The immigrant and entrepreneurship interplay
The following video of restaurant entrepreneur, chef Lauro Romero, is an inspiring story of self determination, risk taking, individualism, and the fulfillment of a beautiful entrepreneurial dream. As Romero so eloquently portrays in this video, there are characteristics and qualities that immigrants and entrepreneurs share: hope of a better life, openness to new experiences, risk taking, hard work, creativity to find unconventional paths to success, humility, recognizing needs in the market & seizing opportunity, synthesizing information, persistence, and resilience.
Much as been written in recent years about the correlation between being an immigrant and being entrepreneurial. An article, "Why are immigrants more entrepreneurial?", published by Harvard Business Review in 2016 explores some of this in greater depth and points out a couple of interesting statistics while suggesting that cross-cultural experience contributes to better entrepreneurial ideas:
Immigrants to the USA represent 27.5% of the countries’ entrepreneurs but only around 13% of the population.
About one-fourth of all technology and engineering companies started in the U.S. between 2006 and 2012 had at least one immigrant cofounder.
Oh - and the food at Lauro Romero's restaurant, Republica? It is well worth the visit. It was ranked as Portland Monthly's Best Restaurant of 2021.
Following are a few other articles on some of the shared characteristics of entrepreneurs and immigrants: