Ardy Arianpour fled Tehran at six years old with his family and four suitcases. Forty years later, he’s helped scale a $1 billion acquisition, saved his father’s life with his own technology, and built a health data platform sitting on 150 million patient records.
The 46-year-old founder and CEO of Seqster grew up in San Diego, the city his family landed in when they escaped war in Tehran in 1986.
Growing up, while most teenagers were working at lemonade stands and ice cream parlours, Arianpour was working at the Salk Institute and teaching himself to trade stocks online by 16. In 1998, he featured in Time Magazine for making big returns as a teen broker and investing in his pension, all while still in high school.
But his big break didn’t come from a stock windfall. After studying biological sciences at university and then getting an MBA from the Marshall Goldsmith School of Management, he spent years scaling Ambry Genetics as its senior vice president, where he led its $1 billion acquisition by Konica Minolta—and earned so much in the process he could have retired.
“After my success at Ambry, I honestly didn’t have to work anymore and could have sat on a beach for the rest of my life,” Arianpour tells Fortune. Instead, he founded Seqster.
