Post by EWOR

The founders least likely to succeed by every conventional metric – 'wrong' passport, 'wrong' network, 'wrong' room – had already survived the kind of setbacks that end most companies before they ever started one. Many EWOR Fellows have come from immigrant backgrounds. Some were stateless, others raised millions before obtaining permanent residency. Many built in a language they learned in less than a year. Building a company means spending years in conditions of total uncertainty, with no guarantee the next door opens. Immigrants do not need to be ‘taught’ what that feels like. What most founders call their worst-case scenario, immigrants have already lived through and moved past. There is also something specific about building without permission that immigrants understand before anyone teaches it to them. Most founders wait to be invited into the room. Immigrants have spent their lives getting into rooms they were never supposed to enter. Thiri left Burma at 16 to flee war and access university. She spent 9 years in Malaysia earning her PhD, and applied to Harvard University 4 times before being accepted. Her research became ICC evidence against the Burmese military. She’s now building Nyxium at EWOR. Adam and his brother Liam fled the war in Syria by boat as teenagers, their laptop strapped to Adam's stomach to survive the journey. They learned Swedish in a year and used that same laptop to bootstrap their first venture to 100,000 users and $3M revenue. They are now building MigmaAI at EWOR. Fuzhan left Iran at 22 by sneaking out of her window to collect the visa documents her parents refused to sign. She went on to earn three master's degrees, a summa cum laude PhD from the Technical University of Munich, and published 12+ research papers. She’s now building frontier AI for factory floors at EWOR. Born after his sister under China’s one child policy, Owen left Beijing and moved to Australia before ending up in San Francisco. At EWOR, he’s now building an AI-native immigration law firm serving 250+ customers. Valencia fled Burundi as a refugee at 4, entered Swedish politics at 13, and was elected to local government by 18 to manage real municipal budgets. At 21, she quit, taught herself to code, and is now building Numerra, an AI financial operating system, at EWOR. Eva left Russia in 2022, leaving behind a degree she never got to finish – yet she had already accumulated 840+ citations and acceptances to Oxford and EPFL with no formal qualifications. She's now building a preventive solution for the largest chronic disease on the planet at EWOR. Each of these founders built something real in conditions that were not set up for them. And yet they are still here – and thriving. That is exactly the kind of founder we look for at EWOR. If any of this sounds familiar, you already know what to do: https://lnkd.in/e3vsb4tQ #EWOR #entrepreneurship #immigrantfounders #startups #technology