SoundHound’s millionaire boss founded 3 software startups before even graduating—he tells Gen Z who want to be their own boss ‘throw darts randomly’

They weren’t all unicorns, but the willingness to pursue big ideas despite the risk of failure is a lesson Gen Z founders can embrace, he tells Fortune

As someone who immigrated from Iran at age 17 knowing little English, becoming a entrepreneur one day may have seemed a far-fetched dream

But Keyvan Mohajer always kept the mindset: You cannot hit big unless you try

By the time he walked across the stage at the University of Toronto to receive his bachelor’s degree in engineering, Mohajer already had three software companies to his name

For Mohajer, who serves as CEO, failure has only ever served as motivation

And, it’s a lesson Gen Z eager to launch side gigs can learn from: The willingness to go out on a limb and build a company from scratch may sound intimidating—but it only takes one good idea to explode into major success. “Every attempt, you should think of it as this is the one that’s going to succeed… Because if you just throw darts randomly at the target, for every attempt, there is the one that’s going to get the bullseye,” Mohajer tells Fortune

From dorm room to the boardroom Mohajer grew up always fascinated by two things: movies and robots

So, after first seeing Star Trek, he always dreamed of how to bring computerized voice systems into the real world

But only after meeting his later cofounders, James Hom and Majid Emami, during his Stanford electrical engineering doctoral gram did he realize he could be part of the team to make it a reality

Their first duct was simple: query by humming

But by December 24, the code was cracked.“It was on Christmas Eve that I finally hummed this Godfather soundtrack, and it told me, ‘You’re singing The Godfather,’” he said to the Iranian Students of California’s The Tale of a Success series

His pitch to investors became simple: AI-powered voice is the future. “In 20 years we will talk to computers and they will talk back to us and that will change computing.” And while it took years for SoundHound to get up off the ground, he tells Fortune finding his passion, or what makes his “heart beat faster,” has been core to his success today. “You can do things and go through life and get by and check boxes and be average,” he says. “But I really wanted to be excellent, and I wanted to push boundaries

Founders who got their start in the dorm room At a time when college students are questioning the value of a degree, SoundHound’s founding story is another reminder of the innovation that often spurs across college campuses—even if it is just from cofounders meeting for the first time

Both sets of founders met on Stanford’s campus

But there perhaps is no more famous company that spurred from the college experience than Facebook

The billionaire returned to his alma mater in 2017 and said he never expected to be such an entrepreneurial success story. “The thing is, it never even occurred to me that someone might be us,” Zuckerberg said. “We were just college kids

We didn’t know anything that

There were all these big nology companies with resources

I just assumed one of them would do it.” “We’ve all started lifelong friendships here, and some of us even families,” he added. “That’s why I’m so grateful to this place

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