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Neri Karra Sillaman is an adviser and speaker who was recently recognized on the Thinkers50 Radar list for 2024 as one of the top 30 emerging management thinkers. She is an adjunct professor and entrepreneurship expert at the University of Oxford, and founder of Neri Karra, a global luxury leather goods brand that has been manufacturing for leading Italian labels for over 25 years. A former child refugee, she brings a powerful perspective on resilience, cultural innovation, and ethical business to her work. Her insights have been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, and Fortune. Whats the big idea? Its no coincidence that immigrant-led businesses have better survival and long-term success rates. Common threads of the immigrant experience tend to naturally strengthen the necessary skills to build a thriving business. Qualities such as personal resilience, commitment to a greater purpose, and authentic community building give many immigrants an edge as entrepreneurs. Below, Neri shares five key insights from her new book, Pioneers: 8 Principles of Business Longevity from Immigrant Entrepreneurs. Listen to the audio versionread by Neri herselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. Start with who you are, not just whats missing Most entrepreneurs are told to scan the market for gaps to fill. But immigrant entrepreneurs often do something radically differentthey begin by looking inward. They build businesses rooted in their personal stories, cultural legacies, and lived experiences. When Jan Koum, co-founder of WhatsApp, remembered the fear of phone surveillance in Soviet Ukraine and the costs of calling his family from America, he didnt just see problemshe envisioned a solution. WhatsApp became a free, ad-free, encrypted service that now connects nearly three billion people. This principle of inside-out entrepreneurship isnt just more humanits more resilient. When the origin of your idea is deeply meaningful, your motivation is more sustainable. Youre not chasing trends. Youre building what only you can build. 2. Necessity is the fuel of endurance Immigrants often dont start businesses because they want to. They do it because they have to. This is what I call necessity entrepreneurship. Companies started by immigrants tend to grow faster and survive longer. Necessity isnt a disadvantage. Its a source of grit. When youve fled war, rebuilt your life from nothing, or supported your family with little more than hope, you develop a drive that doesnt quit when things get hard. This endurance often makes immigrant-founded businesses outlast their peers. In fact, companies started by immigrants tend to grow faster and survive longer. In a world where 90% of startups fail, that kind of staying power is worth paying attention to. 3. Community is the business model Long before stakeholder capitalism was a buzzword, immigrant entrepreneurs were practicing it. Many come from collectivist cultures or grew up relying on informal networks of support. That mindset shows up in how they build companies. Take the story of my own business: we got out of a refugee camp in Istanbul thanks to a distant relative who took us in. Today, her children are my factory manager and accountant. We didnt just build a brandwe built a family business, sustained by trust. Community is not a nice to have. For many immigrant founders, it is the secret to longevity. They succeed because they lift others as they rise. 4. Build with legacy in mind, not just profit Immigrant entrepreneurs tend to have a long-term lens. Perhaps its because theyve witnessed how quickly everything can disappear. Or because theyve felt the weight of whats been lost and the responsibility to create something that endures. Companies that last are the ones rooted in purpose. Luis von Ahn, founder of Duolingo, grew up in Guatemala, where access to education was limited. He didnt just build a tech company; he built a free tool to democratize language learning worldwide. Thats what legacy looks like. Profit is important. But the immigrant entrepreneurs I interviewed showed again and again: the companies that last are the ones rooted in purpose. 5. Connection is the true currency of success Success stories are often told in isolation, but nobody does it alone. Immigrant entrepreneurs understand this better than most. Theyve seen how invisible networksfamily ties, community trust, shared experiencecan shape their futures. In the book, I write: Forests appear to be made up of individual trees, but each one thrives only because of the vast, interconnected root system below. Thats what Ive found in immigrant-led businesses, too. Whether its a factory built with childhood friends or a mentorship that changes everything, the unseen connections are what make a business resilient. Theyre also what make it human. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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May is Mental Health Awareness Month. That means campaigns about anxiety, burnout, depression, and trauma will pop up in schools, offices, billboards, and magazines across the country. But few of those campaigns will mention a force that fuels all of those conditionsa force so normalized, it hides in plain sight. That force is Car Brain. Car Brain is an affliction that causes people to justify or ignore antisocial behavior that involves an automobile. It’s when someone who respects others in nearly every context suddenly becomes selfish, reckless, or even hostile just because a car has become part of the interaction. Once you start looking, youll see it everywhere, online and IRL. Car Brain is a dangerous but normalized condition that needs a spotlight during Mental Health Awareness Month. It’s a kind of cultural psychosis. Its why someone who would never shove an elderly person out of the way has no problem speeding past a crosswalk while an elderly person inches across the street. