Mike Honda is the senior Asian American U.S. Congressman from California, second in seniority only to David Wu of Oregon. As the representative for Silicon Valley, Honda’s interests align closely with those of Asian American tech professionals. And as a House Democratic Senior Whip and a member of the powerful House Appropriations and Budget Committee, he has built up the clout to represent those interests effectively.
During Honda’s first term — which began in 2001 — representing California’s 15th Congressional District he showed himself to be a clear voice for Asian Americans in Congress. In 2004 he was named Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and held the post for seven years before passing it on to Congresswoman Judy Chu in January of 2011.
Honda knows personally the importance for Asian Americans of having a voice in Congress. His first memories are of life in one of the internment camps to which Japanese Americans were sent soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
“Between the ages of one and almost five, I lived at Camp Amache — ironic given my father’s service in the US Military Intelligence Service,” recalls Honda. “One of the first lessons I learned was that being Japanese carried a negative connotation in America. My parents raised me talking about the injustices of camp, how it was a violation of the Constitution, and how Japanese Americans had been mistreated. The reason we were sent to camp is because no one in Washington said no. I’m here in Congress to make sure that never happens again to any community in America.”
Mike Honda was born in Walnut Grove, California on June 27, 1941. In August of 1942 his family was sent to the Granada Relocation Center (aka Camp Amache), the smallest of 10 internment camps with an eventual population of 7,318. Following their release in 1944, the family lived in Illinois for nearly a decade before returning to California in 1953. Honda’s parents worked as strawberry sharecroppers in San Jose’s Blossom Valley.
Honda began high school at Andrew P. Hill High, but transferred to San Josė High Academy from which he graduated. He entered San Josė State University in 1942. In 1965 Honda decided to interrupt his studies to join the Peace Corps after being inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s call for public service.
“I went into the Peace Corps as a college student one-credit shy of graduation and with little direction,” he recalls. “I emerged with the confidence that my emotional, psychological and physical limits had been pushed, plied and ultimately surpassed. I went into the Peace Corps speaking one language; I emerged speaking another: Spanish, a gift that introduced me to a new world, gave me a new way of understanding new cultures and helped me connect to constituents in California.
After two years in El Salvador Honda returned to San Josė State to complete his bachelor degrees in biological sciences and Spanish in 1968.
Honda began his 30-year teaching career in 1971 as a high school science teacher in the San José public schools. During this period he also returned to San Josė State to earn a master’s degree in education in 1974. He later served as a principal at two public schools and conducted educational research at Stanford University.
Honda’s first taste of politics came in 1971 when he was appointed to the San José City Planning Commission by Mayor Norman Mineta. In 1981 he was elected to the San Jose Unified School Board, then to the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors in 1990. In 1996 he was elected to the California State Assembly where he served until beginning his first term as a Congressman in 2001.
From 2001 to 2006 Honda served on the Science Committee and the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. In 2007 he was appointed to the powerful Appropriations Committee by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Honda was also named Regional Whip for Northern California.
Honda cultivated close ties with the Chinese American community. In May 2007 he became the first regular member of the San Francisco Lodge of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance not of Chinese ancestry.
In 2009 Honda was re-elected for a second term as DNC vice-chair. By virtue of his represenstation of Silicon Valley, Honda is also co-chair of the Democratic Caucus’ New Media Working Group. He is the original author of the Equity and Excellence Commission now housed in the US Department of Education.
“In light of my 30-year career as an educator and almost 10 years in the U.S. Congress, it surprises people to learn that I struggled as a student,” said Honda to explain his deep feelings about education. “I was shy to speak up. I failed classes. My empathy with English-language learners — and the unique obstacles they face — inspired me to get involved. I’ve learned that we as educators must do more to encourage students and provide each child with the education he/she deserves. That is why I created the Educational Opportunity and Equity Commission. This Commission focuses our country’s full attention on the needs of each child in order to reverse our low education rankings globally. Working with the Commission, I aim to fix this once and for all.”
Honda is widowed and has two grown children. Son Mark is an aerospace engineer and daughter Michelle is a public health educator in San Jose. Late wife Jeanne was a teacher at Baldwin Elementary School in San José before passing in 2004.
What makes Bill Nguyen inspiring isn’t just that he created eight cutting-edge Silicon Valley startups, including one with an $850 mil. payday; it’s that he completely blurred the line between working in tech and playing with tech.
That’s pretty cool, of course, and the cool factor is central to the tech business now that tech has become synonymous with cool with the advent of the smartphone and the tablet. It’s been 13 years since Nguyen, 41, started up his first company, but if anything his entrepreneurial vision is getting cooler with age. His latest startup is Colors, a mobile social networking app that hopes to make Facebook seem old-fashioned.
A smartphone user who has downloaded the Colors app instantly acquires a social connection with other Colors users within a 150-foot radius. In a matter of seconds they can effortlessly share photos, text and their common interests. In short, Colors automates the work of creating small communities instantly, simply by virtue of the user walking into a place.
The app is already being used on iPhones and an Android version is in the works. Since mobile phones are more portable than laptops and desktops, Nguyen’s app has the potential to become far more unbiquitous than Facebook.
Color’s second advantage is that it doesn’t require users to register by surrendering a name and an email address. And it’s free. Simply by downloading the app, a user can turn his smartphone into an app for connecting with that attractive stranger sitting across the café by sending her a photo or video of himself in real time. In fact, he can share whatever photos or videos he may have saved to his Color archives. And if they want to turn the session into a real party, they can include others in the vicinity. Each additional participant expands the range of the ad hoc Color network. Nguyen hopes to build an advertising-based business model, presumably to entice local establishments that would like a chance to lure users prowling the local scene for dining, shopping and entertainment.
“This transition to post-PC world is going to be a huge fundamental shift,” said Nguyen. “We’re sharing more and more information in real-time.”
The third advantage is Bill Nguyen himself. He’s established himself as one of the coolest entrepreneurs to emerge from Silicon Valley since possibly Steve Jobs. Color is his eighth and possibly coolest startup. It comes on the heels of LaLa.com, a highly user-friendly music-download and sharing site he sold to Apple in June of 2009 for $80 million. LaLa may simply have been too cool for Apple with its pricey, highly profitable iTunes. Jobs killed off LaLa at the end of May 2010, leaving Nguyen sniffing around for the next cool thing. Color is it.
Color has excited some leading Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Last September Bain Capital provided $14 million in seed funding. In March Sequoia Capital chipped in another $25 million. And Silicon Valley Bank added $2 million more.
