Many people helped me on my journey from a refugee camp to teaching at Oxford University, but one of the most influential was a man I never met. A man who, indirectly, showed me that people like us could succeed and set me on the path to discovering the secrets of immigrant entrepreneurs’ success.
Having been brought up as part of a persecuted Turkish ethnic minority in communist Bulgaria and then as a refugee in Turkey, I found myself suddenly thrown into an unfamiliar world when I received financial aid to study at the University of Miami in the late 1990s. Nothing represented the shock of the new more than the strange devices we were expected to write our essays on—it was the first time I’d ever seen a computer.
