching people who want to get better. We try to sell people on “why,” which is the key element. I tell anyone who comes into my program, “You’re welcome to ask me why we’re going to do anything we do here, and I should have an answer.” One out of every 50 times, the answer is going to be, “I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and I think it might work.” We do experiments, but most of the time, I should have an answer for why we’re doing this exercise, at this time, in this way. Once they understand that and buy into the “why,” it’s easy to get them to do it.
2 key takeaways from the article
- When Michael Phelps’s goggles filled with water in the 200-meter butterfly final at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he didn’t panic. He counted his strokes, just as he’d practiced for years, and broke the world record. The coach who prepared him for that moment is Bob Bowman, now director of swimming and diving and the head men’s coach at the University of Texas at Austin. In this conversation, McKinsey Senior Partners Kevin Carmody and Tiffany Burns talk with Bowman about how he defines winning, why he builds every plan backward from a “dream goal,” and how leaders can create a culture where people actually want feedback.
- The following are excerpts from his talk. A) According to Bob one of the things he thinks is most important in any endeavor is showing up day in, day out, consistently. That’s what really gets you where you want to go. If you wait on motivation or rely on motivation, it’s not going to do it for you. B) According to him, my job is to get everybody I have influence over to make as much incremental improvement as possible every day. C) It’s all about having the right people in the right positions. D) People who have won gold medals, are that they’re not amazing in practice every day. But they have a high average level most days. E) Everybody who has done anything meaningful will have failed many times. I encourage people to embrace failure. F) Start with a dream goal, then work backward. G) And while coaching people who want to get better he tries to sell people on “why,” which is the key element.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Leadership, Coaching, Mentoring
What Sports Psychology Teaches Leaders About Resilience
By Lien De Pau | Forbes | November 04, 2026
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Sports psychology has spent decades studying one question: why do some people perform well when it matters most, and others freeze? The answers apply far beyond sport. A tense argument at home or a failed launch at work uses the same human machinery in our brains as a penalty kick does.
Resilience Is A Set Of Skills, Not A Caracter Trait. Many people believe resilience is something you either have or you do not have. The research on elite performers points the other way. Resilience looks more like a set of trainable habits than a personality type. Athletes build it through repetition, honest reflection, and recovery time. Athletes do not wait for adversity to appear. They create small versions of it in their daily training.
Why People Freeze When Stress Levels Rise. Freezing under pressure has a well-known pattern. When stakes rise, people start monitoring their behavior in slow motion. They think about each step instead of trusting practice. Because of that, mental performance gets stiff and slow. It happens to all of us. You have run a hundred pitches. But on the one that matters, you start overthinking every sentence. What we can learn from athletes is simple and works well in a professional context too: shift your attention from all the process details to one clear cue.
Skill 1: Review Your Actions. Athletes watch tape. They do not replay their mistakes for days on end. But they study what happened, adjust, and move on from there. Most of us often do the opposite. We either ignore the loss, and pretend it never happened. Or we replay it, in endless loops at night. Neither helps. Try to have a short review about a stress event you were in: what happened, what was in my control, what will I do differently next time. Ten minutes to review is plenty. Then stop. And move on once the lesson is learned.
Skill 2: Use Routines To Stay Steady. Top performers rely on routines before key moments. A tennis player bounces the ball the same number of times. A runner has a warm-up sequence they do not change. A routine gives your mind something certain when everything else feels uncertain. You can build one before any big meeting: a short walk, three slow breaths, a quick replay of a sentence that anchors you. What you do, matters less than the consistency of doing the same thing every time you go into a big meeting. A calm body also helps. If your pulse is racing, your thinking suffers.
Skill 3: Recover Your Mind. Athletes treat recovery as a part of training. They know that growth happens during rest, not during the work itself. Business leaders usually treat rest as optional. But that’s a quiet way to lose resilience over time. If you want to keep performing, schedule recovery the way you schedule meetings. Rebuilding your energy after running on empty shows how long that really takes.
