The Refugee Experience as a Catalyst for Inclusive FinTech

Adverse life experiences drove my interest in using technology for financial stability

Every refugee has a story to tell. Unfortunately, we’ll never hear most of them. But here’s mine. It’s a story with a lot of twists and turns but an unusual upward trajectory. The hardships were a catalyst for me, they trained me in how to overcome obstacles and leverage opportunities. It brought out my empathy for economically excluded people.

I’m now the founder of a financial technology startup that serves freelancers and solo entrepreneurs. If there’s anything I understand, it’s that life can be uncertain. I’m taking World Refugee Day as an occasion to share the narrative that led up to founding Joust.

There’s no takeaway. There’s no call to action. I’m writing this because I want to share my story with colleagues, fellow fintech professionals, and all other curious folks.

Early Childhood in the Soviet Era

I was born in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan SSR. My maternal grandfather was an Azerbaijanian farm boy turned biochemist and a prominent member of the community. The Soviet system served him well and allowed him to flourish in a pharmaceutical career.

My grandfather married an Armenian woman. Then my Azeri/Armenian mother, who grew up in a privileged social strata of Soviet intelligentsia, married my father, a Tunisian student she had been tutoring in Russian at the university in Baku.

When most people in the U.S. think of the Soviet Union they think of a bleak, Solzhenitsyn-esque existence. This was not the case for me. My family had an atypically comfortable life. Up until age ten, I had a delightful childhood, full of travels abroad to Tunisia and Europe.

The Refugee Experience

All of that changed when the Soviet system fell. The union that had been holding the USSR together had also kept the ethnic tensions in check. With that structure gone, they rose to the surface. As part Armenian, we, along with Jews and other outsiders, were targets of the Baku pogrom.

We fled on a midnight train to Moscow. We had nothing.

Upon arrival, we lived in a one-room apartment with a dozen other family members briefly, before we found a semi-permanent location to squat in a dilapidated building previously used to house chemical laboratories. We survived there through six winters, among the old lab equipment and kegs of lithium. Most everyone in Moscow experienced hardship during that era of change, but we were even further along the margin of that society. We couldn’t seek employment because we were undocumented, nor could we leave. That was my first and most direct experience of economic exclusion.

As a teenager on the streets of Moscow, I really learned how to hustle. My mom somehow managed to make meat pies and sell them. I did a brisk business in selling pirated VHS tapes, mostly 1980s action flicks.

Journey to the U.S.

Enter the Christian missionaries. They played a crucial role in this part of my life by providing humanitarian aid, containers of clothing, non-perishable food, and other supplies. We became closely involved with them. They taught us English and eventually offered us legitimate employment. My mother remarried an American man in the organization, paving the way for my life in the U.S.

That was a time when the U.S. administration did better for refugees. The embassy officials promised us green cards the moment we set foot in the U.S. But It was up to us to figure out how to get out of Russia and go there.

We secured necessary documentation along with weekend tourist visas to Germany and crossed the borders of seven countries: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.S.

The church that had been helping us with the move arranged a place for us to live when we arrived. Less than a week after we left Moscow, we pulled up to a well-maintained house, with two cars in the driveway, on a leafy street in a middle-class suburb in Georgia. I was awestruck.

The Marines as a Startup Incubator

I wanted to fully integrate into American culture. I joined the U.S. Marines as soon as I possibly could—upon graduating from high school three years after our immigration. I saw it as a vehicle for social mobility, a way to gain skills, and the idea of discipline appealed to me. I took advantage of the GI Bill and earned a B.B.A. in International Business, earning course credits even while deployed.

When my unit deployed to Iraq, I happened to be seated on a plane next to the colonel who ran the base we had been assigned to.

I was just a corporal, but I had a few semesters of business school and had been studying supply chain logistics. I was bold and I talked a good talk of algorithms and my analyses of the base’s inefficiencies. I had big ideas about moving things faster, for example, water and mail. With this display of chutzpah, I risked getting assigned to cleaning latrines, but it worked. I impressed him so he pulled me into something called the “mayor’s cell” to help run logistics for the base.

This base of 20,000 personnel was a complex of Soviet-era buildings. I was only two borders away from the country of my early childhood. I had a feel for former-Soviet infrastructures.

I was also willing to call bullshit on Halliburton.

They bid on every single maintenance issue and had no idea what they were doing. I found locals who actually knew how to find the parts to replace the blown-up fixtures. We started giving contracts to these Iraqis. Serving as a local liaison was a profoundly gratifying experience for me to promote democracy through economic empowerment. The entrepreneur in me was coming out again.

