Soul Boom - Payam Zamani: From Impoverished Refugee to Tech Mogul

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

In this episode of Soul Boom, Rainn Wilson sits down with tech entrepreneur and philanthropist Payam Zamani. They explore Payam’s incredible journey from fleeing religious persecution in Iran for his Baháʼí faith to founding an incredibly successful tech company in the United States. Delving into themes of resilience, optimism, and the integration of spiritual principles in business, this conversation is both inspiring and thought-provoking. Discover how Payam’s experiences have shaped his approach to life and work, and learn why he believes in leading with love and intention. Get Payam's book, Crossing the Desert: https://amzn.to/3ziVdUQ Thank you to our sponsors! Waking Up app (1st month FREE!): https://wakingup.com/soulboom Fetzer Institute: https://fetzer.org/ Sign up for our newsletter! https://soulboom.substack.com SUBSCRIBE to Soul Boom!! https://bit.ly/Subscribe2SoulBoom Watch our Clips: https://bit.ly/SoulBoomCLIPS Watch WISDOM DUMP: https://bit.ly/WISDOMDUMP Follow us! Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulboom TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@soulboom Sponsor Soul Boom: [e-mail] Work with Soul Boom: [e-mail] Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: [e-mail] Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Spring Green Films Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Voicing Change Media Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Go to Soulboom.substack.com. Thank you. You're listening to So, boom. We were beaten, however you can imagine. We were spit on. I was angry primarily. I was bleeding, but it was angry. You know, I remember that about 10 minutes into it.

I was kind of like in the twilight zone. I could not really fully grasp what was going on anymore. I couldn't feel the pain. But I remember looking across the street and looking at all these parents that were passing by and thinking that what has happened to this population. that they become like this. They're just watching.

They're seeing them. They're killing two boys. They just don't care. Has God forgotten these people? What has happened to them? Hey there. It's me, Rain Wilson. And I want to dig into the human experience.

I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. Hey everybody. In this episode of Soul Boom, I'm really excited to talk to a dear friend of mine, someone that I've known at least for 15 years. Payam Zamani is a tech entrepreneur, a fellow member of the Baha'i faith, philanthropist, so many things, a great dad. And how exciting is this that I have my podcast. And guess what? I can bring my friends on my podcast, and he's written a book that is fantastic.

And I'm not just saying that. It's a page turner. It's really exciting. It's called Crossing the Desert, the Power of Embracing Life's Difficult Journeys. Oh, look, it's got a little quote on the front cover. Who's this a must-read, big-hearted book, harrowing and yet full of hope, Rain Wilson. I got blurbed, baby. it's an incredible story.

He's got an incredible story. I'm really excited to talk to him about it. Paiam, welcome to Soul Boom. Thank you, Rayne. It really feels good to be in a place that I have been welcome with so much love. So thank you. Really, your story comes in three or four main parts. Spoiler alert, you flee Iran after the Iranian revolution,

And then you come to the United States, a very dirt poor refugee living in the Central Valley, Modesto, California. Get yourself in education. And then 10, 12 years later, you've got an IPO going. You started an online business, auto web.com, and you have an IPO of almost a billion dollars. That right there is an incredible story. And there's a whole other parts of you that we hope to get to know. For folks who don't know, Baha'is in Iran, members of the Baha'i faith, are treated very poorly,

especially by the clergy and the current theocracy. But it has had a checkered and tragic past over the past 150, 170 years, tens of thousands of early members of the Baha'i faith put to death. and just a constant kind of living in trauma with the Baha'i faith. But can you give us a little bit of background of the Baha'is in Iran? I mean, as you mentioned, Baha'is have been persecuted

for a very long time in Iran from the inception of the faith in the mid-1800s. But then a lot of people, they tend to believe that if they know the Baha'is and they know a little bit about the Baha'i faith, that before the Iranian revolution, life must have been good for them. Not really so, unless you lived in Tehran, and not just in Tehran,

but northern Tehran. If you live there, the chances are life was acceptable. But outside of Tehran, where my family lived, it was very different. So there's no question that there is a correlation between the less educated, unfortunately, you are, and the further away you are from these centers of culture and, you know, kind of like worldliness, you're more likely to support that traditional way of thinking that the clergy brought. You know, what's interesting is that I would say that today's Iranians, in Iran, even in those small villages, are by far more accepting of Baha'is than they were during the Shah's regime because they saw what the clergy are capable of when they were put in charge

and they also control their lives too, not just the lives of the Baha'is. Yeah, what are the top three reasons that the clergy of Iran and so much of the population of Iran are just anti-Bahis? I mean, Baha'is, for the people who don't know, like peace-loving, it's about peace and unity,

it's about serving the poor, it's about getting an education. There's nothing in the Baha'i faith that, in fact, Baha'is are told to be obedient to the government that they live under. So the Baha'is are not trying to overthrow anyone. They're not trying to, we're not even actively supposed to proselytize. So Baha'is aren't supposed to like actively try and convert people.

There's just this peaceable population of this homegrown religion. Why all of the violence and hatred? I mean, I think if you ask 10 different people, they'll each give you three different reasons. Okay. But I will tell you that from my perspective, one is the fact that Iranians and the clergy are so big on the that Islam is a last religion. So the Baha'i faith came over a thousand years after Islam. So they feel that that's absolutely blasphemy. Because Muhammad said in the Quran, and he has a quote that says he calls himself the seal of

the prophets. So that one phrase has been interpreted by most of the Muslim world, that there will never be another prophet or manifestation or, you know, divine teacher. that comes down after Muhammad in the year 622. Exactly. And also, it is not that uncommon that religions, they accept the religions before them, but not the ones after them. And so that is an area that they have a problem with. The second thing is that as Baha'is, we believe that given that, for the most part, we are all educated, we no longer need clergy. We don't need to have a middleman between us and God, well, you know, Iran is run by the clergy. I'm guessing that they're not too happy about

that teaching either. And there are many others. I mean, we have, the Baha'i faith kind of like gets rid of the dogmas and superstition and so on. One of the teachings I love the most, probably one of the reasons that I personally have that connection to the Baha'i faith is the one that says science and religion should agree. And if they don't, it's religion that is in fault because then it's no longer makes sense. It's superstition. And if you go back to, let's say, a few decades ago when my dad was young, the idea of education, Western-style education, was frowned upon.

It was viewed as a way to, in a sense, take people away from the Muslim faith. So, like, when my dad was a kid and he wanted to go to school, his dad was very much a fundamentalist, he would say, no, if you go to school, you'll become a Baha'i. And that was the thinking that went on in many of those small towns and villages. Education in those parts of the Muslim world

at that time was going to, what's it called Madrasa? Yeah, you would need to learn how to read Quran. That's all you need. Just memorize the Quran pretty much. So the idea of learning arts and science, and culture and history.

And of course, in the Baha'i faith, too, we're taught that in the individual investigation of truth. We don't accept just the truth of our parents or the truth of our clergy or the truth of our culture and investigate the truth for ourselves. That's, again, a pretty progressive idea. You know, it's interesting.

I was just talking to somebody else this past week that I need to really go back and peel the onion to think about the challenges I faced because at the time living in Iran, that was normal to me. It didn't take till many years later for me to experience human rights and how life should be like to realize that was not okay. But you were bullied a lot. I was bullied a lot. There were many stores that would not sell us the basic necessities that, you know, milk or whatever, that they will not sell us because we are behind.

The fact that you're in a group, people come and they shake everyone's hands, but they don't shake your hand because they don't touch the Baha'is like they're dirty or something? Absolutely because you're dirty. You cannot washing will not clean you. I mean my grandmother, my dad's mom would not touch me because my dad had become a Baha'i himself and she was a Muslim. She was a devout Muslim. She will not touch me, her grandson because I was dirty. Wow. That's astonishing. Your grandmother would not touch you. This goes deep. Wow. Yeah. That's a good. Yeah. That's a good. You're, that is deep. And there's several hundred thousand Baha'is in Iran.

Now maybe more, half a million, maybe a million, maybe more. Yeah, I mean, nobody knows recently some Western organization did a survey, and there seems to be a lot more than that, but nobody really knows. But at the time when we had real statistics, there were more Baha'is in Iran than all other religious minorities combined, outside of Islam, of course. What made life in Iran unbearable that you needed to cross the desert? So there were problems that all Iranians were dealing with. And it wasn't just unique to Bahia, such as getting bombed by Iraq.

And that war went on for eight years. I talked about this in my book that every Thursday, for eight years, every town in Iran had a mass funeral, just because of the boys that would come back from the... the front line that were killed. People forget about that war. So you had the Iranian revolution, and then the first thing they did is go to war against Iraq, right?

Yeah, well, Iraq attacked Iran. But yes, that's exactly what happened. And then on top of that, you have, you know, there wasn't enough food. So food was rationed. You would have to go stand in long lines and get access to, you know, the kind of essentials that you needed.

And... Why didn't your family leave Iran after the revolution in 79? 80 because many Baha'is left at that very specific junction. My parents were not interested to leave because they felt that staying behind when Baha'is are being persecuted, when Baha'is are being killed, is a form of resistance. And particularly my dad, did not think that that would be a good idea. And, but life progressively got worse in Iran, just politically got worse and just the environment got worse. We had the war going on. And then the situation of Baha'is every day. I remember my dad used to work for the local spiritual assembly

of the Baha'is of Tehran. And he would come back home every night and he would tell us who the government had killed the day before. What Baha'is that my mom and dad knew who was killed. I remember there was this surgeon, Dr. Hakeem, that my mom knew well. One night, you know, told us about him. Another night about my mom's second cousin that was killed, Mr. Roshani. Another time was her second cousin that was killed. It was an ongoing thing all the time. It went from dozens to hundreds of Baha'is being killed.

