“There is no greater country on earth for entrepreneurship than America. In every category, from the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, where I live, to university R&D labs, to countless Main Street small business owners, Americans are taking risks, embracing new ideas and—most importantly—creating jobs.”
ERIC RIES
Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author credited with pioneering the lean start-up movement
In 1958, when I was eight and a half years old, I found myself on a plane with my mother, headed for New York. My uncle Joe had sent tickets for us to come to America. My mother told me not to worry, we were just going two stops and then we’d get off.
This was my first airplane ride, in a four-engine El Al Israel Airlines propeller plane. It was a bumpy ride and I kept throwing up. But I was surprised and delighted to find that you could just sit there and people brought food to you in your seat. I had never experienced that.
I still love that about planes.
After we landed at LaGuardia Airport, I was awed by the sheer size of everything. Everything I saw in America seemed bigger than I could have ever imagined. The buildings. The cars. The portions of food. The size of the people. Everything was big.
After our arrival, we moved into my beloved aunt Magda and uncle Larry’s basement in their house in Flushing, Queens. Uncle Larry was my mother’s brother. I was amazed that they had a refrigerator filled with food. Imagine that. It wasn’t a restaurant, yet they had a refrigerator with food in it? I had never seen such a thing before. I couldn’t fathom that they owned their own house, and had a car, and a bike, and a refrigerator full of food.
I was also introduced to Cocoa Marsh, a chocolate syrup, which I immediately fell in love with. I was even more impressed by a jar of jam. When my aunt Magda saw how awed I was by that jar of jam, she gave me a spoon and said to me in Hungarian (since she didn’t speak Hebrew and I couldn’t speak a word of English at the time), “Go on, taste it.”
I thought she meant I could have all of it. So I ate the whole jar with a spoon.
My cousins Eva and Linda and my aunt Magda and uncle Larry and my mother were all laughing. I didn’t know why. All I knew was that in my young life, I had never tasted something so wonderful.
And then there was Wonder Bread. Oh my Lord, how I loved that bread. To me, it was like cake. I would often eat the bread with nothing on it. And after I discovered ketchup, there was no stopping me. I ate ketchup sandwiches, which consisted of a big ketchup smear between two slices of Wonder Bread. I put ketchup on everything: on tuna fish, on scrambled eggs—everything. I still do.
Aunt Magda and Uncle Larry allowed my mother and me to live in their basement for two years, and I will forever be grateful. In our time there, I experienced many things for the first time: riding a bike, brushing my teeth, bathing indoors in a bathtub. And for the first time, I sat on a toilet. This was also when I was introduced to toilet paper; I no longer had to use rags to wipe. The first time I used toilet paper, I threw it in the wastebasket. I didn’t know you were supposed to flush it down the toilet bowl.
Every day was an amazing experience. The streets were filled with cars and people. The houses were neatly lined up next to each other. Everyone seemed happy and well fed. It was normal to see kids my age walking around with ice cream cones in their hands as if it were a banality. That treasure, an ice cream cone, which before I had worked so hard to attain, was old hat to these kids. It was humdrum. This is the luxury of America. It’s all relative.
The first time I walked to the end of the street where Aunt Magda and Uncle Larry lived, I was afraid to cross. The streets were filled with cars going every which way. I had never seen a traffic light, so I didn’t understand how one got to the other side. But when I saw people starting to walk across the street, I hurriedly followed them. And there, on the other side, I visited my first supermarket.
To say that I was in awe wouldn’t do it justice. It was simply beyond anything I could have ever imagined. To me, it seemed like a city of food, with the crisscrossing aisles looking like streets filled with a level of abundance that was completely new to me. I had never imagined that you could choose from fifty different brands of coffee. In fact, I had never imagined that you could choose much of anything.
When my mother and I visited her other brother, Uncle George, and his wife, Florence, I saw my first television set. It was a huge piece of furniture, perhaps four feet wide, with cabinet doors on each side and a big curved screen in the middle. It must have been evening news time, because I remember seeing a black-and-white close-up of the face of a man inside the box. I envisioned a man inside the box talking to us. All I could do was stare at the screen, amazed at the wonder of television.
While visiting Uncle George and Aunt Florence, I wandered outside and walked down the street. At the corner, I was attracted to a striking bloodred metal structure. It wasn’t all that tall, and there seemed to be a lever. I reached up and pulled it.
