A new generation of leaders who began with very little money — some reaching America with a suitcase, a scholarship or a refugee’s fresh start, others growing up in public housing or launching a business from a dorm room or a car — then rose to found or run companies that shape how Americans search, pay, eat, shop, travel and stay secure. Their stories extend a pattern as old as the country itself.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Fifteen leaders in three groups: immigrants in technology, immigrants in consumer business, and American-born founders and executives who also started with next to nothing. Each profile notes where they started and what they went on to build. See twelve more 21st-century leaders profiled in Movers & Shapers →
Leaders behind search, browsers, digital payments, on-demand delivery and enterprise cybersecurity.
Explore →
Executives and founders who led global food and fashion brands found in nearly every American home.
Explore →
U.S.-born founders and executives who began in public housing, rural poverty or with a few thousand dollars in savings.
Explore →Leaders behind search, browsers, digital payments, on-demand delivery and enterprise cybersecurity.
Pichai grew up in Chennai and came to Stanford for graduate study in engineering. After joining Google in 2004, he led the creation of the Chrome browser and later oversaw Android, becoming Google’s chief executive in 2015 and Alphabet’s in 2019, where he steered the company’s long-term bet on artificial intelligence.
Arora came to Boston for an MBA at Northeastern and worked his way through school before rising to chief business officer at Google. Named CEO of Palo Alto Networks in 2018, he pursued a “platformization” strategy of in-house development and acquisitions that grew annual revenue from about $2.3 billion to more than $11 billion, making the company a central player in AI-era cybersecurity.
Levchin arrived in Chicago as a teenager with his refugee family and studied computer science at the University of Illinois. He co-founded PayPal, where his fraud-detection work helped make online payments viable at scale, and later founded Affirm, which helped popularize point-of-sale installment lending for online shoppers.
Xu moved to Champaign, Illinois, as a young child and later studied at UC Berkeley and Stanford. In 2013 he co-founded DoorDash, which grew into the largest U.S. food-delivery platform and gave hundreds of thousands of local restaurants and merchants a new way to reach customers.
Executives and founders who led global food and fashion brands found in nearly every American home.
Nooyi came to the Yale School of Management in 1978 and built a career in strategy before joining PepsiCo. As chief executive from 2006 to 2018, she broadened the company toward healthier products and long-term sustainability goals, becoming one of the most prominent women and immigrants to lead a Fortune 50 company.
Gutierrez’s family fled Cuba when he was a child. He joined Kellogg in Mexico as a sales representative and rose to become the company’s chief executive in 1999, then served as U.S. Secretary of Commerce from 2005 to 2009.
Chang and his wife, Jin Sook, opened a small Los Angeles clothing store in 1984 that grew into Forever 21, a fast-fashion chain with hundreds of stores and billions in annual sales at its peak. The company later went through bankruptcy restructurings, but its rise showed how quickly trend-driven retail could scale.
The immigrant story is one form of a broader American one. These U.S.-born founders and executives also began with minimal funds and built companies of national consequence.
Schultz grew up in public housing in Brooklyn and became the first in his family to attend college. He joined Starbucks in 1982, bought the small Seattle roaster in 1987 and turned it into a global chain that made the neighborhood coffeehouse a fixture of American daily life.
Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi. The Oprah Winfrey Show became the highest-rated talk show in American television history, and her company, Harpo Productions, made her one of the first Black women to own a major production studio and build a media business on her own terms.
Ellison was raised by adoptive relatives in Chicago and left college without a degree. In 1977 he co-founded the company that became Oracle, which commercialized relational database software and grew into one of the foundations of corporate computing and cloud infrastructure.
Burns was raised by a single mother in public housing on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She joined Xerox as an engineering intern in 1980 and rose to chief executive in 2009, becoming the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company.
Dell began selling upgraded PCs from his University of Texas dorm room in 1984. His direct-to-customer, build-to-order model cut out retail middlemen and made Dell one of the world’s largest PC makers; in 1992 he became the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company at the time.
Blakely was selling fax machines door to door when she developed the idea for Spanx, which she launched in 2000 without outside investors or advertising. The brand created a new shapewear category, and Forbes later named her the youngest self-made woman billionaire.
Chesky and a roommate began renting air mattresses in their San Francisco apartment because they could not cover the rent. The idea became Airbnb, which he has led as chief executive and which reshaped how millions of Americans travel and earn money from their homes.
Perry overcame an abusive childhood and years of failed stage productions before his plays found a national audience. He went on to write, direct and produce a long run of films and TV series and built Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, one of the largest film-production campuses in the country.
These leaders are profiled in Movers & Shapers under their industries. Their defining work came after 2000, so they belong to this era too. Each link opens their full profile.
These profiles are intentionally concise. Major archives and institutions offer reliable starting points for readers who want more detail on immigration and American enterprise.