There was a big outcry in the United Nations and other countries, and then it kind of went more underground, and they would just get disappeared. That's exactly. Much more convenient to just have them disappear than to have them like hung in the public square. And then you fast forward to 1981 when I was expelled from school. And that was one of those life moments

that is of course etched in my mind and something that I think in many ways shaped who I am today. That's one of those events that shaped me. And so here I am in this middle, school. There's one other Bahai boy, probably about 600 students attend the school, and they had this public mass prayer they would do every day at noon in the school. And then there was this religious teacher responsible to make sure that all the students are good Muslims and so on. And he carried a gun to make sure that was happening. And he came, he would come to us. He would say that you should

join us for this mass prayer. And we will politely let him know that as Baha'is, we have our own prayers. And he would be very cordial. He would say, okay, fine, no problem, no problem. And he would go away. One day, me and this other friend, we are sitting in the classroom, but we can hear his sermon. And during his sermon, he says that today we're going to get rid of the Baha'i boys. We're going to cleanse our school of these Baha'i boys. And of course, what happens is that the school ends and me and this boy were like, this is going to be an ugly day. We're just sitting in the courtyard of the school and the faculty are leaving the school and we ask a few of them, would they give us a ride? Of course, they said no. Even if they wanted to, they'd be in danger

by doing that. So they all left and that just say, remember that eerie moment that there's us and then I see 50, 60, I don't know how many kids outside. of the school with sticks, rocks, whatever you can imagine, waiting for us. And we kind of looked at each other after a while. We thought, well, they're going to come in if we don't go out. Let's show some courage and walk out. And we did. I called that the bleeding mile.

We were about a mile away from home. Pelted. Yeah, we were beaten. However you can imagine, we were spit on for about a mile by all. these kids. Frankly, you know, I remember that about 10 minutes into it. I was kind of like in the twilight zone. I could not really fully grasp what was going on anymore. I couldn't feel the pain. But I remember looking across the street and looking at all these parents that were passing by and thinking that what has happened to this population? That they become like this.

You look at those parents. Because parents, people are out on the street watching. They're just watching. They're seeing them. They're killing two boys. they just don't care. Has God forgotten these people? What has happened to them? And I made it home and I remember that, I mean, like I was angry primarily. I was bleeding, but I was angry from all the spit.

And you could literally wring out spit out of my clothes. And my hair was flat from spit. And I remember that I wanted to go back and, you know, fight them. And, you know, luckily my grandmother, my mom's mom was with us, and she basically helped me back, you know, let me go out. But that's one of those moments that clearly, you know, gets to define you. Then a decision is made by the family that they need to smuggle you out of the country. The country wouldn't let you just leave.

You had to get smuggled out. You couldn't, like, get a passport or say, we want to emigrate or anything like that. That wasn't an option. No, the Iranian government had also made it in place. for Baha'is to leave Iran. They had taken our passports away. Which just seems odd to me that, oh, we despise the Baha'is. We're going to torture, disappear them, hang them in public squares, make life impossible.

But we're also not going to let them leave. What was the thinking there? Why wouldn't they just say, oh, closed borders, except Baha'is, you guys can all go. We hate you. I know. One would think that that would be the smartest thing to do. We don't like you, so go. But no, they wanted to cleanse the world of us.

They wanted to get rid of us. They wanted to remove us from existence. So it is, you know, they didn't want us to go elsewhere and teach the Baha'i faith in another part of the world. They wanted to cleanse the world of the existence of Baha'is. So they thought by keeping us there. It's a little bit final solution-y. It is. I mean, they either thought that they're going to kill us or we're going to change our mind about being Baha'i's.

Yeah. Or just torture, make life. impossible. And again, I want to say to listeners and viewers, like, this is not all Muslims. No. This is most Muslims are allowing and peaceable. This is really a reflection on this very kind of corrupt backward fundamentalist clergy. And this is, you know, 150 years of history. Pressure is coming from from that very specific direction. So our kind of story here isn't about Islam or Muslims. This is about this certain faction

of Shiite Muslims that made life a living hell for Baha'is. I absolutely agree. And frankly, I would say that if it wasn't probably for many of those Muslims, probably they would have killed all Baha'is. So there is a, and you've got to also keep in mind, Baha'i faith is a new

religion. So all Baha'is in Iran, they have Muslim family members. So it is not as though, or Jewish family members, the Russian family members. So the population is very much intermingled. It's not as though they can tell from color of your skin that, you know, oh, you must be

a high. You know, we're all part of the same ethnicity and so on. Sure. Think of it this way. If you are a mother and a law-abiding mother, how do you find a smuggler? You know, what do you go to find a smuggles? So part one, find a smuggler. Exactly.

