Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Hamid Hashemi, chief executive of iPic Entertainment, which manages theaters, restaurants, bars and bowling alleys. To read the complete interview, check out other articles, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Photo credit: Earl Wilson for The New York Times
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What were your early years like?
I was born and raised in Iran. The focus of society in the Middle East is family. In the United States, it’s more about the individual. This is a country that’s very competitive, and that’s the greatest thing about it. It doesn’t matter where you come from, what you come with, you can rise to the top. You can do whatever you want. This is a luxury you don’t have in other countries.
But the other side of that is when you grow up in the Middle East, it’s all about the family. Your weekend, your entertainment, is getting together with the rest of your family, and families are big. When we got together, it was up to 100 people. My father had 11 siblings, and my mother had three, so when we got together, there were probably 50 kids.
When you grow up in a family like that, there’s a sense of security. It isn’t just because you are getting taken care of; it gets ingrained in you that you take care of other people.
And what kind of things were you doing outside of class?
I was a happy kid. We had a good upbringing. We would create our own soccer teams. Here, we schedule our kids. It’s not what they want to do; it’s what we want them to do, and we schedule everything for them.
Where I grew up, those luxuries didn’t exist, so we all had to do our own thing. There were no leagues. The kids on the street would create their own team, of all different ages, and you competed with kids in a different neighborhood. We did it all ourselves. It helps you to become self-sufficient.
Tell me about your parents.
My father was a self-made man, a serial entrepreneur. He started with a pharmacy, and he was in real estate and built clinics. He’s always been my role model because every Sunday we would get in the car and drive to rural areas where people didn’t have access to medical care.
He had this little box that he would fill up with different kinds of antibiotics and painkillers. We would literally drive three hours outside of town to visit people. And they would line up because they knew that he was coming. These people were in desperate need of medicine.
My mom was also very inspiring. She’s the one who always said, “You can do whatever you want. If you want to succeed at it, you’re going to succeed at it.”
Did you have an idea early on about what you wanted to do for a career?
When I was 12, I decided I wanted to be a heart surgeon. I saw my grandfather have a heart attack and he was lying there helpless. That’s when I decided what I wanted to do. I had three years of medical school before the revolution took place in Iran, and I had the opportunity to leave or stay there.
I moved here on Dec. 10, 1978, and tried to get back into medical school. But at the time, it was $18,000 a year, and I came here with $700 in my pocket. There was no way I could earn that much money and go to school.
And when I first got here, school was in session already, so I spent most of the first few months literally just watching TV and learning English. I watched “Sesame Street” and “Three’s Company.” There are no blonds in Iran, so I didn’t understand all the blond jokes.
Once school started, I really started focusing on business courses. And I delivered furniture on the weekends, and I worked the night shift at a hotel, from midnight until 7 a.m., to support myself. As soon as I got out of school, I started in real estate, renting homes. I needed quick money. Then I started my own real estate company.
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To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times’ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews of hundreds of business leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.