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} Car Brain is why so many Americans experience a constant state of low-grade anxiety, sensory overload, and chronic stresswithout realizing its rooted in something deeper than work or home life. Its rooted in their daily environment, which has been designed around machine speed instead of human need. Every day, more than 100 Americans are killed in traffic crashes. Far more survive with catastrophic injuriesamputations, traumatic brain injuries, permanent disability. These arent all “accidents.” A high-speed collision on a downtown street that changes a group of peoples lives forever isnt an oopsies. Most severe crashes are the logical result of antisocial choices baked into a car-first culture: Speeding through school zones because you’re late for work. Running red lights because it was barely red. Parking in a bike lane because they can just go around. Failing to yield at crosswalks because didnt I already tell you, Im late for work! These common and seemingly minor decisions have enormous consequences. What starts as personal entitlement often ends in someone elses hospital stayor funeral. The emotional weight of a car-centric world Mental health experts know that your surroundings shape your mood and behavior. Environments that are loud, fast, and disconnected from human interaction put us into a constant state of alert. Whats the dominant environment in most American communities? Roads that prioritize automobile travel and an ever-present sense that one wrong move could be deadly. Children cant safely bike to school, so they get chauffeured insteadlosing both independence and physical activity. Seniors become prisoners in their own homes if they can no longer drive. People in poverty are forced to spend thousands of dollars they dont have just to participate in society. And all of us find ourselves stuck inside vehicles that make us more anxious, more aggressive, and more isolated. The dependence on personal vehicles leads to thinking of them as an extension of ourselves, or at least a vital part of our lives. So any perceived inconvenience ignites Car Brain, causing us to commit or justify behavior wed otherwise condemn. In any other context, these antisocial behaviors would be signs of a serious problem: Yelling at someone who walked slower than you in the grocery store. Swinging nunchucks at a crowded playground. Storing your spare fridge on a public sidewalk. But do all of that with a car? And suddenly its just the price of modern life. Thats the power of Car Brain: its so culturally embedded that it looks rational. Speeding, running red lights, tailgating, parking in bike lanes, parking in bus lanes, parking on sidewalks, blaming dead pedestrians for not being dressed like Christmas treesthese are all harmful cultural norms that need to be shamed and met with severe consequences. Theres an unspoken belief that driving is natural, necessary, and morally superior. Its why cities spend millions expanding roads while underfunding buses. Its why congestion is treated as a crisis, but 40,000 annual road deaths are met with a shrug. The most dangerous part of Car Brain is that we dont see it for what it isa mass delusion that enables harm, excludes millions, and degrades mental and physical well-being. The path to wellness Mental Health Awareness Month shouldn’t just be about personal coping strategies and mindfulness reminders. It should include a reckoning with the systems that make us sick in the first place. The alternative is to design neighborhoods where walking, cycling, and taking transit arent signs of poverty or punishment, but signs of liberation. That requires us to stop treating streets as high-speed pipelines for cars and start treating them as places of connectionplaces for living, meeting, playing, and being human. Be ready to confront your own Car Brain, which whispers that anything slowing down a driver must be wrongeven if that wrong thing is a child trying to cross the street. Admitting what were capable of will make it easier to stop excusing antisocial, dangerous behavior just because it happens to involve a motor vehicle. The first step in healing is recognizing were all breathing the same polluted cultural air. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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In the past several years, the trend of “going direct” in public relations has gotten trendy. Broadly, the idea is that certain companiesmainly tech startupsstand a better chance of advancing their own narratives by sidestepping traditional PR and media altogether. Instead, the company founder, fellow executives, and partners would post content to the internet and social media to directly communicate with their customers. There’s naturally been a lot of consternation in the media and PR industries about how effective this kind of approach is, the real value of traditional PR, and whether a company can really chart their own path without some kind of third-party validation. It’s not my intent to wade into that debate (though if you’d like a deep-dive exploration, I hosted a panel on the topic at the Consensus conference). It is, however, an undeniable trend that’s caught fire the last few years. Now AI is poised to throw gas on that flame. