When Shahrouz Varshabi was about 17 years old, he was accepted to a college outside of his hometown in Iran.
This was good news for Varshabi, but it also meant a financial strain for his parents.
“I was feeling so bad about the situation because I was coming from a sort of poor family, and I didn’t want to have pressure on my father’s shoulders,” Varshabi says.
When Varshabi couldn’t find a job in the city where his new school was located, he decided to get entrepreneurial and make one for himself. Varshabi was studying graphic design, and he noticed a common problem he and his fellow students were encountering: a lack of high-quality printers for their projects.
“The price of the printer is like the same as one month’s rent,” Varshabi says. “I paid my rent to buy a printer actually.”
But his risk paid off and, before long, Varshabi had an abundance of student customers for his printing business. “My parents was like, ‘Hey you doing all right, you need money?’ And I was like ‘I don’t really need money. If you want money, I can help you, actually,’ ” he says.
As Varshabi will tell you, it was his entrepreneurial success in Iran that gave him the confidence to pursue other career goals.
“… I started from zero, and I made so much money that I paid my tuition, my rent and I bought a car, I had some savings,” Varshabi says. “So it just gave me so much confidence to do whatever I want to do for myself. I know that there’s no limits now.”
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