In a counter-intuitive way, the military can be a useful lab for entrepreneurship. It can be a pressure cooker that makes you or breaks you. You’re dealing with extreme uncertainty, yet you have some autonomy within this system, especially in combat roles that typically work in small teams. You learn how to make decisions, deal with setbacks, and get things done.

Drawing on my scrappy resilience as a refugee helped me a lot in the military. Looking back, my military experience was critical for transforming from a refugee to a tech startup founder.

The Financial Crisis Fallout

After the military, my business degree helped me land a job at Merrill Lynch, and I breezed through all the relevant broker certifications. The timeline is now at 2007. I was entering financial services just as that whole thing started to crumble. Portfolios were losing 50-60% of their value. Coworkers were jumping ship. I was left with their angry clients.

Merrill had a load of toxic assets on its balance sheet, but then-CEO John Thain was giving us these weekly pep talks about how everything was okay. Reports from economists blaming “complexity” and offering optimism about “counter cyclical” asset classes rang false. It smelled like corporate propaganda. And I know propaganda.

I began to wonder if the whole U.S. financial system was a house of cards or one big Ponzi scheme. What really happened? To make sense of it all I went to grad school to study economic policy. I did reach some conclusions, but I’ll save those for another piece.

After earning my master’s degree, I went to work for a hedge fund. Analyzing the inner workings of companies was deeply gratifying intellectually. It’s the most cerebral role I’ve ever had, but my heart just wasn’t in it.

I was curious to examine how financial institutions really work, so I accepted a position as a bank examiner in the U.S. Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. I had an amazing view of the banking system. I worked with dozens of banks of all sizes. What I saw: banks, both large and small, were (and still are) profoundly reactive instead of proactive. I became interested in how we could use technology to help banks make better decisions and get ahead of risks before they snowball into the next crisis.

The FinTech Startup World

Around this time, states were starting to legalize marijuana and banking dispensaries became an interesting new challenge. There were plenty of risks, and the vertical provided a great laboratory to test my risk modeling theories.

Now we’re in my current life phase as a fintech startup founder. Tokken was handling 35% of our partners' transactions in Colorado, just six months after our launch. My team, including the amazing Rita Crague, now Head of Risk at Joust, built a unique risk engine we call Gestalt that integrated mobile payments. It used blockchain to anchor data, creating an indelible record that can be readily monitored and validated.

But one big risk changed all that: the 2016 election. Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, promptly rescinded the Department of Justice’s Cole Memorandum—the policy that de-prioritized federal cannabis enforcement in states that had made it legal. All our banking partners got scared, understandably. For us, Tokken was over, but we still had this amazing technology in Gestalt.

We sold Tokken assets to a company that could afford to wait for a more business-friendly political climate. But to salvage any lessons from Tokken, we found a whole new underserved market segment. And proudly pivoted toward the gig economy.

From my methodical analysis, I saw a genuine need to better serve freelancers—and a familiar pain of financial disenfranchisement. Granted there’s a significant difference between being a refugee and being a freelancer. The latter is a choice, often positive. But as I looked closer into this segment, I recognized a few common themes: the uncertainty, falling between the cracks, and being ignored by the system.

Rationally, this was a clear choice. My heart was in it too. All my past incarnations: the video hustling teen, the innovative Marine, the bank regulator—the whole chain of events starting from my refugee experience—were leading up to Joust.

We saw freelancers cobbling together a bunch of different tech tools and consumer accounts to manage themselves a micro-business, and without any of the services typically offered to large companies. They’ve been betwixt and between.

Digging deeper, we identified a particularly sore pain point: getting paid late or not at all. The Gestalt engine has enabled us to offer PayArmour. It’s a form of “factoring,” an accounting tool big banks offer big companies all the time. We’ve been able to scale it down to freelance size because Gestalt allows us to assess risk accurately and efficiently.

In just the past six months of Joust, we launched our product, earned a spot in TechStars (winter 2019 alumni), and now have over 2,200 business users with 500,000 more in the pipeline.

I’ve dealt with dramatic uncertainty and instability in my life. Solo entrepreneurs and freelancers take on a lot of uncertainty and instability too. Seeing how Joust has allowed more people to follow their true interests and live more securely in that journey has given my post-refugee life real meaning. Now I can look back on it and see how, despite the hardships, I can leverage my experiences to empower those who may have felt like the system hasn’t always worked in their favor.