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}} The next evolution of going direct I was struck by this after reflecting on my conversation with Scrunch AI CEO Chris Andrew on The Media Copilot podcast. Scrunch specializes in placement in AI search. Its customers are mostly brands who want to ensure their content is crawled, analyzed, and summarized when someone asks a chatbot about the brand or its area of focus. The idea is conceptually similar to SEO (search engine optimization), though the industry hasn’t yet settled on a name for it (AIEO, LLMO, and GAIO are all contenders). As Google has just aptly demonstrated in its push this week to elevate AI Mode as a standard feature in search, the purpose of an AI search is to give answers, not links. That’s a huge problem if your product is information, which is exactly why much of the media industry is locked in a legal battle with the AI industry over copyright. But if you’re a company just trying to sell something, an AI summary that informs a user about your brand is a win whether they click through to your site or not. If they do, there’s information to suggest they’ll be much more inclined to engage further and even transact. And if they don’t, you’ve effectively hit them with an ad by having the brand mentioned in the summary. On the media side of things, the click-killing aspect to AI search has many outlets throwing up defenses on their content against crawlers. They’re configuring their robots.txt file to say “no” to bots, putting up other digital defenses, and denying access to their content unless AI companies pay upeither through licensing agreements or pay-as-you-go frameworks. A recent story in A Media Operator, which covers the business side of the media industry, showed that many media companies have begun to wake up to the rapidly growing presence of AI crawlers. An executive from Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure company, said over 800,000 websites have activated Cloudflare’s most aggressive protection setting. There’s an obvious disconnect between the incentives of the media versus brands in AI search, and that creates an opportunity for an AI upgrade of the go-direct strategy. AI search engines still need to provide answers to queries, and if credible journalism about those topics is blocked, something has to fill the void. Brands that give unfettered access to their content to crawlers (because why wouldn’t you?) will have an advantage. This goes double if the company can execute on a multichannel content strategy that gets their brand cited across multiple sites or domains. One important difference between AI search and SEO, pointed out by Andrew in the podcast, is that citations count more to AI crawlers than links. That means if a brand can seed the web with consistent facts and brand citations across multiple sites, it will help ensure AI search engines “learn” from their preferred narrative. You can imagine a scenario where a major company, with enough resources, could theoretically pull off a version of what Russia has done with respect to advancing their preferred narrative on the war in Ukraine, thoroughly examined by a NewsGuard investigation. Except in Russia’s case, it was done mainly via sketchy-looking sites clearly created to “spam” AI crawlers with propaganda. A company could do this out in the open, with a content strategy that amplifies their storytelling across blogs, podcasts, social media, and more, published across multiple domains. Humans would easily be able to tell it’s all marketing, but AI engines just see it as more datadata that can have a large amount of influence in what appears in summaries. How the media can chart a smarter course There’s still hope to steer away from a future where corporate propaganda is dominant. It starts with media sites adopting a sophisticated approach to blocking, something I outlined in my newsletter last week. Blanket bans are understandablepublishers still feel burned by Big Tech’s platform dynamics of the pastbut shutting off access entirely is a short-term defense with long-term costs. A more strategic approach would involve selectively exposing certain types of content: meta descriptions, older articles, multimedia, and more. This allows media companies to remain visible in AI search while still protecting core value. But beyond technical solutions, the real hope is in what consumers of information actually want. Review site like PCMag and The Wirecutter didnt become popular because they were algorithmically boosted. They emerged because people didnt like getting fed the company line. Similarly, if AI-generated answers start to feel like corporate brochureware, consumers will notice. Credible, independent journalism isnt just good ethics; its a market advantageif its accessible. In the end, AI engines that optimize for this balance will win out, too. It’s right there in ChatGPT’s model spec: the chatbot is designed to “seek the truth together” with the user. It can’t do that without including independent perspectives and weighing them appropriately against a barrage of go-direct content. AI may be dramatically altering the ways people get information, but audiences also hate being misled. If the public has a way to find reporting they can trusteven in an AI-mediated environmenttheyll take it. But the burden is on both the media and AI platforms to keep that path open. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}}
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