Sam Thapaliya, the Nepalese Elon Musk

The United States is a nation created by and for immigrants, and true to its origins, the most successful and innovative Americans tend to be immigrants. The most famous current example of this pattern is Elon Musk, but there will always be someone new that saw an opportunity in America and built success there. Sambhav Thapaliya is a Nepali innovator who, at the young age of 24, has founded two majorly successful tech startup companies. Similarly to Elon Musk, he shares a passion for finance, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence; one of his companies, Zebec, is like an advanced version of Paypal. It is easy to see someone like Sam leading the way into the future of AI and finance. 

Being born in Nepal, during the rough period of Nepalese Civil War in 1998, Sam was completely removed from technology as a child. In fact, he only ever discovered computers and banks at the age of thirteen. However, he had an immediate fascination with them and developed his first ERP, or management, software within the first year of discovering computers. He continued to create and play with programming all throughout school, and after he graduated took two and a half years off to develop a successful accounting software. Unfortunately, the software was not as successful as Sam would have liked for it to be due to the geographical location of his headquarters. He was unable to expand to his liking, and saw the potential in moving to America to create business there. So, he sold the accounting software and moved to Northern California, attending Menlo University in 2017. There his first successful company, ASMI, was solidified from an idea he had when he was growing up in Nepal. The company ended up winning the Menlo College 2020 Entrepreneurship and Innovation Award, a huge boost to the inventor.

More success reached the Nepali developer. Throughout school, he made several friends that would be instrumental in the success of both his companies, as teammates, advisors, cofounders, and even patrons of his companies. As such, Sam recounts the best lunch of his life as being the one where he received funding from one of his former classmates. Sam was convincing the alumnus to become an advisor for ASMI, but ended up receiving a check instead and reassurance that his advertising based AI technology was a worthwhile project worth money. He was right. 

As a Nepali man, Sam has witnessed dictators, communism, and socialism. The fascination for blockchain technology spawned out of his desire to create technology that removes any sort of middleman from money transactions, being the government or anything otherwise. Unfortunately, cryptocurrency is still illegal in Nepal. Sam still is working hard on running his company Zebec, which is its own cryptocurrency and software that does exactly that; remove the middleman from transactions via crypto. He is right on the trajectory of Elon Musk and is surely making his countrymen proud to be at the forefront of technology today.