Yeah, there wasn't like Craig's list of like the smugglers section. Exactly. Exactly, or yellow pages I will have that. So you typically would find a smuggler by talking to others who had smuggled their family members out to see if they could make any recommendations for a good smuggler. And for one with good reviews. Is there a Yelp? Yeah, exactly.

The smuggler gets four and a half stars. That's right. Had an excellent experience with him. Our son arrived alive. So they found. How much money did they have to pay the smugglers to get you out? about $10,000, which was a lot of money. I mean, this is Iran.

And, you know, so that was a ton of money. And it's like life savings. And so, but that's what he took. And I remember the final night that I was in Iran. So I was at my cousin's home. My mom is there. We lived in Shiraz. I said goodbye to my dad.

I'm in Tehran with my mom. Met the smuggler. Smuggler got a picture of me. And I told my mom, I'm going to go for a walk. The next morning you were supposed to be on a 24-hour bus ride to the border town. So I started walking the streets of Tehran. I'm 16. I love the city and I knew that city well. I used to go everywhere on my own. I was very independent and I remember I was just thinking that I had this deep sadness. I don't want to leave. My parents are here, but I feel like I don't have a choice and as I was walking I passed by this movie theater that was showing an Iranian movie. I decided to go in and I decided to go in and

and just watch one last Iranian movie and saw that. And in Iran, you go to a movie theater. Everybody is having sunflower seeds, and they spit them out and sometimes sits the back of your neck. And everybody's smoking. So you can kind of see the movie in as a smoke, you know, makes it up in the movie theater. And so, and then, you know, at 9 p.m. I walked out,

and I was walking this July. So it's a warm night. I'm walking back to my cousin someone. I'm thinking my mom's got to be worried that where is he? But it was kind of off thinking about that, that my mom is just going to hand me to smugglers in 24 hours. Wow. You know, she's not going to know where I'm going to be for a long time.

This is nothing to worry about. How hard that would be. I mean, I have a 19-year-old son, as you know, thinking about putting a 16-year-old version of him in the hands of smugglers to try and get across, what was it, pecks? or Afghanistan or Pakistan. Yeah.

Yeah. So you take a 24-hour bus to a border town. Take us through some of the highlights or low lights, as it were, of this odyssey. Because it is absolutely blood-chilling. It's harrowing thinking about a teenager going through this. So we have to take a bus ride from Tehran to Zahedan. Zahedan is kind of like where Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan meet. and it is kind of like this rustic town.

There are very few trees. We had to drive for 24 hours through what is called Dashtal Lute or the Emptiness Desert. If you look up online, you'll see that NASA has named it the hottest place on the planet. They recorded 152 degrees Fahrenheit as the hottest day. Holy moly. I know. It's amazing. So July 7th is when we're driving through it.

The height of summer. So we get to, and they had asked me. So did you just drive, like the middle of the night, you get in a truck and they just take off into the desert across the border? Well, we took a bus from Tehran to Zahedon. Right. And it's just like Iranian bus company. And, but the smuggler had asked my mom and I to not sit next to each other.

There's a 24-hour bus ride. They wanted to make sure that we're not going to raise any suspicious. We got to the town. We got off the bus. And they had asked me to not say goodbye to my mom, to not talk to her, not to touch her. Oh my God. And so you can imagine, and I'm there, I get off the bus,

and my heart is pounding, and I got to walk to the side of the road. I know somebody's going to pick me up, and life is going to change dramatically at that moment in time. I did that, did not look back, a white car, Iranian-made car, stopped by, the guy who had a picture of me, asked me to get in. I got in the car, closed the door. He sped away.

It was about 8 a.m. I remember I just looked back and I could see my mom standing by that bus. 30-some-odd years later. I still can't tell this story. So I felt like our eyes kind of locked in, but she couldn't really see my eyes. You know, their son, you know, just directed at the back window. of the car. There's no way.

The glare. But I could tell she's crying out loud inside, but she cannot show any emotions. So the car made a left turn, and that was it. And just even now, I think about she had to get on the next bus,

24-hour ride, back to Tehran and then to Shiraz. What a right that was that. Hmm. Can't even imagine. So what's the next, what's the next step? I don't want to give away all the stories. No, I know. There's a lot more there details.

But they took me to a safe house, the smugglers. They took me to a safe house. And I wasn't at safe house till about 10 p.m. About 8 p.m. Four Jewish girls also joined us. Because there's this other boy who had come along with us as well. Four Jewish girls joined us. And then at about 8 p.m. when it got dark,

they asked us to go out to the courtyard of this house. We got into that truck, the boys in the front. There was two me and this other boy, plus the driver and his support. And they said their prayers before we got on the, and they were Sunni Muslims, which about nine percent of Iranians are Sunnis. They are highly persecuted by the Shiite Muslims in Iran also. The girls, they had to go in the back. It was a grand Cherokee Jeep.