Nguyen himself could have easily financed the entire venture himself from his $850 million payday when he sold Onebox to Phone.com in 2001. And there have been others, though not as big.
But Nguyen’s biggest asset is his image as a free-thinking magnet for other creative types. His office furniture at Color is a white ceramic bathtub placed on his office window sill. He sits in the tub to work, prompting passersby to snicker. In the basement are tents and sleeping bags for staffers putting in late nights. There is also a half-pipe and a set of giant Legos for kids. Nguyen has already hired away DJ Patil, chief scientist at LinkedIn which is set for an IPO. Others are expected to follow, including from Apple.
Bill Nguyen was born about two years after his parents fled Vietnam in 1969. Nguyen started the first of his eight successful Silicon Valley start-ups in 1998. The more successful ones include Onebox, an internet-based phone messaging service, and Seven, a universal mobile email system. He co-founded LaLa in 2007, naming it after the first words spoken by his older son Jacob, now 6.
“I’ve been called a serial entrepreneur,” Nguyen said.
He is married to Amanda, a pastry chef. They have two sons. Nguyen is a surfer. The family frequently vacations in the custom home Nguyen built in 2001 on an 18-acre lot overlooking Maui’s pristine Mokuleia Bay.
During her three years as Chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools Michelle Rhee became the point woman for the national debate on education reform by doing what many reformers talk about doing but rarely work up the nerve to do — ignore seniority rules to fire hundreds of underperforming teachers.
By firing 240 teachers, pressuring out 150 more, closing 21 schools, and paying those who remained based on performance, Rhee ignited a firestorm. The politically powerful teachers’ union helped defeat the reelection bid of Adrian Fenty, the charismatic young mayor who hired Rhee in June of 2007. After Fenty lost the democratic primary in 2010, Rhee announced her resignation on October 13, 2010.
“My goal is to continue to be able to serve the children of this nation,” she said at the time, noting that many communities want help in implementing reforms similar to those she had introduced.
After her departure Rhee was accused by the teacher’s union — on sketchy inferences — of having condoned or even encouraged the changing of answers on student tests meant to measure the progress of her reforms. Some even argued that her much-praised reforms had in fact been a failure. They ignore solid student progress on tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) between 2007 and 2009 — the integrity of which have never been impugned — showing that Rhee’s reforms produced student progress not matched by any other comparable urban district.
Rhee immediately capitalized on her national education gadfly status by launching StudentsFirst, a political advocacy organization focused on educational reform. On December 6, 2010 Rhee told Oprah Winfrey on her show that she has declined all job offers resulting from her high profile work as D.C. Schools Chancellor. She announced a goal of recruiting 1 million members for StudentsFirst and raising 1 billion dollars to catalyze education reform in the United States. Rhee also accepted the invitation of Florida’s GOP governor-elect Rick Scott to serve on his transition team.
Rhee’s tough-minded, go-for-broke reforms have influenced the discourse on education around the country. Even one of the presidential election debates between Obama and McCain in the fall of 2008 centered around Rhee’s position on school vouchers. A half year after her departure from Washington D.C., her reforms there remain the focus of political debates around the country as to whether putting the focus on teacher qualification and performance is the best way to raise dismal academic standards in economically challenged inner-city schools.
It’s no exaggeration to say that for years to come Michelle Rhee will remain the American icon for kickass educational reform.
Michelle Rhee was born on Christmas Day of 1969 in Ann Arbor, Michigan to parents who had immigrated from South Korea mid-decade. Michelle was raised in the Toledo, Ohio metropolitan area and graduated from Maumee Valley Country Day School in 1988. She graduated from Cornell University in 1992 with a BA in government. She later earned a masters in public policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Upon graduation Rhee joined Teach For America. She taught in Baltimore’s inner-city schools for three years. During her first year there she made overly talkative students put a piece of masking tape on their lips. When the tape was removed the students’ lips were bleeding.
In the resume Rhee submitted for the D.C. Schools Chancellor post and elsewhere, she claimed that over a two-year period in Baltimore she improved the national standardized test scores of 90% of her students to the 90th percentile or higher from initial average scores in the 13th percentile. Following her resignation a retired Washington D.C. teacher named G.F. Brandenburg published a blog post claiming that he had investigated Rhee’s test-score claim and found them to be false. Other independent sources could neither refute nor support her claim because the relevant Baltimore records were missing.
In 1997 Rhee founded the New Teacher Project, a non-profit that helps needy school districts recruit and train teachers. In ten years the Project expanded to 40 programs in 20 states and recruited over 10,000 teachers. It was the success that D.C. schools enjoyed in recruiting highly qualified applicants through the New Teacher Project that prompted Mayor Adrian Fenty to appoint Rhee to replace the old chancellor of the D.C. Schools system on June 12, 2007. Rhee rejected Fenty’s offer, but relented after he promised her a free hand in performing her job and strong support from his office.
Among Rhee’s first moves in the Chancellor job was to bring in master educators into classrooms to watch teachers at work. It was through this method that she was able to begin weeding out underperforming teachers. She also pushed to change the system under which teachers were paid from one based on seniority to one based on improvements in test scores. These kinds of changes are precisely what the current governors of Florida, New York and Idaho are trying to pushing through their legislatures. In large part, it’s the vehement resistance of teachers unions to these measures that so many charges have been leveled against Rhee after her departure from Washington D.C.
But accounts of her education reforms were received warmly by many prominent figures, including President George Bush and the First Lady who invited Rhee to be her guest at the 2008 State of the Union address.
Rhee has two daughters, Starr and Olivia, with Teach For America Executive Vice President of Public Affairs Kevin Huffman from whom she is divorced. Rhee is engaged to Kevin Johnson, Sacramento Mayor and former NBA basketball player.
Let’s visit each category:
Cheat: This is the newest allegation, arising from a USA Today investigative piece in late March that revisited an older controversy about the high number of test score erasures at some D.C. schools.
The prediction for the coming year: Until Rhee’s opponents can effectively paint her as a cheat/fraud/failure, it is likely we will see more governors and Republican-controlled legislatures unleash Rhee-style reforms. Which means the education fights will become even more polarized, more bitter – all because they focus on Rhee’s issue of singling out teachers.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2011/04/01/2011-04-01_why_michelle_rhee_is_public_enemy_number_one_in_education_reform_debate_she_chal.html#ixzz1LRXnmfZK
Michelle Rhee became a public face of education reform during her tenure as head of the District of Columbia’s schools, but she found out that reform isn’t always popular, especially when it involves school closings and teacher layoffs.
