The move was unexpected. So was his father’s death from cancer, a moment of grief that left his family with a decision about where to go next. And as luck would have it, Kordestani followed family friends to the United States in the 1970s just as turmoil broke out in Iran.
“My immigration was total serendipity,” he said in an interview at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.
Kordestani’s trials as an immigrant and his success in Silicon Valley help illustrate why the tech industry has reacted so strongly to President Donald Trump’s travel ban. Immigrants in the Bay Area have founded companies, served as executives and helped create the technology of the future.
An immigrant’s journey to a new country is rarely as simple as following a relative or friend. But Kordestani’s challenges also shaped his success in Silicon Valley, including more than a decade at Google, where he joined the tech firm as employee number 11 and led the company’s global business operations.
He once told a graduating class at San Jose State University — his alma mater — to “think and act like an immigrant.”
“What I mean by that immigrant attitude is that you’ve got to continually fight, challenge yourself,” said Kordestani, who is now a US citizen. “You’ve got to make yourself uncomfortable so you grow from that.”
At 53 years old, he’s still tackling new challenges at Twitter, a tech firm that raked in $2.5 billion in revenue in 2016, but posted a loss of $457 million. Trump’s tweeting has raised Twitter’s profile around the world, yet the company still struggles to compete for ad dollars amid layoffs and executive departures.
Trump’s recently revised executive order, though blocked in court, continues to bring more attention to how immigration fuelled Silicon Valley’s growth. It’s also placed more pressure on Twitter’s leaders, who have faced calls from critics to bar the president from the social network for what they deem as hate speech and misinformation.
While Kordestani opposes the travel ban, he’s also an optimist who firmly believes in the power of dialogue that Twitter enables.
“Achieving the success he has achieved has allowed him to have a very optimistic view of the world — that hard work and persistence will pay off in the end — and he brings that to every meeting and challenge,” said Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s general counsel.
When Kordestani reflects on his childhood in Tehran, Iran, he describes a metropolis filled with different cultures and religions living together in harmony.
His mom was a nurse. His dad, an engineer, built a three-story apartment that the middle-class family called home. Americans lived on one floor. Israelis lived on another. His dance instructor was Armenian.
Attending Andisheh Don Bosco School, an Italian Catholic school in Tehran, Kordestani studied in English and Farsi.
But when his father died, Kordestani knew there would be more opportunities to study engineering outside of Iran. Getting admitted into a university in Iran is highly competitive, and there are only a limited number of spots for students.
At 14 years old, Kordestani envisioned life in America would be like the sitcom The Jeffersons. The country was filled with opportunity, as conveyed by the show’s Movin’ On Up theme song.
“It was an African-American family living in Manhattan,” Kordestani said. “It just seemed like this incredible dazzling city to me, and I imagined the entire United States looked like that.”
Two choices were on the table: San Jose, where his father’s boss had sons attending school, or Fort Worth, Texas.
“I think California has better weather. We should go there,” his mom said at the time.
In 1978, Kordestani, his younger brother and mom packed their bags for San Jose. The harmonious Iran of his youth soon became a distant memory.
That year, men barred the doors of the packed Cinema Rex in Abadan, Iran. They set the movie theatre on fire, killing close to 400 people. Months later, protests in Iran led to the overthrow of its US-backed monarch. Then, in November 1979, supporters of the Iranian Revolution stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took more than 50 Americans hostage for 444 days.
Iran’s political upheaval hit the Kordestanis financially, making their funds inaccessible over the years. Like other immigrants, the family focused on education and hard work.
At Buchser High School in Santa Clara, Kordestani said, talking to his classmates helped reduce tensions fuelled on campus by the Iran hostage crisis.
An Italian-American history teacher, who was concerned about Kordestani, drove the student to and from school and called on him during class.
“It just became this live political discourse and discussion, and he kept referring to me to talk about what’s going on in the region,” Kordestani said, noting it mirrors what’s happening on Twitter today.
In 1980, Kordestani graduated from high school and had some final words for his classmates.
“I hope one day the leaders of the world realise the value of friendship and establish this feeling among themselves, the way I did with my American friends here at Buchser High,” he wrote.
After graduating from San Jose State University in 1984 with a degree in electrical and electronics engineering, Kordestani took a job at Hewlett-Packard as a product marketing manager.
Around that time, he also became a naturalised US citizen. That allowed him to bring back his mom, who had left the country because she didn’t have a green card.
After five years at HP, Kordestani wanted another challenge, so he earned a master’s degree in business administration from Stanford University and went on to work for a number of Silicon Valley startups.
He joined Google in 1999, and employees who worked with him said he instilled confidence during the company’s rapid growth.
Colleagues joked that Kordestani was “sandbagging,” or tempering expectations to make Google’s financial results look better. So he once stood on a sandbag to read quarterly forecasts and targets.
“It shows his ability to laugh at himself and his ability to create strong cultures that really set the company up for success,” said Jeff Levick, who had served as Google’s vice president of industry development and marketing for the Americas region. Levick is now an executive in residence at Greylock Partners.
But at the peak of Kordestani’s career success, fame and fortune at Google, he also found himself in the office of a psychologist in San Francisco, going through a divorce with his wife Bita Daryabari and questioning if he should be happy with all he accomplished.
In 2008, Forbes valued Kordestani’s net worth at $2.2 billion. After his divorce, Forbes assessed his net worth in 2009 at $1.4 billion.
Speaking in 2009 at a leadership conference at UCLA, organised by two Iranian-American groups, Kordestani said that “life is messy,” but urged the audience not to be afraid of failure. When life surprises you, he told the crowd, checklists and the Persian life manual go out the window.
In 2011, Kordestani, who has two older children with Daryabari, got married again. His current wife, Gisel, used to work at Google and is the co-founder and chief operating officer of political fundraising site Crowdpac.
“Sometimes you think people like Omid are perfect and untouchable. He showed the real human side of struggle and shared it, and I think that was valiant,” Gisel Kordestani said of the speech her husband gave in 2009.
He has two young children with Gisel, who was born and raised in France but has English parents. The couple speak French, English and Farsi to their children.
Kordestani has a contagious laugh, like several of his colleagues and friends whom he’s known for 30 or 40 years, his wife said.
“I make fun of him because when he’s telling a joke, he usually starts laughing as he’s telling the punch line,” she said.
On an alumni wall of honour filled with black and gold plaques at San Jose State University, an etching of a smiling Kordestani stands out among other notable engineering graduates.
When students pack that room to receive scholarships, Belle Wei, an SJSU professor and former dean of the college of engineering, often points to Kordestani’s plaque as she encourages them to follow their own dreams.
“If you work hard, you’re in the right place and doing the right thing,” she tells the students, “then one day you can be like Omid.” —The Mercury News (San Jose, California)/TNS
