In this talk, Adriana Gascoigne shares a deeply personal narrative centered on her mother’s immigrant journey and its impact on her own entrepreneurial mindset. She recounts how her Mexican‑Japanese mother met her French‑American father in Bangkok, navigated cultural and linguistic barriers, and moved to the United States with minimal resources. Her mother built a successful travel‑agency business from the ground up, eventually out‑earning her husband and funding her children’s education at UC Berkeley and UC Davis. Adriana draws a direct line between the scrappy, resilient qualities required of immigrants and those needed to launch successful startups, citing that 51 % of U.S. billion‑dollar startups are founded by immigrants. She concludes by urging the audience to adopt an immigrant’s resourceful mindset—being persistent, leveraging community resources, and refusing to accept “no” as an answer—in order to achieve entrepreneurial success.
Chapters
Hello, how's everyone doing tonight? Woo! So, I love this new format because when they called me to ask me to participate, they said, "I want you to tell a story." And I'm like, "Oh my God, I get to tell a story and not a PowerPoint? This is so awesome!" So, I'm going to tell a very personal story, one that's very meaningful to me and one that actually taught me a lot in life. So it's all about immigration. So who in this room is an immigrant or born from foreign parents, immigrant parents? Woo! Awesome, that's, I think that looks like 75% of the room. So that's awesome. I too am born from immigrant parents. My mother is Mexican and Japanese, but born and raised in Mexico City. Viva Latinos! And my dad is, is French-American, born and raised in Los Angeles, in East LA. So this story specifically is about my mother, who is my role model, my rock, just my force. She's taught me so much in my lifetime, and I think this story is worth sharing as a result. So my mom and my dad met in Bangkok, Thailand, of all places. My dad was leaving the Navy, after 4 years. He was stationed in Okinawa, Japan. And my mother was traveling to Japan for the first time in her life. She was one of 12 in her family, 6 boys, 6 girls, and she was the first one to be able to save up enough money to go visit her family in Japan. So she actually got to meet her cousins and her grandparents and everything. So she was the lucky one of the 12. So she was 19 years old, very young at 19, and she went with 2 of her girlfriends to not only Japan, but Singapore and Thailand. And in Thailand, at the Princess Palace in Bangkok, she met my father. And my father went up to her and said, "Buenos días, señorita," without knowing anything other than those words. She's like, "Who's this strange man in uniform approaching me?" And he says, "I have to see you again. I can't not live my life knowing that I didn't try to see you again." So my mom's like, "Well, I'm in this little tour group," and it was a very official tour group, the one with the little flags. And he's like, "I don't give a shit. I'm gonna go find you wherever you are." And he was, he showed up at her hotel. And my mom is— My mom is very conservative and she's like, "Okay, well, if we go out, you have to take my two friends too." So my dad, like, the poor guy coming from the Navy, had like $20 to his name, really spent his last $20 on these ladies, but he didn't care. He said, "I just wanted to be around—" He wanted to be around my mom and get to know her better. So he said before he left, "I will have 3 packages waiting for you in Mexico City and a letter, and on this day they will arrive." And on that day they did arrive. And my mom was like, "Okay, this guy's serious. I think he likes me." And he ended up going to Mexico City a month later and just trying to get a job with his very little Spanish and just wooing my mom. And he couldn't find a job, so he went back to LA, but he's like, "I miss her too much." So he went back 3 months later and tried again and actually started meeting the family, which is a big deal in Mexican families. And cut to 6 months later and they get married. So she was accepted into the family, very surprising given that my dad— my grandpa is a Shinto priest, Japanese, like, doesn't, you know, didn't want her to marry someone from another race, which is a little bit ironic. But the things that my mom learned when she came to the United States, she spoke very little, little English. And she was taking a lot of risks coming to the United States without her family, without her loved ones, without a job, with a man that she only knew for 6 months. I mean, this is a stranger, really. And she was also 19, okay? I mean, I'm like, that's a crazy decision knowing that in retrospect. So she said, "I knew that this was the right thing for me. I really wanted to take this risk. He was a man of integrity. He is a man of integrity." And so she moved. And again, learning Spanish, really trying to understand— sorry, learning English, really trying to understand the language and learn the language fast so she could get a job. And she did get a job. She was working at— she got a job working for Mexicana Airlines, which is no longer in existence, and she was working at their corporate offices, and she did well, and she was there for 15 years, and she said, "This is sort of a piece of cake. Like, I can actually run my own travel agency easy." So she did. She opened up her travel agency, and it was in Southern California, and then she opened up a couple different offices, started getting huge groups, clients that would come to her, groups of people, people that would come back and put groups travel packages together and things like that. And she did really, really well. She made a lot of dough. And she actually ended up making more money than my father, who worked at the Walt Disney Company, and ended up putting my sister and I through college. And my sister went to UC Berkeley, I went to UC Davis. So, na— Aggie! And, um, so Having a role model like my mother who sacrificed so much emotionally, financially, physically to come to this country and be resilient, be bootstrapped, be scrappy, not take no for an answer, just yes, I know I can do it, I know I can build this business, I know I can make money, I know I can make a living. She taught me so much. And this whole point of being a startup entrepreneur, going out and finding your passion and purpose and building a company has a deep connection and correlation to being an immigrant, right? I mean, you have to be scrappy. 51% of the— 51% of the most successful startups, I think it's the billion, the U.S. dollar billion-dollar startups, are actually built by immigrants. So that's a really amazing stat. And yeah. And the resiliency factor, the fact that she was always saying, you know, you can do it, you can follow your dreams, you know, we had it really difficult, but here you have resources, you have a community, you have people to answer your questions, you have advisors, you know, you have really great educational institutions and organizations to support what you're doing. It's like you really don't have an excuse, right? So I think that's what she taught me is just really, really be scrappy. You can do anything that you put your mind to because there's people out there that have it a lot harder than we do. And, you know, just think like an immigrant, be like an immigrant, because I think in the end you'll be very, very successful and resilient and be able to accomplish your dreams. Thank you.