Rhee stepped down Wednesday, several weeks after the man who appointed her, Mayor Adrian Fenty, was defeated in a Democratic primary where Rhee’s celebrated yet stormy tenure was a factor.
“We have agreed that the best way to keep the reforms going is for this reformer to step aside,” she said during Wednesday’s announcement, adding that the decision was one both she and Fenty’s presumed successor, D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray, agreed on.
Education observers suggested that the fast pace of change and Rhee’s abrupt personality might have contributed to her downfall, though not everyone agreed. Others stressed the importance of getting stakeholders to back sweeping change.
“Michelle Rhee did mostly what she was hired to do: shake up the system, be a bull in a china shop,” said Mike Petrilli, vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit education think tank.
If there is any lesson in Rhee’s departure for other school reformers, Petrilli said, it is that they need to pay attention to politics. Petrilli blamed Fenty for failing to sell education reform and said he and Rhee were wrong to think that just showing gains in student achievement would bring residents around.
“At the end of the day, school reform is not terribly popular,” Petrilli said. “People will say they support accountability, but if they’re gong to shut down your local school or fire your friend who is a teacher, suddenly reform doesn’t sound so good.”
Larry Cuban, a former D.C. public schools teacher who wrote a book about education reform in Texas, says Rhee took the “sledgehammer” approach of many new schools heads: trying to force reform through quickly. In her first year, she closed more than 20 schools and replaced nearly three dozen principals. Cuban said that approach doesn’t work.
“It fails because it often alienates the very groups you have to cooperate and build partnerships with, and those are teachers and parents,” Cuban said.
Fenty on Wednesday rejected suggestions that the pace of reform should have been slower, and the idea that if it had been, both he and Rhee would have been able to continue their work in a second term.
“We were elected to fix the schools as fast as humanly possible,” Fenty said Wednesday after Rhee’s announcement.
Rhee, who founded a nonprofit that focuses on teacher recruiting, became a national figure during her three years as D.C. public schools chancellor. She appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, graced the cover of Time magazine and drew praise from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Many of Rhee’s reforms were ones the U.S. Department of Education has promoted, such as evaluating teachers in part based on student performance and replacing principals at failing schools. She was also criticized for laying off hundreds of school employees.
George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers Union, said he wasn’t bothered by the pace of change under Rhee but rather by her approach.
“There was a certain degree of impatience that caused her to overlook the human element of this,” Parker said. Had she “exhibited a little more sensitivity,” he added, she would have fared better.
Frederick M. Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, disagreed.
“I think the wrong lesson to take is, ‘Michelle should have been nicer,’” Hess said. “It’s the wrong lesson to imagine the right personality would have smoothed over the conflict.”
In the end, Rhee, a former Teach For America teacher, didn’t last much longer than many urban school heads. According to a 2008 report from the Council of Great City Schools, the average tenure of a school superintendent is about three and a half years — about what Rhee’s was. And though Rhee is departing, her senior management is staying in place. On Wednesday, it was announced that Kaya Henderson, the deputy chancellor who worked with Rhee at the New Teacher Project, has been named acting chancellor.
What exactly is next for Rhee is unclear.
By the time Vicki Sato retired as president of Vertex Pharmaceuticals in 2005 she was recognized as the biotech industry’s most respected female executive, as well as one of the most successful women in the entire business world.
Not only had she pioneered the development of protease inhibitors, a class of drugs used to treat or prevent HIV and Hepatitis C by inhibiting the virus’s ability to reproduce, she had shown that women could succeed in the high-wattage, high-pressure world of high-stakes drug development.
To cap off an illustrious career, after her retirement from the business world, Sato was welcomed back by Harvard as a professor at both Harvard Business School and at its Molecular and Cell biology department.
It was at Harvard that Sato had begun her professional career as an assistant professor of cell biology in 1976. After seven years she became discouraged by what she perceived to be a glass ceiling in university research. At the same time, she became intrigued by the excitement at Kendall Square where biotech startups were trying to break new ground. She took a sabbatical and joined Angenics, a startup that developed diagnostic tools for agricultural and veterinary purposes.
“I really had fun!” Sato recalled. “I liked learning about venture capital and intellectual property. I decided to stay in industry for a while. But I was more interested in making drugs, where I thought the power of the emerging biotech industry would be.”
In 1984 she went to work with a Harvard colleague at a startup called Biogen, another enterprise that was turning Kendall Squar into a hotbed of biotech activity. Sato was asked to develop cellular assays and animal models for insight into how to use these molecules in a medical setting. Biogen became the poster child for both the promise of interferon and the interminable process of shepherding interferon-based drugs through clinical trials.
“But ultimately, it became a multibillion dollar drug that has saved many lives,” said Sato, recalling the company’s ordeals. “The original vision was correct. The lesson for the biotechnology industry’s drug development dreams was how long it would take to get a drug approved.”
During her nine years at Biogen Sato worked her way up to VP of research and personally led research on inflammation, thrombosis, and HIV. Her efforts led to Angiomax, an antithrombotic agent derived from the leech, and the beta-interferon drug Avonex for multiple sclerosis.
In 1993 she left Biogen to join another startup called Vertex as its chief scientific officer. She rose to senior vice president of of R&D and chair of its scientific advisory board before being named president in 2000.
In addition to her teaching and research work at Harvard, Sato is a special advisor to Atlas Ventures, a global venture capital firm. She is also a board member at Bristol Myers Squibb, PerkinElmer Corporation, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Prize4Life and the Broad Institute where she sits on the board of scientific counselors).
Vicki Sato earned an AB from Radcliffe College and a masters and a PhD from Harvard University in 1972. She did postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley and at Stanford Medical Center.
At one extreme of U.S. foreign policy are those who say, “Nuke ‘em back to the stone age.” At the other are those who want a principled, restrained U.S. to shame enemies into submission by marshaling international clucking against them.
According to his critics at least, State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh embodies the latter position.
Koh may disagree with that assessment, but he has sometimes let his professorial taste for provocative phrasing supply detractors with ammunition for painting him as a man eager to subordinate the U.S. Constitution to vague, unenforceable notions of human rights and international law.
One famous example has Koh naming the U.S. in his “Axis of Disobedience” along with North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Another is Koh’s assertion that sharia, the Muslim holy law, may on occasion be applied to govern legal decisions in American courts.