They got in the back. They were covered by Tarf. did you have with you? I had a duffel bag with like very few small duffel bag, probably no more than 10 pounds. What do you take when you don't even know if you're going to survive the ride? So the girls were in the back, a tarp over them. We left the courtyard and the guy started driving really fast. And this is the old truck so you feel the speed. And there was a turn and there was moonlight. There was a turn that the truck had to make it right to. turn and I'm just thinking that why is he not slowing down there's no way can make that right

turn at the speed he's going when he got the turn he turned off the lights he went straight off the road and so the truck is all over the place he went into a riverbed and continued in that river bed and every now and then somebody would come out from it appeared like a hole in the ground to just tell him not to go this way go the other way because there are border guards potentially that could see you. And if they were to see you, he has a network everywhere. Yeah.

And if they were to see you, they would not stop you. They would just use rocket-propelled grenade to neutralize you. Wow. They wouldn't get themselves in trouble because they knew that the smugglers

also have guns and so on. And ultimately we got to a place that we could see the border guards guarding a stretch of highway. And we are about maybe 500 yards away with lights off at a bit high.

up, we can see them, but they can't see us. And as they were dry, as one, the patrol drove away, maybe it was a mile away, we crossed the highway. The guy who was his support ran out, swept the highway to make sure there are no tire marks left behind. And we went on for another half hour. There are motorcycles waiting for us. We got on those motorcycles, went on for another hour till we got to a place that they had literally used dynamites to close a valley, but by getting the mountain to collapse. And we got off the motorcycles and we started just on our hands and knees climbing that barrier that they had created. And then we went on on a hike for over five hours. After the hike was complete, as the sun was coming up, we got to the other side of this

mountain. And I tell people that the best way to visualize it, think of the movie Lawrence of Arabia. And when you see the sand dunes and that's what they look like. I felt like I'm going to die. I literally collapsed, you know, the six of us that were getting smuggled out. From a distance, I saw a truck coming and as the truck got closer, I saw that the steering wheel was on the right-hand side and I knew I'm in Pakistan. But I had just illegally entered a country. So the journey has not ended, has just begun. And I'm also in one of the roughest places on the planet where Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan meet is not a place you want to be. So this went on. I mean, it's, it was this was just a beginning of what would take three, four more days

before I made it to the first border town called Kuwaita, Pakistan. And you describe all of the adventures you went on. It just goes on and on and on. It's jaw-dropping what you had to endure at age 16. It's terrifying. But they tell people think about what the government must have done that the mother thinks that this is a safer path. I think about that in terms of economic refugees

and immigrants coming to the U.S. southern border and families having to walk the Darien gap in Panama. The Mediterranean, how many of them get killed? Yeah, yeah, crossing Africa, crossing the Sahara to like, but what, how bad must it be? Yeah. Where that is seen as a better option. Yeah.

You know, I say this often to people. I say this we draw it. I'm a proud American. This is the country that has helped me realize what human rights looks like. The first time I felt I experienced human rights was when I went to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad Pakistan

and when I told them that I want to go to the U.S., they did not laugh at me. They showed me a path that how I can do that. But I say I'm a proud American because this is the country that gives that teenage me, completely on the other side of the world, hope. Whether you like it or not,

it's not China or Russia. It's this country that gives hope. And I think that's a spiritual destiny that we have as Americans. It's a privilege to be in a position to give hope to the world. We don't want that to diminish. We want that light to shine brightly. That's a good thing that we have been chosen to be the people to give that kind of hope to humanity. You came to America as a political, religious, persecuted refugee. That's right. America has taken in economic refugees, immigrants from all over the world,

people that have gotten an education here and started lives. And, you know, e pluribus unum out of many one, it's great in theory, it hasn't always been practiced in the United States, as you know, with our treatment of, African Americans and Native Americans.

But it is something to strive for, something to not give up on. And you're a part of that story. Moving forward in your story, because I don't want to steal all the juicy stories from crossing the desert. I love the fact that you and your brother, Frank, were enamored with cars.

Tell us about that and the founding of the car. Yeah. Auto Web. So you got to keep in mind, Modesto is very much of an all-American city. One of my first experiences. It's low riders, muscle cars. It is.

And even beyond that, so, like, I love to learn more about the U.S. I got to tell you about this, that George Bush, senior, visited our high school. Who was standing next to him, Chuck Norris? Because he's from Modesto. Oh, my God. So I'm experiencing all of these wild things. and then you've got the graffiti, American graffiti night that was filmed there

and the culture of cruising was very much alive. So every Friday night, Saturday night, me and my friends, we would get in our cars and go down McKinery Avenue. And the first time I was shocked that in this central valley town, why is there bumper-to-bumper traffic at 10 p.m. On a Friday night.

