Built By: Mohamad Ali of Carbonite
When Mohamad Ali arrived in the US in 1981, he encountered a whole different world. Having spent the first 11 years of his life in Guyana, where electric power was unreliable and procuring the very basics was a challenge, he found himself at the JFK airport, in front of an unfamiliar machine that he had to use — an escalator. “I remember [that] my mom and I [were] standing at the bottom of the escalator, wondering how to get on it and, more importantly — how to get off it.”
At that very moment, the idea of ever leading a technology company was unfathomable.
The road to success wasn’t easy. Upon arrival, Mohamad and his mother had a total of $34 and settled in a small apartment in Queens. “It was a terrible apartment. It was infested with cockroaches and mice, [and] every piece of furniture that we had was picked up from the street,” he recalls.
Still, despite his humble beginnings, Mohamad managed to receive engineering degrees from Stanford University and went on to work at Adobe, IBM and HP, before joining Carbonite as CEO in 2014. He credits this success partially to luck and partially to three of his teachers who would become important mentors, and would encourage him to strive for more. It was with their help that he got to learn about computers and was able to enroll in a great high school that ultimately paved the road to a scholarship at Stanford.
While at Stanford, Mohamad supported himself by working at Adobe, but upon graduation, he decided to leave and start an artificial intelligence company. “I don’t know if it’s the immigrant mindset, but there’s something about wanting to create something new and have some level of control over your destiny,” he shares.
Seizing opportunity to steer life in the right direction is definitely not new to Mohamad. In fact, his first encounter with entrepreneurship came during his high school years, when he would sell floppy disks to fellow students. “I found this guy in Brooklyn, who had a large supply of floppy disks. I would be able to buy them for 25 cents [from him], and sell them for $2”, he remembers. “When I graduated from college, I thought that I could stay at Adobe and make sixty or seventy thousand a year, or I could do something that would make multiples of that. In the long run, I would make a lot more and I would be able to propel myself and my family forward.” His bet paid off — the company grew to $10 million, and after selling it, Mohamad joined IBM.
While he attributes his ability to constantly innovate and dream big to his immigrant background, he believes that ultimately what makes the US strong is the combination of native-born and foreign talent. “It’s not just the immigrant piece that’s critical to creating exceptional value”, he said. “I think the more powerful thing is the combination of foreign and domestic [talent]. When you put that together, you can accomplish a lot. […] I think that’s why 40% of the Fortune 500 companies in America were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. But in the end, they didn’t do this on their own, they did it in partnership with extremely brilliant people who were born in America.”
Written By: Leia Ruseva of Ellis Project
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