How Immigrant Resilience Builds Businesses That Last with Neri Karra Sillaman

**Guy Kawasaki** (0:00)
Where has time gone? This is the sixth year of the Remarkable People podcast, and I thought maybe it's time to find a revenue model. So if you'd like to sponsor this podcast, please reach out to me. You will be able to reach an audience of highly educated, high income, open-minded, I would even say growth mindset-minded people.
And I will even read the ads or the promotions inside the podcast. We're not just going to slap it on at the beginning and the middle and the end. I will do the reading. One caveat, I will not promote products and services that I do not like. So if you have a remarkable product or service, you are in the right place. Guy at guykawasaki.com.
This is Remarkable People.

**Neri Karra Sillaman** (0:57)
We live in a very unstable world. And instead of reacting to that unstable world, the leaders and business owners have to first anchor themselves, ask themselves the question of what is important to me? What are my values? What is something that I can control?
Even if everything around me changes, what is something in my business that will never change? And only you can answer that. That can be the quality of your product. That can be the community that you are a part of.

**Guy Kawasaki** (1:33)
Hello, everybody. It's Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People podcast. And we have a guest coming today from France. And she is a remarkable person. Her name is Neri Karra Sillaman. Now she is an entrepreneur, she's an academic, and also she is an author. She's the author specifically of this book called Pioneers. And we're going to get into it later. But this book is in kind of direct juxtaposition against books like Good to Grade and In Search of Excellence and many books that I've written too. So we'll discuss why I was so wrong and Jim Collins was so wrong and Tom Peters was so wrong.
All of which are friends.
You're still an instructor at the University of Oxford, right?

**Neri Karra Sillaman** (2:31)
I'm not an instructor. I work as an entrepreneurship expert at University of Oxford. So what that means is that I'm more in a tutor consultant role for students who create businesses and most of them come out of the university and they become real life companies. They become startups. So my role is to take their idea and guide them into reality.

**Guy Kawasaki** (2:58)
That sounds like an instructor to me.
I hereby name you an instructor at the University of Oxford. So first of all, you have a very interesting arc of your life. So can you just give us the quick story of how you came to where you are today?

**Neri Karra Sillaman** (3:16)
I guess I have to start where I was born, which is Bulgaria. And I was born into Turkish ethnic minority, living in Bulgaria for many, many centuries. But when I was growing up in the 1980s, the communist government of Bulgaria decided to carry out an ethnic assimilation campaign against people of my ethnicity. So that meant changing our names, not being able to have Turkish names, practice our culture, religion in any shape or form.
And many people were imprisoned in camps, basically, called Belene Camp. Many people died and for several years, my family and I tried to run away to avoid our names being changed, but eventually they were. And in June of 1989, we were forced to immigrate from Bulgaria to Turkey. And my parents took two suitcases, my nine-year-old brother and the 11-year-old me, and we ended up at the border.
And we were first put in a refugee camp at the border. And I remember looking at all the chaos around me, thinking the only way out of this will be if I get a good education. And I start with that because it has colored and shaped who I am that very moment. And everything I do goes back to that moment. Despite not speaking the Turkish language and not having any money and starting school with first in a refugee camp and then in a classroom of 83 students, I managed to get financial aid to come to University of Miami, graduated in two and a half years with a business degree, went back to Turkey and started our family business, which is in leather products.
So it's still in business today. It's been 26 years and we produce for Prada, Miu Miu, as well as our own brand. And I can tell you we have, as a business, been through many ups and downs. And I think when I was writing Pioneers, I talk about business longevity. And no, the company is not 100 years old, but you go through so many ups and downs, particularly because we start with zero.