How These 5 Immigrant Entrepreneurs Are Living the American Dream

STARTING A successful business is tough. Even tougher: starting a successful business after emigrating to another country. All of these founders did just that, moving thousands of miles from home to where their talents and drive would be most appreciated. “The spirit of entrepreneurship in America is unparalleled,” says Vinita Negi, the New Delhi–born founder of Trigent Solutions (No. 369 on this year’s Inc. 500), a D.C. area–based business and IT consultancy. “There’s no comparison to what it’s like in India, or even other countries.” They still call it the American dream. These founders show us why.

- Jill Krasny

GUIDO KOVALSKYS WAS NERVOUS. A native Argentine, he’d emigrated in 1996 to the U.S. to attend business school at UC Berkeley, and afterward scored a job with the consulting giant McKinsey, where he was readying himself to make a big presentation. Then, an Indian colleague took him aside. “Guido, they’ll notice you’re a foreigner,” he said. (They would, given Kovalskys’s thick accent.) “But you have to believe they are thinking, ‘If this guy is here, he must be really, really good.’ ” That steadied his nerves, and made him see the power in his upbringing.

Today, given Kovalskys’s leading-man looks, easy charm, and strong résumé— his first company, Bionexo, which was founded in 2000, remains a dominant online health care platform in Spain and his native South America—it’s hard to imagine any investor rejecting him. Still, he’s heard “We’re not into it” far too many times from Silicon Valley’s top VCs.

GRANTED, KOVALSKYS’S company Near pod is based in Hallandale Beach, Florida, just north of Miami and about as far from Silicon Valley as you can get while remaining in the continental U.S. But that’s fine with Kovalskys, who long ago grew accustomed to being an outsider. He was raised in Buenos Aires. His mother was Sicilian, and his father, an economics professor, was born to Lithuanian and Polish parents. “They spoke different languages at home,” he recalls, “and were really disconnected from their roots.” His many friends had similar backgrounds— thanks to the waves of Italian, German, Russian, and Spanish immigrants who flocked to Argentina in the early 20th century—so he mostly took his multicultural background for granted. Until, at least, that day at McKinsey.