Iqram Magdon-Ismail

“Have faith. I tell myself all the time. Just kind of follow your instinct and your gut and believe in whatever you’re working on or doing or thinking about. Sometimes I need to remind myself that that’s the best approach to living. That’s advice I give myself almost every day,” Iqram Magdon-Ismail said in a 2017 interview with The Associated Press. In 2009 he co-founded the digital payment platform Venmo and served as its president and director until it was acquired by Braintree in 2012 for $26.2 million (which was subsequently purchased by PayPal the following year). Magdon-Ismail, who moved to the U.S. from Zimbabwe as a teenager, currently works at Ense, a social voice platform he founded in 2016. “I have met lots of bright students forced to leave the country because they didn’t have appropriate working status. America is the land of opportunity, and international students with lots of potential are like all other students that attend U.S. universities – we should do whatever we can to keep these amazing people here.” Updated July 2016