Koh would protest that these statements were taken out of context. What is indisputable is that the Korean American who served for five years as Dean of Yale Law School has been harsh and vocal in his criticisms of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequent efforts to justify waterboarding and other physical interrogation techniques used against al Qaida detainees at Abu Ghraib Prison.
“We should resist the claim that a War on Terror permits the commander in chief’s power to be expanded into a wanton power to act as torturer in chief,” Koh writes in an article published in Indiana Law Journal — showing again his weakness for flamboyant phrasing that is uncommon in an eminent Yale legal scholar, much less one who served for three years as an Assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration.
At bottom Koh has been an insistent advocate of a U.S. that not only “obeys global norms” and submits to “transnational legal process”, but makes itself into a shining example and the most powerful global exponent of human rights and international law.
“Adhering to international standards strengthens those who do and isolates those who don’t,” is a quote from Obama’s Nobel Prize speech that sums up Koh’s belief in the national security advantage of working through a system of international law rather than taking a unilateral approach. This internationalist approach, Koh argues, is founded on nothing more liberal than the vision of universal rights and rule of law on which the founding fathers based the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Koh also echoes his other famous boss and client, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in arguing that “a commitment to human rights starts with universal standards and with holding everyone accountable to those standards, including ourselves.”
What worries critics is that the post of State Department Legal Adviser holds Koh out to the world as the top U.S. lawyer in the international legal system.
“This is not a desk job,” groused conservative commentator Steven Gross when Koh was nominated for the post by President Obama in March of 2009. “This guy will be the face of American international law around the world. The top legal adviser at State travels extensively and is involved in international legal negotiations, treaties and in major United Nations conferences.
“The president should have the right to choose the most conservative or liberal legal advisers to give them advice, but this is much more than that. The concern is that he cares as much about — if not more about — international law and integrating that into the American judicial system than he does about protecting American prerogatives and American sovereignty.”
Notwithstanding Koh’s penchant for raising red flags with provocative phraseology, his impeccable credentials and the high respect he enjoys in international law circles ensured confirmation by a largely partisan vote of 62-35 on June 25, 2009, three months after his nomination. As the Obama Administration’s top voice in matters pertaining to U.S. interests under international law, in March 2010 Koh surprised critics by arguing eloquently for the legality of using missiles fired from drones to target al Qaida officials in Pakistan. More recently, Koh took the lead in using the force of international law to bring about the imprisonment of Julian Assange in Britain after WikiLeaks facilitated the publication of tens of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables.
Harold Hongju Koh was born in Boston, Massachusetts on December 8, 1954 to Korean parents who, together, became the first Asian Americans to teach at Yale. At the time Harold was born his father was a S. Korean diplomat serving Korea’s first democratic government. When that regime quickly collapsed the elder Koh won asylum in the U.S., allowing the family to stay in the U.S. The family moved to New Haven where both parents were hired to teach at Yale through the efforts of then deputy National Security Adviser Walt Rostow and his brother Eugene, then dean of the law school. The elder Koh and wife Hesung Chun Koh taught a course on East Asian law and society for three years. Harold was six then, one of six Koh siblings. ‘‘It was my first experience with American goodness,’‘ Koh told the New York Times.
At around that time Harold was afflicted with polio and was forced to have two operations. Despite leg braces and a lengthy course of physical therapy, Koh still walks with a limp.
Koh graduated from New Haven’s Hopkins School in 1971. He majored in government at Harvard where he graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1975. He took advantage of a scholarship to study at Oxford for two years before entering Harvard Law School in 1980. He did well enough there to earn a clerkship with Supreme Court Associate Justice Harry Blackmun and spend two years as an associate at the D.C. office of the prestigious international law firm of Covington & Burling.
In 1983 Koh began a two-year stint as attorney-adviser to the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the United States Department of Justice under Reagan, then joined the Yale Law School faculty in 1985 where he distinguished himself as a brilliant legal scholar, an admired professor and an effective human rights advocate. In 1992 he led a group of Yale students and human rights lawyers in litigation against the United States government to free Haitian refugees interned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The suit ended in 1994 with the refugees’ release. It also caught the eye of President Clinton who nominated Koh the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights. Koh was confirmed unanimously on October 21, 1998. He left the post at the end of Clinton’s second term in January of 2001 and returned to teach at Yale where he was named dean in 2004.
Despite Koh’s clear political leanings on the issue of the role international law should play in U.S. foreign policy, he won respect for being politically impartial as Dean. When critics accused him of having politicized Yale Law School during his term, the Yale Conservative Law Students organization came to his defense. “Dean Koh has been very supportive of conservative students and conservative student organizations,” they said, adding, “Dean Koh is one of the brightest legal minds of his generation, a credit to the profession we look forward to joining, and an able and effective public servant.”
Harold Koh’s achievement is practically commonplace in his distinguished family. Brother Howard Kyongju Koh is currently the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health after a career as a Harvard University public health professor and Massachusetts Public Health Commissioner. Sister Jean Koh Peters also teaches at Yale Law School. Wife Mary-Christy Fisher, with whom Koh has two children, is an attorney for the New Haven Legal Assistance Association.
As Sun Microsystems’s co-founder and first CEO, and as an admired venture capitalist, Vinod Khosla has played a fundamental role in shaping the methods and ethics of the global technology industry. In recent years his pioneering role in the computer industry has been overshadowed by his outspoken leadership in green technology.
On April 28, 2011 Khosla also became a leader in large-scale philanthropy when he and wife Neeru signed the billionaire Giving Pledge championed by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Under the pledge half of Khosla’s estimated $1.1 billion fortune will be left to charity.
Vinod Khosla was born on January 28, 1955 in India while his father, a soldier, was stationed in New Delhi. His lifelong focus on technology was inspired by an article he read at the age of 14 about the founding of Intel. He earned a BS in electrical engineering from the Delhi campus of the India Institute of Technology (IIT), then came to the U.S. for a masters in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, followed by an MBA from Stanford in 1980.
Upon graduation Khosla founded his first venture, an electronic design automation firm called Daisy Systems. In 1982 Khosla joined with two fellow Stanford classmates and a UC Berkeley computer science grad student to co-found Sun Microsystems. The company’s name was derived from the acronym for “Stanford University Network”. As the company’s first Chairman and CEO Khosla pioneered open systems and processors based on reduced instruction-set computing (RISC) architecture for microprocessors.