And of course, the idea was to collect as many phone numbers as you could and, you know, just meet as many people as you can. And I love that you went from being spat on on the streets of Iran to, like, cruising with milkshakes at 11 p.m. And listening to probably Van Halen or something. Van Halen, Banjovi, you know, whatever else I was going on. What a cultural trip. Yeah, yeah. No, it was an amazing experience being there at that time. And I think those years Modesto were pretty special.

I'm bummed that they have banned cruising in Modesto now. I had owned many cars since I'd arrived in the U.S. My first car was a Pinto. I saved 600 bucks and I got my first car. And I was so excited about getting that. And then I bought a... You overpaid. I overpaid 600 bucks.

I shopped probably 580. And then I bought a 1976 Camero, which I absolutely loved. That's a great car. It was a gas guzzler, and I could barely afford the money for that. But then I own many cars. I bought a Nissan Pulsar, if you remember those cars. Sure. I hated it, though.

That's so ugly. Because I would drive it during cruising. Guys would try to catch up to me thinking there's a girl driving the car. And they would catch up, they would look, they would get all upset that, who the hell are you driving a Nissan Pulsar? So, anyhow, so I sold that. And I bought a convertible Dutson pickup truck that had a. massive boombox in the back. But yeah, I owned 16 cars by the time I was 23,

and all cheap cars. You knew something about buying and selling cars. Yeah, I love that. And fixing cars. And I would make a little bit of money on them every time. In 1994, I graduated from UC Davis and my brother graduated from Chico State. And he had gone the job at Microsoft.

And I was still trying to figure out what I was going to do. And he basically wanted to do. he called me up, he said, hey, what do you think about starting a website about cars? I'm like, sounds amazing, but I have no idea what you're talking about. I had never been online. So he came to my home and set me up on CompuServe. 90% people are listening to this.

I have no idea what I'm talking about. Super early days of the web. Especially dial-up service. This is like AOL. You'd get those CDs sent to you in the mail. Yes. Yeah. And then you connect.

You hear a bunch of beeping noise and so on. Finally, you connect. And so I went online and I loved it. I thought, oh my God, this can be amazing. So we decided that we're going to start a company providing information about cars online. The whole idea was let's educate the consumer so they'll know more about cars than the car salesman. And, you know, right, today if you want to buy a car, you'll know what's the invoice price of that car. Sure.

We were the first ever offer that. and the dealers hated us for it, but then they soon realized, well, the consumers are going to come to the website. It's good for everybody. So they ultimately, you know, they reached peace with us over providing all the information that we were. So that became the beginning of AutoWeb

that we founded that company in 1994. This is, of course, way pre-Google. This is right about when Yahoo came about. There were fewer than 5,000 domains that were registered. So I remember we wanted to... Can you imagine? We wanted to register a domain name

and we could have gone anything. Card.com, auto.com, auto.com, anything you can imagine. And I remember that we thought, well, autos on the web, auto web, makes sense. Now, of course, if I could go back in time, I would just register all those domain names. Forget building a business.

I'll sell the domains later. You'll make even more money. So... Auto web grows by leaps and bounds. you're working with dealerships and you're connecting consumers to dealers. You were a pioneer in that field of someone Googling something and filling out a form and then getting connected to a, and then you get a percentage of that, right? Is that how you built the business?

So think of it this way. Speaking English is one thing, but speaking English good enough to sell the car dealers is fundamentally a different thing. So I'm still improving my English. I've been in the U.S. only for about six years. And so I'm going to car dealers, door to door, knocking on the doors. And you know how chaotic dealerships are? So I'm going there, trying to find the GM or the owner,

and try to get the guy to pay attention to me so I can sell them something. I went to 150 of these meetings. Nobody signed up. And I remember I would go to them in advance of it the night before. I'm listening to Anthony Robbins. I'm reading Wayne Dyer's books. I'm reading Zig Zigler. And then right before going to my meeting,

I'm listening to Guns and Roses to really pump me up. So I'm energetic and excited and show up, you know, try to sell them. After 150, you know, my brother said that, should we just stop? I'm like, are you kidding me? Colonel Sanders went to 1,000 meetings, could not sell any of them.

And he ultimately did. I've only gone to 150. And 150, you know, nose closer to a yes. so we'll keep going. And finally, we were able to sell, and that kind of opened up the floodgates. But it was not easy, but at the same time, we found a lot of really amazing people along the way that kind of became our champions and became people who wanted to mentor us and help us down that path. I mean, the names like Norm Turner, if he hears this, he knows who he is.

And if it wasn't for Norm. Norm doesn't listen to this podcast. He's a realtor, you're right, today. He used to run a Honda store. And you then take an auto web public. There's an IPO. How many years later? A couple years later?

