“Every attempt, you should think of it as this is the one that’s going to succeed… Because if you just throw darts randomly at the target, for every attempt, there is the one that’s going to get the bullseye,” Mohajer tells Fortune.
Mohajer grew up always fascinated by two things: movies and robots. So, after first seeing Star Trek, he always dreamed of how to bring computerized voice systems into the real world. But only after meeting his later cofounders, James Hom and Majid Emami, during his Stanford electrical engineering doctoral program did he realize he could be part of the team to make it a reality.
And while it took years for SoundHound to get up off the ground, he tells Fortune finding his passion, or what makes his “heart beat faster,” has been core to his success today.
“You can do things and go through life and get by and check boxes and be average,” he says. “But I really wanted to be excellent, and I wanted to push boundaries. I want to go to places others haven’t gone before, and that gave me the drive to be an entrepreneur and just push the limits and combining the two.”
The billionaire returned to his alma mater in 2017 and said he never expected to be such an entrepreneurial success story.
“The thing is, it never even occurred to me that someone might be us,” Zuckerberg said. “We were just college kids. We didn’t know anything about that. There were all these big technology companies with resources. I just assumed one of them would do it.”
“We’ve all started lifelong friendships here, and some of us even families,” he added. “That’s why I’m so grateful to this place. Thanks, Harvard.”