In 1984 he left Sun to become a venture capitalist. He didn’t begin making his mark until joining the firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a general partner in 1986. There Khosla made several successful early stage investments. Despite his key role with some huge flops like Asera and Dynabook, his successful Kleiner Perkins bets established him as one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley. What elevated Khosla above many other venture capitalist was his belief that social conscience should influence venture capital bets. He played a key role in the SKS Microfinance, an Indian microfinance NGO that makes small loans to poor women in rural India.
A growing interest in nurturing technologies that can play a role in averting a global environmental catastrophe prompted Khosla to form Khosla Ventures in 2004. Ironically, one of Khosla’s most controversial statements — made before his recent green-tech focus — seemed to express scorn for clean technologies.
“If it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Most of what we talk about today—hybrid, biodiesel, ethanol, solar photovoltaics, geothermal—I believe are irrelevant to the scale of the problem.”
His early focus on green technology prompted him to invest heavily in ethanol companies like Altra, Mascoma and Cilion as offering the most promising substitute for gasoline. His view seems to have been inspired in part by Brazil’s success in using ethanol produced from crops to end its dependence on foreign oil. Khosla also contributed heavily to the campaign to pass California’s Proposition 87, The Clean Energy Initiative, which failed in November of 2006.
More recently, however, Khosla seems to have recognized that ethanol may be superseded by genetically engineered bio-fuels that produce fuel efficiently without competing with food crops like corn and sugar cane. Another one of Khosla’s green bets is Calera, a company seeking ways to trap carbon dioxide in cement. He has also invested in solar power though at least one such bet has soured. In early 2011 Khosla led a $42 million Series A round investment in WeatherBill, a firm that automates weather risk assessment in order to sell crop insurance efficiently by mapping global weather patterns.
In 2010 Forbes named Khosla one of the world’s 10 greenest billionaires. Khosla serves on the boards of Agami, eASIC, Indian School of Business, Infinera, Kovio, Metricstream, Spatial Photonics, Xsigo and Zettacore. In 2006 Neeru Khosla co-founded the CK-12 Foundation that aims to develop open source textbooks and lower the cost of education in America and the rest of the world. Khosla and his wife have given $500,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Patrick Soon-Shiong is known as L.A. richest man. He also happens to be the world’s most financially successful biotech entrepreneur, having managed the virtually impossible feat of building not one but two multi-billion-dollar pharmacentical firms simultaneously without having to give away more than small minority stakes in either. What’s more, he’s already cashed out for $6.4 billion while investing into a startup in the promising area of wireless medical monitoring systems.
Even more inspiring is that Soon-Shiong’s stature as a pharmaceutical tycoon is now being superseded by his generosity as a medical philanthropist, having made over $200 million in donations and pledges to Los Angeles-area hospitals.
Patrick Soon-Shiong was born in 1952 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa to immigrant parents who had fled China during World War II. Patrick’s father had been an herbalist in China. In South Africa the elder Soon-Shiong continued to practice herbal medicine though his main source of income was the family’s general store.
“My father was a village doctor, practicing Chinese herbal medicine,” Patrick told an interviewer from Los Angeles Business Journal in October of 2008. “People would come to the house for advice. He’d make up some herbal concoction to give them. I’d watch all that. It was very inspiring and influences what I do today.”
Patrick graduated from high school at age 16 with good enough grades to win acceptance to the University of Witwatersrand Medical School. The elite all-white Johannesburg General Hospital where he hoped to do his internship had never admitted a Chinese student. His medical school department chairman stipulated that he would not sponsor Soon-Shiong’s application to intern there unless he graduated among the top four in his class of 189. Soon-Shiong did just that at the age of 23.
“I was determined to have my internship at this particular prestigious white hospital because I knew that’s where I’d get the best training and work with the best doctors,” Soon-Shiong recalls. Even then he had to take half the salary of white interns. “My peers wanted to go on strike over that, but I said, no, I’d be glad to take the lower salary just so I could learn from the best.”
In 1977 Soon-Shiong finished his internship and turned down an offer of a staff position at an academic hospital. Instead he worked for six months at a tuberculosis clinic for blacks while seeking opportunities outside of South Africa. He received two offers from Canada. He accepted a surgery residency at Vancouver General Hospital at the University of British Columbia.
By the time Soon-Shiong left South Africa he was married to a struggling young actress named Michele Chan who was facing her own racial barriers. Her race precluded her from landing roles on South African TV.
At Vancouver General Soon-Shiong showed exceptional surgical skills. He also began showing the split focus that would characterize the working style that led to his later success. He worked in the surgical ward by day but devoted evenings to earning a masters of science degree by working with an eminent pancreatic cancer researcher. By the time Soon-Shiong earned his masters in 1978 he became the first resident to win multiple research awards simultaneously from the American College of Surgeons, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, and the American Association of Academic Surgery.
In 1980 his work also secured him an offer from UCLA Medical School where he completed the training to win board-certification as a surgeon. In 1983 he was invited to join the faculty. Soon-Shiong conducted research on new techniques for delivering chemotherapy. He also performed the UCLA Medical Center’s first pancreas transplant.
Meanwhile Michele too was enjoying career success in their new hometown. In 1984 she landed a regular role on the children’s TV series Danger Bay.
“Here’s a wonderful irony,” says Soon-Shiong. “They refused to put Michele on South African television when we lived there. But after she got a role in Danger Bay, of course South African TV bought that show and aired it.”
UCLA became interested in having Soon-Shiong start up a new transplant program. He was more interested in developing a less invasive way to treat diabetes by transplanting healthy islet cells that could produce insulin inside the patient’s own pancreas. The technique had led to a dead end a decade earlier when researchers were unable to devise a way to keep the patient’s immune system from destroying the cells before they could begin producing insulin. In 1987 Soon-Shiong came up with the strategy of encapsulating the islets in a gel made from seaweed. He believed the coating would protect the islet cells from being attacked by the immune system while providing oxygen through photosynthesis.
Soon-Shiong reported success with this approach in the early stages of research. His peers were unconvinced. In 1991 Soon-Shiong decided to prove out the technique by leaving UCLA and founding a diabetes research firm called VivoRx. Among the first investors was his older brother Terrence. The brothers also started a second firm called VivoRx Diabetes Inc. to pursue the same line of attack on treating diabetes.
