Huffington Magazine Issue 22 | Page 55

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES (BRIN); KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES (MUSK); NOAH BERGER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES (KHOSLA) BRAIN DRAIN to a report earlier this year by the Partnership for a New American Economy. And their companies have produced sizable economic benefits. This year, engineering and technology companies founded in the United States employed about 560,000 workers and generated $63 billion in sales, according to Wadhwa. About a quarter of those companies had at least one foreign-born founder. HUFFINGTON 11.11.12 An estimated three out of every four startups fail, if not more. But by the conventional wisdom of Silicon Valley, Darash’s chances were even slimmer. For one, he does not have a co-founder. He insists he doesn’t need one. (Paul Graham, creator of the startup incubator Y Combinator, has said having a co-founder is critical because “a startup is too much for one person to bear.”) Darash also never worked for a major tech company before, so he did not have the network of contacts that Left to right: Google coFounder Sergey Brin, co -founder of Paypal and Tesla Elon Musk and Vinod Khosla,