We first had to raise a lot of money along the way from VCs, and no VC in Silicon Valley would give us money because, think of it, two guys who did not go to an Ivy League school and they speak English with thick accent So we had to go all the way to Fort Lee, New Jersey to raise money. And I think we're probably the only ones from Silicon Valley. A lot of money in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

I know, exactly. Just don't ask where he came from. But we raised money there, and ultimately we did raise money from Silicon Valley later on, but after the company had achieved greater level of success. But in 1999, so five years later, we took a company public. And, you know, that is definitely, when you're there at that moment, And 10 years ago, you had crossed the border without having a passport, without knowing where you're headed, you realize that this is one of those things that probably only happens in America.

It's an astonishing story. When I was reading your book, I was just floored by the fact that, you know, you begin the book and you're staying in like the Mandarin Oriental Hotel or something in Manhattan and getting ready for an IPO. And like 11 years previous, you were crossing the desert and like eating dirt. And then a few years after that, trying to learn English out of a dictionary and selling pizzas and then at community college

and then here you are with VC capital and launching a business. It's, I mean, you can't say only in America. Maybe there's some other countries that that could happen. but regardless, it's an absolutely astonishing story. I mean, if you think about, if I look at my tax return, five years prior to that, it was, I think, $12,000,

and then it was like $24,000 a year after. So I was poor. I was really poor until I wasn't. And then there was this IPO. And so it was definitely a life that, and a journey that I was not expecting. I did not think this is going to turn out this way. I felt that we had a passion for cars

and we were building a business out of passion. It wasn't until a few years into it that we realized that this is bigger than us and there's something happening that is, you know, some people calling it a revolution or whatever it is in the technology world that we just happened to be a part of it at the right time.

Yeah. But the point I'm trying to make is that after I took all the way public, I realized that there are aspects of capitalism and the way this practice that are fundamentally flawed. That, you know, I felt at some level a bit empty, that, you know, that I am a part of this system. And I felt that, you know, almost all of us, we want to be of service to others. We find joy in that. Why is it that nonprofits stand, they stand for the betterment of the world, but for profits, for the most part, for greed and just maximization of profits?

Why are we combining the two? I mean, when you think about an average entrepreneur in Silicon Valley or anywhere that loves to build and sell or take public. Yeah, like the people on Shark Tank. What happens after they do that? Well, I got to do one bigger. Why? because I define myself by the level of success I had with that one exit. But why?

Why isn't there more to it than just that exit? Or if your company is already doing a billion in revenue, why does it necessarily have to do two billion new revenue, regardless of the negative impact you could have on society on Main Street businesses and so on? Why should Amazon grow from 400 billion to 800 billion? Why? These are the questions that I think most businesses don't bother to answer.

And this is why our primary, we call the tagline, but that's the governing principle that we care about that one planet is innovation plus intention. People ask me, what do you think about AI? Are you afraid of AI? I don't know. Am I afraid of the innovator? If I'm afraid of the innovator,

then yes, I'll be afraid of AI also. Because ultimately it is the value system of the innovator that determines if the invention is going to be good or bad. You know, Snapchat recently released this thing that you get to rate your friends. Is that good or bad? I don't know. What was the intention behind it? Was it just money?

Or was it because you saw a real value that somehow rating your friends will bring friends closer? But doesn't this go back to kind of ultimately like Milton Friedman philosophy of capitalism, that capitalism is purely there for profit and competition? and if there's anything ethical to be found in capitalism, that's because of the will of the people and the will of the consumer. So if consumers only want to buy ethical products, then they're going to buy ethical products. But if they just want cheap, convenient products,

they don't give a fuck about ethical. So, you know, so many people would say that that's not capitalism's role. Capitalism is a system and that the free market will determine everything, screw kind of ethics and morals, kind of putting any kind of moral template on top of capitalism. Yeah. Milton Friedman, for sure, is the version of capitalism

that we are, an extreme version of it, that we are right now practicing. But here's the way I would present it, that Milton Friedman's version is about me and how I can maximize my profits and shareholder profits and so on, maximization of shareholder value. I will argue that if as an entrepreneur, I truly want to be

joyful, again, is self-serving. If I want to be truly joyful, I'm going to need more than money. Because I can show you a ton of entrepreneurs that have taken companies public for billions or sold them, and they're not joyful. So let's be self-serving. How can I be more joyful? You can become more joyful if you say that I need to combine my business with impact, with positive impact on humanity by making the world a better place and having a conscious knowledge of how I'm going to do that. The moment you do that, an interesting thing happens, your business actually becomes a better business because people actually like to work with those kinds of companies. And employees don't like to leave those kinds of companies. And consumers like to be a part of those kind of companies. Yeah. So oddly

enough, these companies are actually not low performers. Yeah. I would invest in that. You have well-paid, loyal employees. Yeah, I mean, I tell people that since 2015, that we went down this path in my businesses, we have by far been able to beat