Soon-Shiong’s big break came in 1993 when the firm received permission from the FDA to conduct human trials. Soon-Shiong personally transplanted his patented alginate capsules into the pancreas of Steven Craig, a 38-year-old who had been a severe diabetic since childhood. Over the next several months Craig’s insulin injections were reduced until he was able to go an entire month without any outside insulin. It was a bonanza for Soon-Shiong’s entrepreneurial efforts. In June of 1994 Mylan Laboratories Inc. invested $5 million for a 10 percent stake in Soon-Shiong’s VivoRX and also agreed to front $200,000 a month in research funds for a license to market Soon-Shiong’s diabetic treatment in the hope it would soon win FDA approval.
By 1996 Soon-Shiong faced a series of setbacks in his efforts to reproduce the success he had apparently achieved with Steven Craig. He began shifting his focus away from diabetes. He formed VivoRx Pharmaceutical (later renamed American BioScience) as a vehicle for cancer research and wooed Premiere Inc., a major hospital buying group, into investing $4 million in his various research firms. Perhaps in acknowledgment of the apparent dead end developing on the diabetes front, Soon-Shiong gave Mylan a 10 percent stake in his new cancer research firm for a nominal $1,000.
By this time Soon-Shiong had become enough of a businessman to leverage the interest he had created in his prospective diabetes drug to launch American Pharmaceutical Partners (APP) as a broker of generic drugs to hospitals. Key to this launch was Premiere. Not only did it provide startup funds but also gave APP a running start by using it as a middleman for its drug purchases. Soon-Shiong had provided ample incentive by promising Premiere additional shares based on the amount of sales it generated. In July of 1997 APP was little more than a shell with only $85,000 in total sales but was listed by Premiere — which supplied 1,500 hospitals — as one of its “corporate partners” with multinationals like Merck, Baxter and Johnson & Johnson. Premiere’s determined backing gave APP access to customers like Fujisawa USA who hoped thereby to improve their sales access to Premiere. APP leveraged this bootstrapped status and paid fees tied to total sales to land as accounts buying groups like Novation, the industry leader.
Soon-Shiong pushed APP’s growth aggressively in 1998 by buying the money-losing Fujisawa to uses its plants in Melrose Park, Illinois and Grand Island, New York as a manufacturing base for injectable generics. The acquisition also gave APP 94 product lines with 193 approved product codes. Using its network of buying groups Soon-Shiong was able to reverse Fujisawa’s nine straight years of red ink within six months of the purchase. But the company also added to the quality-control problems with the FDA that was clouding APP’s reputation.
Soon-Shiong’s reputation also took a hit in 1998 when Steven Craig committed suicide. Though the first human test subject of Soon-Shiong’s diabetes drug had continued to praise the therapy, his widow later revealed that his suicide was brought on by depression over his failing health.
Meanwhile Soon-Shiong was also devoting energies to his cancer research conducted under the auspices of American Bioscience. The result was a lawsuit by VivoRx investor Mylan alleging that Soon-Shiong was neglecting those firms’ diabetes research. Mylan sued VivoRx and VivoRx Diabetes and both Terrence and Patrick Soon-Shiong. Terrence fired his brother and sued him for fraud for using consultants paid by VivoRX to conduct cancer research at American BioScience. In early 1999 the arbitration award found no liability against Patrick Soon-Shiong, who was then promptly rehired by Terrence.
By 2000 when Soon-Shiong was again the lead defendant in a second suit filed by Terrence, Mylan and other investors on similar grounds, Soon-Shiong’s research efforts had shifted entirely to Abraxane, an experimental cancer treatment developed through American Bioscience. Using a similar strategy as for Soon-Shiong’s diabetes treatment, Abraxane encapsulated paclitaxel—the active ingredient in the best-selling chemotherapy drug Taxol — within a ball of the water-soluble protein albumin. The albumin coating protected the paclitaxel so it could be delivered intact to the cancerous cell. This novel delivery strategy also dispensed with the toxic solvent that was being used to deliver Taxol, eliminating severe side effects that had drastically limited the concentrations of the drug that could be delivered to cancer cells.
Abraxane was then years from any potential FDA approval for commercial use, but Soon-Shiong was quick to exploit its financial potential. In 1999 his American BioScience granted North American rights to Abraxane to APP for $60 million plus $25 million more in milestone payments. The deal gave Soon-Shiong insurance against the drug’s failure to win approval at the expense of APP shareholders, various critics pointed out. But that bit of self-dealing would turn out to benefit, rather than hurt, APP’s investors. In December of 2001 the appeal of Abraxane’s potential to become a blockbuster drug gave APP the sizzle to raise $144 million in an IPO that gave the company a valuation of over a billion dollars and made Soon-Shiong a billionaire, at least on paper. Soon-Shiong immediately used some of his new wealth to settle the lawsuit against him by paying $32 million to Terrence and Mylan and $5 million to the other investors of VivoRx and VivoRx Diabetes.
Despite these setbacks Soon-Shiong was taking big strides toward becoming a genuine pharmaceuticals tycoon. APP received FDA approval on many additions to its injectables line. Sales jumped to $351.3 million in 2003 from $192 mil. in 2001 while net income rose to $71.7 mil. A company that had been a mere shell in 1997 had mushroomed into a major supplier of injectables.
In January of 2003 the FDA granted fast-track status for Abraxane despite its reservations about the fact that 75% of the patients slated to participate in the proposed clinical trial were located in Russia. In December of 2003 APP released supporting data from the clinical trial. It showed Abraxane to be 31% more effective than Taxol in fighting breast cancer. APP shares jumped only to plunge again as analysts began delving into the data. In particular, the fact that 75 percent of the patients were from Russia raised suspicions that were reinforced by the fact that those patients reported much lower results for Taxol than had been reported in other studies.
In late September of 2004, while the SEC commissioner was mulling a formal probe, Soon-Shiong stepped down as APP’s CEO whle retaining the title of executive chairman to focus on “strategic initiatives” and the researching of new proprietary injectable pharmaceutical products.”
In early 2008 APP was favored by a major stroke of luck thanks to a tragic comedy of errors involving rival Baxter International’s heparin supply. An undetected production flaw allowed the shipment of large quantities of contaminated heparin which caused the deaths of at least 62 patients and illness of tens of thousands more. By February of 2008 Baxter began recalling its heparin. By April it was forced to stop selling heparin altogether.
APP’s heparin too was manufactured in China, but without quality issues.
“We ended up with the safest supply of heparin in the U.S. after the Baxter recall because of the investment we made to make sure our plant in China was safe,” Soon-Shiong boasted.
APP’s market share soared, making the company a far more attractive target for the German distributor Fresenius. On July 7, 2008 Fresenius struck a deal to buy APP for $4.6 billion. Patrick Soon-Shiong’s personal 80 percent stake netted him $3.7 billion.
