San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
CEO driven to fight for other immigrants
Founder of S.F. car rental firm had avoided discussing his youth in Lebanon, but says he can’t keep silent under Trump
At 17, Andre Haddad could identify types of explosives based on the sounds they made whizzing overhead. A mortar shell in trajectory thundered like the sounds of Blue Angels flying low over San Francisco — a noisy spectacle that still rattles Haddad almost 30 years later.
He recalls to this day the sound of a bomb that exploded at his Beirut apartment building, turning to ash his stash of Economist magazines and a taped-up poster of Madonna with red lips and a big hair bow.
Haddad, the 47-year-old chief executive of Turo, a San Francisco startup that helps people rent out their cars, avoided talking about his youth in war-torn Lebanon for a long time.
Then President Trump arrived in Washington.
Haddad has since joined other tech leaders in sounding off against Trump’s call to cut legal immigration in half. He signed his company’s name to amicus briefs in federal court cases and open letters aimed at protecting the immigrants who are a significant part of tech’s work force.
There was a time, not too long ago, when the tech industry pushed only political issues that directly affected their firms, such as tax reform and net neutrality. Its leaders
are now commenting on topics from immigration policy to the rights of women and minorities. Reasons are clear: The Trump administration has many policies and views that challenge the sector’s ideals, and employees in a competitive hiring market are demanding that companies take public stands.
The Bay Area is heavily populated by immigrants, and many work in tech. Those born outside the U.S. make up 71 percent of tech workers in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area, and just over 50 percent in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward area, according to an analysis of census data by the Seattle Times.
On that night in 1989, the last full year of the Lebanese civil war, Haddad and his family survived by taking shelter in an underground parking garage. Much of his neighborhood slept in that makeshift shelter. An estimated 1 million Lebanese fled the country during the conflict.
A few months later, Haddad called his uncle from a Beirut post office and arranged to join him in Paris, leaving behind his family, which was relocating to Cyprus. It was a fresh start.
Being an immigrant ignited in Haddad an impulse to create a better future, he said. He applied to a hundred different schools asking them to register a late addition. “They all declined except one,” he said. After scanning the local newspapers, Haddad found and rented a 200-square-foot studio nearby.
He adapted. Without a fridge, Haddad figured out that he could leave milk on the windowsill without spoiling it in winter. His budget allowed for half a baguette, a pat of butter and some cheese for dinner each night.
Haddad spoke French but used only formal grammar. “I sounded totally weird,” he said.
It wasn’t until many years later that Haddad, working as a liquid-detergent product manager at Procter & Gamble, had enough money to start rebuilding his music library, which burned in the Beirut blast. He stumbled on a relatively new website called eBay and bid on big boxed sets of CDs from American sellers. At the time, even with a favorable exchange rate, Haddad still managed to spend an exorbitant amount on international shipping.
In appreciating the genius of this new online marketplace, he decided to build an auction site for Europe. His family was horrified. They didn’t understand what possessed their son to quit a steady job without a better gig lined up.
“It seemed weird. Weird, scary, irresponsible. But I didn’t feel that it was that weird, and I didn’t feel that it was that risky,” Haddad said. “Because what did I really have to lose?”
The company he helped found, iBazar, had almost no cash. Venture capital hadn’t yet arrived in France. “In order for us to get going, there were lots of investments that we needed to make, in hardware and in hosting, that seemed completely beyond our reach,” Haddad said. He and his co-founders persuaded a data center to get them set up on their servers in exchange for shares of his startup — an unusual proposition at the time. Haddad recalls the first television ad for iBazar airing in 1999. The website crashed, crushed by the onslaught of visits and their lightweight investments in hardware.
The website exploded in popularity, adding 2.4 million registered users and becoming one of the top-viewed sites in France, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.
In 2000, eBay approached iBazar with an offer to buy it for $1 billion. Haddad said he and his co-founders turned it down, though Meg Whitman, then eBay’s CEO, told the New York Times in 2002 that she vetoed the deal because she felt it was too expensive. (Whitman and eBay didn’t respond to requests for comment on Haddad’s account.) Haddad said he dreamed of taking iBazar public someday, but the markets did not cooperate. Internet companies were running out of cash in the early 2000s, leading investors to bolt for the exits. Strapped for cash, iBazar courted a new bid from eBay, this time for a bit over $100 million in company shares.
“People so often ask me do I have regrets,” Haddad said. “Sure, I have regrets, but look at the outcome. Just 10 years before (selling iBazar), I was under the bombs of Beirut.
“The only thing I feel is gratitude.” Haddad went to work at eBay, first in France, then the United States, where the company sponsored his visa. He got a green card in 2010 and left eBay to take the CEO job at Turo in 2011. Since then, the car-rental startup has added more than 10 million members in 37 countries.
Now, Haddad is entering the political fray.
Turo joined with 160 other tech companies last year to file an amicus brief at the U.S. Supreme Court opposing Trump’s ban, which now limits travel from five countries with Muslim majorities, plus two others. (The court upheld the ban in a 5-4 vote.) Turo also signed an open letter urging Trump not to dissolve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children to continue to live and study or work in the country without risk of deportation. Haddad said the startup doesn’t have the resources to lobby for specific legislation that helps immigrants, but it would be open to doing so in the future.
He pointed to the belief popularized by Trump that American-born workers are being displaced by low-skill immigrants who are taking their jobs and lowering their wages. Groups have sued the federal government over the years to block legal immigration or limit recent expansions of work permits.
“I don’t feel like the opportunities that I’ve benefited from and that I’ve created have come at the expense of others,” Haddad said.
“It’s as if the pie was predefined and limited, and if immigrants got a share of the pie, the nonimmigrants would have a smaller share.”
But, he said, “the pie grows. The economy grows. Innovation grows when you’ve got more people who are empowered to participate.”
The impact of immigration on the national economy is well understood. Foreign-born workers account for 17 percent of the U.S. labor force, but nearly 40 years of empirical research offers little supporting evidence that those individuals are stealing American jobs, said Giovanni Peri, an economics professor at UC Davis who specializes in immigration. “If you look at U.S. cities and regions where immigration has been larger, or has an increasing share of the population, those are also the areas where employment of American workers has been growing faster,” Peri said. Lowskilled workers often fill the jobs American don’t want, Peri said, while highly skilled, collegeeducated immigrants grow the economy and create new job opportunities.
Haddad said he tells his immigrant story to his three children so that they might inherit certain values. He wants them to feel proud of where they come from and what makes them special. His youngest child has a Sony alarm clock on her nightstand that Haddad once kept in the makeshift shelter under his Beirut apartment.
“I’ve been telling them my story for a long time because I want them to understand that they have so much privilege,” Haddad said, “and that they always need to think about others.”