Skill 4: Build Confidence From Evidence. Athletes do not rely on motivational speeches. They rely on proof and evidence. They know how many hours they trained and what they have already done towards their goals. Business leaders can do the same. Keep a short list of hard moments you handled well: a tough hire, a lost client you recovered from, a deal that nearly collapsed. Read it before a high-pressure event. It is more reliable than telling yourself to believe in yourself. Confidence built on evidence holds up when the day gets difficult, because it is not based on a mood.
3 key takeaways from the article
- Sports psychology has spent decades studying one question: why do some people perform well when it matters most, and others freeze? The answers apply far beyond sport. A tense argument at home or a failed launch at work uses the same human machinery in our brains as a penalty kick does.
- Freezing under pressure has a well-known pattern. When stakes rise, people start monitoring their behavior in slow motion. They think about each step instead of trusting practice. Because of that, mental performance gets stiff and slow. It happens to all of us. You have run a hundred pitches. But on the one that matters, you start overthinking every sentence. What we can learn from athletes is simple and works well in a professional context too: shift your attention from all the process details to one clear cue.
- What sports psychology teaches leaders about resilience can be summed up in four skills: review your actions, use routines to stay steady, recover your mind, and build confidence from evidence. None of these require a coach or a lot of time. They only require that you treat your mind with the same seriousness an athlete treats a body.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Resilience, Personal Development, Leadership
Entrepreneurship Section
Apple’s Cult-Like Customers Are Every Business Owner’s Dream. Here’s Why
By Kimanzi Constable | Inc | November 4, 2026
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The internet has been buzzing with Apple’s launch of its first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, and a MacBook Pro with a PROLED XDR Display and a touchscreen for the first time. Each new product has been met with excitement and, it seems, an equal amount of criticism.
According to the author, as the founder of multiple companies, including a corporate marketing consultancy, he finds the conversations puzzling. There’s criticism about the iPhone Duo cracking, the increased price of Apple products, and Apple’s customers being described as a “cult.”
What the commentary misses is a crucial lesson for founders and businesses—what kind of a customer base do you want? Here’s why a cult-like customer base is the goal, how to drive exponential revenue growth, and how to build a raving consumer base the Apple way.
Create superfans, not just customers. When evaluating Apple or any other company with a “cult” customer base, ask yourself: Do you want customers who buy only when they feel your offers are completely revolutionary, first, and different from anything else on the market? Or do you want customers who buy every offer you put out because they’re loyal to your brand and will support it for life?
The goal should be to build brand loyalty and a consumer base that’s willing to overlook your missteps and buy each of your offers because they want to support your brand. Cult-like customers are lifelong buyers, which is why the iPhone Duo sold out in minutes. The brand loyalty and customer base Apple has built are why they’ll keep selling out the Duo despite reports of cracking, and why their customers will spend up to $14,549 on a laptop. That’s the kind of customer base every founder and organization should strive to build — lifelong consumers who buy everything. You get there by creating great products, services, and experiences that solve pain points and add value to your customers’ lives.
Great leaders look beyond the noise and find the lesson. One important lesson for founders is that when you don’t give in to negativity and criticism, you can see leadership lessons that build businesses. Stepping back from a mob mentality helps you evaluate situations beyond emotions and learn growth lessons.
In Apple’s case, the lesson is the brand loyalty and raving-fan consumer base the criticism misses. For its rival Samsung, it’s the technology and innovation, such as the curved screens they’re building for the iPhone Duo. Each organization competes, but beyond the noise and criticism, they’ve formed a partnership that’s driving tremendous revenue for both.
3 key takeaways from the article
- The internet has been buzzing with Apple’s launch of its first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, and a MacBook Pro with a PROLED XDR Display and a touchscreen for the first time. Each new product has been met with excitement and, it seems, an equal amount of criticism.
- What the commentary misses is a crucial lesson for founders and businesses—what kind of a customer base do you want?Why a cult-like customer base should be the goal, how to drive exponential revenue growth, and how to build a raving consumer base the Apple way.