Meanwhile, by 2008 Soon-Shiong’s Abraxis BioScience (formerly American BioScience) had grown to employ nearly 5,000. Much of that growth came after Abraxane won FDA approval in 2005 to treat serious breast cancer cases that had turned metastatic. That year Abraxane sales of $315 million accounted for about 90 percent of Abraxis’s revenues and wasn’t quite enough to make Abraxis profitable. But Abraxane’s novel approach to delivering chemotherapy, as well as the research platform created to develop the drug, proved attractive to Celgene, a firm that had made its mark in the oncology field with drugs for blood-borne cancers.
In late June of 2010 Celgene bought Abraxis BioScience for $2.9 billion in cash and stock. Over 80% of Abraxis shares were owned by Soon-Shiong himself. The sale boosted Soon-Shiong’s personal fortune to somewhere around $6 billion, placing him comfortably among the world’s top 100 billionaires. That October Soon-Shiong indulged his longtime passion for basketball and the L.A. Lakers in particular by buying Magic Johnson’s 4.5% stake in the organization for an undisclosed amount.
Soon-Shiong and wife Michele have created a family foundation through which some of his wealth is funneled to expand healthcare to those who can’t wait for a utopian future to develop. The couple began by pledging $55 million to St. John’s Medical Center in nearby Santa Monica in 2008. Since then they have increased the pledge to over $100 mil. and has provided another $100 mil. in underwriting guarantees to help reopen L.A.‘s Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Center. The hospital had served impoverished South Central Los Angeles before being shut down in 2007 for repeated complaints of medical malpractice. In September of 2009 he joined Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and about three dozen other billionaires in making the pledge to donate half his wealth to charity.
Soon-Shiong carefully arranges his schedule so he can drive his daughter to school each day and to be there for her soccer games. He plays tennis with her as well. With his son he goes surf fishing for perch. The entire family surfs and plays basketball together.
On January 3, 2011 Filipino American Tani Cantil Sakauye became the 28th Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court. She was elected to the office on November 2, 2010 while serving as a member of the Court of Appeals for the Third Appellate District.
On July 21, 2010 Cantil Sakauye was nominated by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to succeed retiring Chief Justice Ronald M. George. She was rated by the California State Bar Judicial Nomination Evaluation Commission as exceptionally well qualified for the position. The nomination was unanimously approved on August 25, 2010 by the three-member California Commission on Judicial Appointments. In the November 2 general election the voters elected Cantil Sakauye to a full 12-year term as Chief Justice.
Cantil Sakauye began her judicial career in 1990 when she was appointed to the Sacramento Municipal Court by Governor George Deukmejian. She was elevated to the Superior Court in 1997 by Governor Pete Wilson. There Cantil Sakauye started and presided over the first Sacramento court dedicated to domestic violence cases.
Cantil Sakauye was born in 1959 in Sacramento where she attended C. K. McClatchy High School. After graduating she attended Sacramento City College for a year before transferring to the University of California at Davis. She graduated with honors in 1980, then interrupted her education to spend a year in the Philippines before starting at UC Davis Law School in 1981. Upon graduating in 1984 she prosecuted criminal cases at the Sacramento District Attorney’s Office. In 1988 Cantil Sakauye became a senior staffer for Governor Deukmejian, serving as both deputy legal affairs secretary and as a deputy legislative secretary.
Cantil Sakauye is married to retired Police Lieutenant Mark Sakauye. They have two teen daughters. Cantil Sakauye has been active as a leader of a Brownie and junior Girl Scout Troop.
Zappos—derived from the Spanish word zapatos, meaning shoes—is the world’s largest online shoe retailer. The company owes its success to Tony Hsieh, current CEO and its first investor who took the “almost nothing” venture to $1 billion annual gross in ten years. But Hsieh’s ambition is to clone Zappos’s famous customer service culture outside of merchandise retailing.
Spotting and capitalizing on business opportunities seemed to come naturally to Tony Hsieh. At the age of 12 Hsieh sealed photos between a sheet of plastic and a metal disk and advertised his “button-making” business in a kid’s directory. While other kids were spending their allowances on action figures, Tony was earning several hundred dollars a month of his own money.
As a Harvard undergrad Hsieh sold whole pizzas out of his dorm. Harvard peer Alfred Lin was Hsieh’s No. 1 customer. Lin bought two whole pizzas from Hsieh, took them upstairs and resold them by the slice. Lin was destined to become CFO of Zappos.
In 1995 Hsieh graduated with a B.A. in computer science and went to work as a software engineer at Oracle. The entrepreneurial itch soon got the better of him. He started up LinkExchange so small websites could advertise for free on thousands of other web sites. In 1998 24-year old Hsieh sold LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265 million.
A year later, Hsieh met Nick Swinmurn who, while walking through a mall in the search for a pair of shoes, was struck the idea for an online shoe store. But Swinmurn had one major problem—no investor would touch it, not even good-friend Hsieh.
“I almost deleted the voicemail,” Hsieh says of Swinmurn’s pitch. “I didn’t think consumers would buy shoes sight unseen, and Nick didn’t have a footwear background… But right before I hit delete, Nick mentioned the size of the retail shoe market—$40 billion.” Hsieh initially climbed aboard as an advisor. In two short months he found himself investing $500,000 in ShoeSite.com, which was later changed to Zappos.com.
From the outset Zappos aimed to become the largest online footwear retailer. But two or three years in, Hsieh and Swinmurn dug deep and reevaluated their initial goal. They decided to make Zappos a customer service company “that just happens to sell shoes.” They expanded the warehouse to 77,000 sq. ft. and stopped having manufacturers ship directly to customers. “It was a scary time,” recalls Hsieh. “Drop shipping was 25 percent of revenue.”
In 2006 Swinmurn left and Hsieh became Zappos’s CEO. On July 22, 2009 Amazon.com announced the acquisition of Zappos.com in a $1.2 billion deal. Hsieh made the unusual choice of staying on at Zappos.
Zappos’s service-first strategy demands that it run the warehouse 24/7 so shoes can ship quickly. There have been reports of products arriving at the customer’s doorstep 8 hours after the order was placed. Zappos has a virtually unmatched 365-day return policy with free shipping both ways. And if a customer is looking for a pair of shoes that isn’t in the Zappos stock, employees help customers find what they are looking for at competitor websites.
