KAMRAN ELAHIAN

CAE Systems

I began my career at Hewlett Packard in my early 20s. My project to create design automation software to help engineers with chip design was not supported by management. They told me I was too young and inexperienced to lead a project of my own. But never backing away from risk, and never taking “no” for an answer, I left HP with four colleagues and co-founded my first company, CAE Systems at the age of 27. Within 3 years of its founding, it was acquired by Tektronix for $75M.