Why we fight for founders.

Stephen grew up in Englewood, where he learned to tell gunfire from fireworks before he learned his times tables. Around the fifth grade he decided he was not smart enough to read a whole book. He has since written five. What carried him out was one belief: you do not have to be a product of your environment. You can be the thing that changes it.

After years leading youth programs in the nonprofit world, he learned that the fastest way to transform a community is to equip the people who build businesses inside it. For more than twenty years he has worked with roughly four thousand companies across thirty-three countries, from Medtronic and the U.S. Air Force to family restaurants that could not make payroll. The lesson is the same at every scale. People do not need more information. They need transformation.

At eighteen, Ouss was wholesaling phone cards to one hundred and thirty-seven shops across Amman, introducing himself as the sales rep so nobody would dismiss the kid who owned the company. He landed in Sydney in 2010 without a word of English and has started over four times since. Today he runs a premium dessert company in Sydney and Dubai with no lease and no fixed overheads, along with several other businesses.