first-generation-american
(3)
Michael Polk
Michael Polk is the President and CEO of Implus, the Durham, North Carolina maker of footcare, fitness and sporting goods brands like Sof Sole, Spenco, Yaktrax and TriggerPoint. A first-generation American and career consumer-goods operator, he spent decades climbing through Procter & Gamble, Kraft Foods and Unilever before running Newell Brands for eight years, where he led a transformation that roughly tripled enterprise value. Since 2020 he has paired the Implus job with an advisory role at private equity firm Berkshire Partners, trading the glare of a public-company quarter for the hands-on work of building brands shoulder-to-shoulder with a smaller team.
Shreya Murthy
Shreya Murthy is the cofounder and CEO of Partiful, the text-first party invitation app that became Gen Z's default way to gather. Launched in 2020 during pandemic lockdowns, the New York company has grown past millions of users, raised a $20M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, won Google's Best App of 2024, and landed Murthy on the 2025 TIME100 Next list. A Princeton politics grad and ex-Palantir operator, she left mission-fatigued tech jobs to build the social layer for offline life, betting that parties are not frivolous but infrastructure for community.
Bijan Sabet
Bijan Sabet is a first-generation American venture capitalist, co-founder of Spark Capital, and former U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic. The son of Iranian and Korean immigrants who met in a New York medical school, he drove from Boston to Silicon Valley after a 1991 Macworld, built foundational consumer internet companies, then returned east to co-found Spark Capital in 2005 - backing Twitter when it had 11 employees, Tumblr before it sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion, and Discord before it became the home for every online community. After stepping back from Spark in 2021, President Biden appointed him Ambassador to Prague, where he served until January 2025. He is also a film photographer, board member of Human Rights Watch, and trustee at Boston College.