But Mahmoodi doesn't tell his story the way we expect to hear it. He has plenty of great material but no grasp of the obvious plot. Unlike, say, Horatio Alger (or Bill Clinton), he is not the least bit proud of how far he has come. He would rather not dwell on the past. The past is depressing. If it were up to him, we would see him only as he is now, in the summer of his 40th year: one of Arizona's 1995 Entrepreneurs of the Year and CEO of NIE International Inc., a $40-million (in projected 1996 sales) distributor of computer systems and parts making its second appearance on the Inc. 500 list, at #423. (It was #32 in 1995.) He would be driving a snow-white $70,000 Mercedes-Benz, and he would be living happily with his wife and two sons in a half-million-dollar pink stucco miniature palace, in a gated neighborhood in the desert foothills east of Phoenix.
Mahmoodi is still sorting things out. His success, after all, is a relatively recent event. He is feeling secure enough in his career, finally, to begin revisiting the past. Given just a little more time, he may yet work up a heroic saga, appropriately clichéd. For the moment, though, Mahmoodi's past remains a messy jumble -- painful, embarrassing, at times (in his eyes) shameful. The story that emerges has a nervousness about it that will be familiar to most entrepreneurs, but it also has a kind of euphoria. What's missing is the certainty (unknowable except in retrospect) that things will work out. What's present, still, is the possibility of other endings.
As much as they might want to, few Inc. 500 CEOs can say they began the way Mahmoodi did, with hardly any money, just the rudiments of English, and no place to sleep. Mahmoodi is an extreme example. Yet many will detect in his story echoes of their own beginnings. Fear, loneliness, vulnerability, a sense of what it means to be an outcast -- these are all points on a classic arc, common aspects of the entrepreneurial experience. What every entrepreneur feels, Hadi Mahmoodi has felt. Only more so.
Mahmoodi slept in the park for three months. He did not shave or brush his teeth or change his clothes. Wherever he went, he carried his suitcases. He never opened them for fear somebody would steal his money. (He had about $200.) He didn't talk to people so much as smile and nod and say yes, yes, no matter what the other person was saying, until the other person became upset. Then he switched to no. He ate from dumpsters -- Pizza Hut, Spaghetti Factory, Kentucky Fried Chicken. Especially at Kentucky Fried, they used to throw the food, whatever it was they couldn't sell, in the garbage can. It was a rule among the people who lived in Lafayette Park that any food you found, you shared. Otherwise, it was every man for himself. For example, a blanket that was in the garbage, you don't share it with anybody. Whoever finds that thing, it's his.
Mahmoodi was sure he had made a terrible mistake. He probably would have given up and gone home, except that he didn't have enough money for a return ticket. And he had no reason to expect any better in Iran. At least in Washington, whatever I was doing no one knew about it. But if I was doing the same thing back home, it was a shame.
One fall day three men passing through the park came upon the homeless people and made some unkind remarks. Nothing unusual about that, except that the men were Iranian and were speaking Farsi. Mahmoodi was elated. I said, "Thank God, I understand the language," so I ran up to them. First of all they said, "Stay away. I mean, you are stinking." It was really "stand back." I told them the story, what happened, and they took me to their home, which was an apartment, one little apartment, five people living in there. They were all cab drivers, all those guys.
Mahmoodi took a shower. He shaved his beard. He opened his suitcases and put on clean clothes and threw the old clothes in the garbage. Finally, those clothes were gone. So then I decided that I have to go on with the life that I promised myself, right there. I would never step in that place anymore. That Lafayette Park. The men let Mahmoodi sleep in their apartment only one night. The next day they drove him to the university. Someone there sent him to a rooming house on Wisconsin Avenue. This lady, she had a house, and she said that she had one room and there is already someone in it. She can rent the other half to me. I said that was fine. And it was $22.50 a week for the rent.
Before he could enroll in the university, Mahmoodi had to learn how to speak English. All his money went to pay for lessons. So then I got two jobs. School and two jobs. Every afternoon, after his English lesson, he parked cars at the Holiday Inn. I always had the book, and I studied. Every evening, he headed for the seafood restaurant where he washed dishes and cleaned bathrooms until the early-morning hours. Once, as he was walking home after work, some muggers jumped him on the sidewalk. When they found out his pockets were empty, they broke his nose and cracked two of his ribs.
Mahmoodi was getting nowhere. He believed he would never make enough money to afford tuition at George Washington University. The only friends he had in America were the five Iranian cab drivers. They were full of advice he didn't want. Those guys, they were saying, "Why do you want to go to school? Why do you want to waste your money? You're not going to make it here --take those dreams out of your head. We can get you a cab, and you can be a cab driver. You'll be fine. Get on with your life." And I was saying, "I'm not going to be like you guys. This is not what I'm supposed to do. This is not why I came to this country."
Mahmoodi was coming to realize something: those very men, those cab drivers, were the "success stories" he had heard about all his life. These are the Ph.D. guys, the restaurant owners. These are the guys who were making all those nonsense statements when they were coming back to visit their families. Now I found out the real story. I said, "I've got to get out of here."