- The goal should be to build brand loyalty and a consumer base that’s willing to overlook your missteps and buy each of your offers because they want to support your brand. Cult-like customers are lifelong buyers, which is why the iPhone Duo sold out in minutes. That’s the kind of customer base every founder and organization should strive to build — lifelong consumers who buy everything. You get there by creating great products, services, and experiences that solve pain points and add value to your customers’ lives. And one important lesson for founders is that when you don’t give in to negativity and criticism, you can see leadership lessons that build businesses.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Entrepreneurship, Startups, Leadership
Why Every Entrepreneur Should Adopt the Immigrant Mindset
By Demos Parneros | Entrepreneur | October 27, 2026
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According to the author, some of the best entrepreneurs he has worked with had something in common long before they built successful companies: They were immigrants, or the children of immigrants. In fact, Carnegie notes that immigrants have founded or co-founded more than half of America’s billion-dollar startups.
His family immigrated from Cyprus when he was eight years old. He didn’t speak English. They arrived on a Friday night, and by Monday morning, he was sitting in an American classroom trying to make sense of words he couldn’t understand.
Years later, after leading Fortune 500 companies and investing in startups, the author has realized that entrepreneurship requires many of the same habits he has learned as an eight-year-old immigrant. The encouraging part is that you don’t have to immigrate to develop those habits. They are choices every entrepreneur can make.
Become a student before you become an expert. Before you can succeed in a new country, you have to study. Before you could make friends, participate in school or understand the world around you, he had to learn the language. Once he learned to read, he discovered a love of books, and this passion for learning has been a foundational piece of his career. Business works the same way. Experience matters, but it has a shelf life. Markets evolve, customers change, and technology reshapes industries faster than ever. The leaders who continue learning long after they’ve become successful are usually the ones who stay successful because they never stop asking questions.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Immigrants don’t have the luxury of waiting until everything feels familiar. They solve problems while living inside uncertainty. Entrepreneurs face a remarkably similar challenge. There is rarely enough information, enough capital or enough certainty to eliminate risk. The leaders who succeed aren’t necessarily the ones with the perfect plan. They’re the ones who make thoughtful decisions, learn quickly and adjust without losing momentum. If you wait until every variable is known, you’ll spend more time watching opportunities than pursuing them.
Make resourcefulness your competitive advantage. Many immigrant families develop that habit out of necessity. They learn to stretch every dollar, solve problems creatively and maximize every opportunity because nothing feels guaranteed. Every business leader can adopt that same mindset by asking a simple question: “What can we accomplish with what we already have?” That shift in thinking often unlocks more innovation than a larger budget ever could.
Balance high standards with empathy. Hard work has always been one of the defining characteristics of entrepreneurial success, but the author doesn’t believe it’s enough by itself. Growing up, his parents also taught them to care about other people, to give them the benefit of the doubt and to understand that everyone is carrying challenges you may not be able to see. He has tried to bring that lesson into every leadership role he has held. The best leaders don’t lower expectations because they care about people. They raise expectations while creating an environment where people feel respected, supported and trusted. Accountability and empathy are not competing ideas. They reinforce one another.
Replace “I can’t” with “I’ll figure it out”. One lesson from childhood has stayed with him throughout his career. As an eight-year-old who couldn’t speak English, every day presented a new obstacle. Someone would ask him a question, and he couldn’t answer. So he listened carefully. he repeated words and sentences, growing his confidence with each conversation. That experience permanently changed how he thinks about difficult problems. When people tell him they can’t do something, his instinct is almost always to believe they can. Maybe they don’t know how yet. Maybe it will take more work than they expected. But with focus, intentionality and persistence, there are very few challenges people can’t learn to overcome.
3 key takeaways from the article
- Immigrants have helped build some of America’s most successful businesses because entrepreneurship rewards resilience, adaptability, optimism and hard work. Those qualities are common among immigrants because their experiences often demand them.
- The important lesson, however, is that this mindset isn’t exclusive to immigrants. Every entrepreneur can cultivate it. Stay curious enough to keep learning. Be resourceful instead of waiting for perfect conditions. Treat uncertainty as part of the process instead of a reason to hesitate. Hold yourself and your team to high standards while leading with empathy. And believe that most people are capable of far more than they think.
- The question isn’t whether you’ll encounter obstacles. The question is whether you’ll decide to keep learning, keep adapting and keep moving forward. In business, as in life, that mindset often makes all the difference.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Entrepreneurship, Startups, Immigrants’ Mindset
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