All hell broke loose. A bell began ringing like crazy. I stood frozen. Within a few seconds, I heard loud sirens coming toward me. I had never seen a street fire alarm before and I had never heard sirens, much less seen a fire truck. As I ran back toward Uncle George’s house, I came upon the longest, largest vehicle I had ever seen. It was painted bloodred, just like that metal structure that was now making so much noise. It was bigger than a bus. And it had two drivers, one in the front and one at the back. The sirens scared the daylights out of me. I ran back into Uncle George’s house and quietly sat in the corner, scared out of my mind. It sounds like an exaggeration, but I was truly an alien here. A stranger in a strange land.
My mother was always a proud, independent woman. Although her brothers George and Larry both offered housing and help, she decided that she and I would have to move and get our own place. She refused to accept loans and always insisted on earning her own way. She taught me to be that way. Never a borrower be.
To keep me off the streets, and before I had a mastery of the English language or knew anything about American culture, my mother moved us to Brooklyn. But she couldn’t afford to get us an apartment, so she enrolled me in religious studies at Yeshiva Torah Vadas at Third Street and Bedford Avenue in the Williamsburg section.
It was a Jewish theological seminary, very conservative, and very entrenched in biblical studies. I was set up by the yeshiva to live with the Scheinlen family, who owned a bakery, while my mother lived with her brother Larry. They treated me as if I were a member of the family. I will forever be grateful to them for giving me a safe environment, and for giving my mother a chance to make some headway at work—she refused to take a handout, even then.
Yeshiva was hard. Six days a week, I would get up every morning at six, and would be at the yeshiva by seven thirty. We would start our day by praying at the temple, those of us who actually did pray. At eight thirty, we would begin studying American history, math, and English, and the rest of the day was spent studying the Bible. After 6 p.m., we would go back to yeshiva, eat our dinner, and then continue our Bible studies until 9:30 p.m.
I was eight and a half years old when I saw Santa Claus for the first time, on a billboard advertising Kent cigarettes. At the time, I had never heard of Santa Claus or Christians or Jesus Christ. Santa had a beard, was smoking a cigarette, and had a furry hat on his head, so I assumed he was a Russian rabbi. And then I started hearing the story of Jesus and how he was also a Jew, and a rabbi as well, and that none of the people who worshipped him were Jews. And that he was God and the Son of God, and that there was a Holy Ghost.
I was so mixed up. But I became interested in theology and different religious beliefs, so I started voraciously reading the New Testament and the Koran and other religious books. I learned about Islam and that it honored both Christians and Jews. I learned so much that now, when I meet religious zealots of all kinds, they find it very difficult to make their points, because I can quote psalm and verse right back at them. (Just a digression. Pride has always been my favorite sin.)
America was a whole new world that I could never have imagined, of different peoples with different beliefs, and all of them lived together. I was thrilled to find that America welcomed all sorts of people and gave immigrants the same rights as native-born Americans. This was astonishing to me, and it’s one of the reasons why I love America to this day with all my heart.
I could read anything I wanted to. I could speak my mind. And my mother and I were safe, with no Nazis trying to kill us, no countries surrounding our border that wanted us to disappear—this freedom of expression was not, unlike where I came from, under constant threat of violent reprisal from a war you could literally hitch a ride to in a passing car.
Absorbing my new surroundings, I started to feel strong. I started to feel a sense of being. Some of that came from watching television. I saw that Superman could come from another planet, and still rise to greatness. I felt like—well, Superman. My self-esteem grew. I felt like I was somebody. Because America gave me the right to be somebody. What America had, was a “nothing is impossible” mind-set. You could see it on people’s faces as they went off to work, and you could feel it when you watched TV and saw people flying through the air, and deflecting bullets. You could smell it. It was all around you. And the heroes who were championed were diverse in their origins. They need not have come from America—like Superman, who hailed from Krypton, and later on the Beatles, who hailed from England. From my young perspective, heroism seemed to be a meritocracy in a melting pot.
America taught me that no one is better than anyone else. And that, no matter the difference in your skin color, your accent, or your religious beliefs, no one has the right to make you feel less than what you are.
No one.
That feeling was one of the things that allowed me to forge ahead, and to never quit. This uniquely American spirit of individuality and pride allowed me to embrace the idea of entrepreneurship: that not only can you do anything—you can do everything. It’s also the feeling that allowed me, with my partner Paul Stanley, to form the band that we wanted to see, but never saw, onstage. But more about that band later.