To Hsieh company culture is the most important part of the Zappos brand. In January 2004 he decided to move the customer service headquarters to Las Vegas. “We were having a hard time finding good customer service people in San Francisco,” he explained. “Las Vegas has a lot of call centers and lots of people who want to do customer service as a career.”
“We want people who are passionate about what Zappos is about—service. I don’t care if they’re passionate about shoes.” Hsieh claims he had to turn down some major players because they didn’t fit in with the Zappos culture. A list of ten core company values reminds employees what it means to be part of the Zappos team. A few examples: “Create Fun and a little weirdness”, “Be adventurous, creative, and open-minded”, “Deliver WOW through service”.
With their slogan “Delivering happiness at Zappos”, the “do whatever you can to please the customer” mentality has given employees allowance to go above and beyond—for example, sending a bouquet of flowers with a customer’s order. Even though Hsieh recognizes this extra expense, his aim is to win over repeat customers with the Zappos “wow” service, while attracting new ones by word of mouth.
This generous spirit is shown toward employees as well. Free lunch is provided for all employees to encourage interaction. Karaoke competitions are held during break. Dance Dance Revolution is available in the lobby. Zappos is so proud of its working culture that free tours are offered to the public at the Las Vegas location. Email Hsieh beforehand and he will even arrange to have a Zappos shuttle pick you up from the airport.
Hsieh firmly believes that a focus on excellent company culture is the fix for all corporate problems. “Businesses often forget about the culture, and ultimately, they suffer for it because you can’t deliver good service from unhappy employees.”
But Hsieh doesn’t want Zappos to be known as the shoe retailer forever. In its quest for constant expansion the company has already branched into clothing and other merchandise. He hopes to soon offer the Zappos customer service to cater to needs outside of merchandise retail. Don’t be surprised if you see a Zappos Airlines in the next twenty years.
“For me part of it is about seeing what we can accomplish here at Zappos, but also seeing what we do here that can change other businesses and the world in general—whether its through inspiring other companies to deliver better customer service or to focus on their own company culture.”
Making Fortune’s “Best Companies to Work For” list, along with Google, has given Hsieh’s philosophy a measure of validation. His Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose is scheduled to release June 7th 2010. You guessed it: it tells how a Harvard grad found happiness and meaning in a business-oriented world.
More than any retailer, Don Chang has his fingers on the pulses of young women addicted to trendy clothes at perennially-popular prices. Since its humble origin in 1984 as a 750-square-foot store Chang’s Forever 21 chain has mushroomed into 400 franchised stores around the world, and the company is valued at well over $2 billion. Chang and his wife Jin Sook — his co-founder — are personally worth over $1 billion. The Changs inspire by proving that the American dream is very much alive for all who work hard, think big, sacrifice and keep the faith.
Dong-won (“Don”) Chang’s entrepreneurial instincts were honed in his native Seoul, Korea. Three years before coming to California, Chang opened the city’s first coffee and natural juice delivery service in the fashionable Myungdong district. Don and Jin Sook immigrated to the United States in 1981. Don worked three jobs simultaneously: served coffee and pumped gas by day and worked as a janitor by night.
Don Chang credits the gas station job with inspiring his move into fashion. “I noticed that the merchants had the best cars,” he says and decided to turn his customers into competitors. In 1984 Chang struck deals with local Korean garment factories and opened their first retail store, Fashion 21, in the low-rent area of Highland Park between Los Angeles and Pasadena.
The booming music and bright lights that are now a Forever 21 trademark were there from the start. Jin Sook filled the tiny store with minis and tube tops. The formula proved irresistable to its youthful clientele. Within a year sales grew from $35,000 to $700,000. Jin Sook remains the chain’s very hands-on chief merchandiser, still personally picking out fabrics and designs for the Forever 21 fashion lines.
The rapid growth of Fashion 21’s customer base of trend-hungry teens prompted the Changs to franchise their business under the name Forever 21. It was not until 1995 that the second store opened in Miami’s Mall of the Americas. Six years later Forever 21 had spread to 100 locations. As of early 2010 there were over 400 stores worldwide, including in Japan, Korea, China, Thailand, England, France and the Middle East.
Starting from minis and tube tops, the Changs added increasingly sophisticated styles to age their target clientele from teens to young adults. Today Forever 21’s major appeal lies in its quick-turnover buy-it-now-or-never-see it-again ethic. The chain has become notorious for stocking stores with irresistibly-priced runway knockoffs even before the originals hit the retail racks.
The likes of Anna Sui, Diane von Furstenberg and Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku Lovers have filed over 50 federal copyright infringement and unfair competition suits over the past several years. Such suits against Forever 21 tend to end quietly with undisclosed settlement terms.
But these hiccups have done little to slow Forever 21’s success. The company enjoyed sales of $1.7 billion and a net income of $135 million for the fiscal year that ended February 2009, according to a Forbes.com estimate. While others are reeling from the recession, Forever 21 is pushing ahead with new plans for adding merchandise categories like home goods, swimwear and a junior’s plus-size collection. Last year it even paid $2.2 mil. for 13 locations from the bankrupt Mervyn’s department-store chain for $2.2 million to serve as new Forever 21 locations.
“We have always grown at a rapid pace because that is one of the challenges I set for myself,” says Chang. “We hope to keep up the pace of growth in the future.”
Former Forever 21 factory workers say the fast growth has been powered in part by a sweatshop culture. In September 2001 19 employees sued for unpaid wages, mandatory unpaid overtime, 12-15 hour days and compulsory weekend shifts. In March 2004 an undisclosed settlement was announced.
The source of the Changs’ unshakeable faith is no secret. On the bottom of every Forever 21 shopping bag is John 3:16, a popular bible passage that reads, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Jin Sook Chang is known to attend church every morning at five.
“People join their church just to get close to them,” a garment district insider says of the Changs. Mrs. Chang is known to “pluck” young designers out of the companies she’s working with, “and if they’re Christian and religious, she puts them in business,” he explains. And for some, it seems to have been a true blessing. Rowena Rodriguez, a mid-thirties fashion consultant and one-time “unbeliever” was born again with Mrs. Chang’s help. “In the short time I worked with Mrs. Chang, my life was transformed, and I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.” When asked the secret to the Changs’ success, Rodriguez exclaims: “The Changs love Jesus!”
The Changs attribute their success to a lot of hard work and a frugal corporate culture. A high degree of personal privacy may be one more condition. While Forever 21 courts hype, the family is determinedly low-key. The internet turns up very few photos on the couple. The Changs live with their two daughters, Linda and Esther, who attend church with them every Sunday.