our peers in the market, even though, again, given the principles that I try to employ, I say that I don't want to be in a business, that our success should be the cause of someone else's demise. Otherwise, I'd rather be in a different business. I don't want to compete with anyone. But the fact is, if you run a good business,

the consumers will choose whoever they want to choose, and they happen to come to a business like ours, than one that does not care about these kinds of values. What are some of those values? How do you put them in place in one planet group? Sure. If someone was a business consultant was coming from the outside and looking at it, they would say, oh, here's what this business group does different

than other business groups in the Bay Area. The number one thing is love for everyone that you're dealing with, is love for humanity and looking at every human as a noble creation, that if I look at even my competitor as someone I'm going to have love for, the way I'm going to treat them is going to fundamentally change. How do you instill that as a philosophy in your employees? That's our number one core principle in the company leading with love. And so what that means is that we have a whole culture,

training around it. But basically what that means is that I'm going to consider the impact of my financial decisions on people around me. And there are consequences. There's a ripple effect. Let's talk about the ripple effect before we say, yes, let's move forward. So that's one. The second thing is that we put our money where our mouth is, that we believe that we need to sacrificeally give. And we don't think that just because we are good at, let's say, software, can also solve the problem of education in Africa. Who says so? There are people that they have dedicated their lives to that. So we rather go find some of those people and adopt them as our nonprofit arm, as people who know it the best, and let's support them to do the good thing that they do

and more of the good thing that they do. And sacrificeally give to those causes. So I think that as a business, giving one percent is a checkmark. I don't want to be a checkmark. I want to do real things. so we give as much as 20% of the profits of the business. We have service days that we tell our employees, on these days you get paid, whether you do service or not. Service comes from the heart. You can't be forced to offer service. But on those days, we pay you to go out there

and be of service to humanity. You decide how. There's one thing we prefer that you don't do, and that is don't serve political parties on those days because by nature they're divisive. Yesterday was one of our service days. and our teams in 11 different countries all over the place. We're offering service.

And that's a beautiful thing because it brings joy to them while they are on the clock. What about profit sharing? Profit sharing is an essential part of our, you know, I did that for multiple reasons, one, because I believe that that's the right thing to do. But then the second thing is that people are so conditioned in my world that they want the company to sell or go public, so they can have that big payday. I'm like, forget that big payday.

Let's have a payday every quarter based on the success of the business. So you share that success. Those are some examples, and I believe that by employing these, we also do another good thing, which is we put a cap on how big a company can become.

And I think that's a good thing. Do we need global dominators? I don't know how that benefits us. I don't know how, you know, I've met Jeff Bezos, seems like a nice guy. But I don't know if Amazon's of the world are necessary for the world. I think, are we better off

because we have fewer people vying for our business because many of those local businesses have gone bankrupt and so on? I don't think that necessarily makes the world a better place. So I do think that diversity of businesses, diversity of options for consumers

is a good thing. And I'd like to think that when you build a business based on cool, I call them spiritual principles, but these are timeless values we can all buy into, I think puts a cap on how big these businesses become, and that's a good thing. It's an incredible story. Payam, you know, I admire you so much. I love you so much as a brother. Why now? Why'd you write this book now? What's your philosophy?

I've written this book three times, but then every time I thought that why would anyone want to read my book? So I had to rewrite it in order to get to a point that I was, was happy with it. I felt that this book could help a lot of people because these challenges in life have helped me. And I thought maybe people can just read about these challenges and this stuff I've dealt with and maybe they can get the same thing out of it without having to go through the pain. I'd like to think that this book can bring hope to a bunch of people, a bunch of teenagers, all the way on the other side of the planet, that there is hope. And speaking of which, is there going to be a Farsi translation?

Is this going to be made available in Iran somehow? Oh, that's a good question. My publisher is not in favor of that because they cannot sell it in Iran. So, we need to figure it out. We can hire some smugglers to bring Farsi versions over the Pakistani mountains. Reverse smuggle into Iran. Exactly.

But, I mean, there's also immigrants in this country that I think that they will find this book interesting. Entrepreneurs, first time entrepreneurs, or second-time entrepreneurs, that they can just read about the struggles and how they can probably build a better company that would not just feed their pockets, but also feed their soul. And ultimately, I would say that any executive, any CEO, that they're struggling with bringing meaning to their businesses,

I think that this book can potentially help them. At the end of the day, though, I think that this book is supposed to be a reminder that crisis and victories are the two sides of the same coin, that don't run away from them, crisis gets you ready for the next set of victories. And when you have those victories, know that crisis will follow too.

So this cycle will keep going and that's okay. Right, right. You certainly have known some crises and you've certainly known some victories. And thank you so much for sharing your story on Soul Boom. Thank you, Ray. I really appreciate the invite. You're the best. The Soul Boom Podcast.

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