8 major US companies with Iranian-American founders or CEOs

Ferdowsi was studying electrical engineering at MIT when he met Drew Houston in 2008. Houston was looking for a business partner to secure backing for his cloud-storage idea from Y Combinator.

A week later, Ferdowsi dropped out and helped launch Dropbox. The company went public in March 2018.

As the CEO and owner of SBE Entertainment, Nazarian owns several nightclubs, hotels, and restaurants, including SLS hotels and Umami Burger. He grew up in California after his Persian Jewish family left Tehran following the Iranian Revolution. His father made a fortune as an early investor in Qualcomm Inc.

Hot Pockets, the iconic American snack, were created by two Iranian immigrant brothers. Paul and David Merage were born in Tehran. They got the idea for their company, Chef America, while attending college in California. The pair sold the company to Nestle in 2002 for $2.6 billion.

Omidyar wrote the code for online auctioneer eBay by himself in 1995 in an attempt to impress his girlfriend, according to Entrepreneur. Omidyar served as the company's chairman before stepping down to focus on impact investing, Forbes reported. He also founded First Look Media, the owner of The Intercept and producer of films "Spotlight" and "Dark Money," according to Fast Company.

Omidyar has a net worth of $13 billion, Forbes estimates.

Goodarzi's family immigrated to the United States just before the Iranian Revolution, when he was 10 years old, he wrote in 2018 essay for Entrepreneur. Goodarzi wrote that he experienced bullying and difficulties at school during the Iranian hostage crisis, which taught him the value of hard work and inclusion. Goodarzi was appointed CEO of Intuit in January 2019 after a 15-year career with the company, Business Insider reported.

Rad and Mateen first became friends as children, Rad told Rolling Stone in 2014.

Rad founded Tinder in 2012 after dropping out of the University of Southern California to found a now-defunct adtech platform called Adly, Business Insider reported.

The pair have been embroiled in several lawsuits. In one settled in 2014, Tinder cofounder and current Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd alleged that Rad ignored her sexual harassment complaint against Mateen, according to The New York Times. Rad temporarily lost his post atop Tinder as a result and left the company in 2016. Rad is also in the midst of multibillion-dollar lawsuit with Tinder's parent company IAC, according to the LA Times.

Rowghani is a partner at Y Combinator, the startup incubator that helped launch Airbnb, Dropbox, Instacart, and DoorDash, according to the organization's website. Before pivoting to investing, Rowghani served as Twitter's chief operating officer, the South China Morning Post reported.