I didn't learn ownership in a classroom.
I grew up comfortable. In Lebanon. In a family that had built real success. Then years of civil war took all of it. What the fighting didn't destroy, it made worthless. So my parents made an incredibly brave decision: they left everything they knew and brought my brother and me to the United States to start over from nothing.
"Start over" wasn't a figure of speech. My brother and I both worked our way through college. He went on to finish medical school and start his own practice. I began as a software engineer at a global energy company, went back for my MBA, and settled into a career at one of the big consulting firms, where, over several years, I did a little of everything: sales, business development, strategy, finance, process design, technology, even HR. I got to do it inside some of the most respected names in the business (Microsoft, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle), working with some of the sharpest minds in business and technology. It was the finest business education I could have asked for. But the whole time, a voice kept nagging at me: as much as I love working with people running companies, I don't want to run one. I want to build one.
So at 31, I did.
What an education that first company was. In two years we grew to 27 people, and in those same two years, I got married and we had our first child. Everything was moving at once. Fully bootstrapped. Then, as much by luck as by design, I had the chance to sell at a seven-figure valuation, just before the dot-com crash wiped out companies far larger than mine. It wasn't retirement money. But it was a cushion, and it was a complete, A-to-Z apprenticeship in building something from nothing. I knew immediately I wanted to do it again.
Over the next fifteen years, I built three more. Then I bought my way into a larger company through an acquisition, and it wasn't the same ride. My family had grown to a wife and three kids. I was working 80-plus-hour weeks. The business was stumbling through a series of early strategic missteps, most of them traceable to a single source: a founder's ego that had gone unchecked for far too long. That founder was me. And then, just before my 50th birthday, came the kind of news that reorders everything: a diagnosis of incurable blood cancer.
I could have walked away. I didn't. Through determination, trial and error, a refusal to quit, and no small amount of luck, we turned it around. We grew to nearly 100 people, and the business finally began to scale. Whatever the stress, whatever the diagnosis hanging over me, I wasn't going to abandon my own dream, or the dreams of the senior people who had staked their careers on mine.
Eventually, the exit came: eight figures, with every one of our early employees sharing in it. My family was set. And for the first time, I could pour my energy into what mattered most, being fully present with them, in case the disease ever slipped out of my control.
That was supposed to be the end of the story. Keep the businesses I still owned running, and give the rest of my time to my family.
Then, as the pandemic eased in 2021, the phone started ringing. Former colleagues. Friends. Then referrals, and referrals of referrals, all of them early-stage founders. Almost every one was betting their own money, or family-and-friends money, on a dream they'd carried for years. And they were all wrestling with the same things: How do I build the right mindset for this? How do I attract great people away from safer, higher-paying jobs?
I had lived every one of those questions. And somewhere in those conversations, it hit me: this is the point of all of it.
