‘Sending The Elevator Back Down’: How This Columbia MBA Is Lifting Those After Him

Syed Faraz

Syed Faraz enlisted in the U.S. Air Force directly out of undergrad. As a navigator, he flew more than 630 combat hours. He has been involved in the rescue of thousands of refugees and aid delivery to earthquake survivors. He also was deeply involved in national security innovation as the CTO for the U-2 spy plane program, raising over $100 million for grassroots innovation initiatives, inspiring the launch of a $64 million innovation fund, and helping found the U.S. Department of Defense’s first unit-level Federal Lab — the lessons of which can be found in the Harvard Business School case study he launched exploring change in bureaucracies. Now pursuing a Stanford MBA as a Tillman Scholar and Harvard MPA as a Zuckerman Fellow at the Kennedy School, Faraz is a 2020 LunaCap scholarship recipient and a foundation fellow who is helping to interview the next class of 10 scholarship recipients.

He is a true American success story — but one that wouldn’t be possible without the drive of his hard-working father, part of a larger picture that Faraz equates with the mission of LunaCap.

“I was born and raised in India and lived in Saudi Arabia for a couple of years as well,” he tells Poets&Quants. “My dad worked there, just like a lot of South Asian migrant workers. He dropped out of college in the 1960s, hitchhiked from the middle of India to the coast, and slept on the streets for three months trying to find a ship that would take him to the Middle East because he had heard there were jobs there.

“And then he got a boat. Went to Saudi Arabia, didn’t speak a word of Arabic, but he learned. Started off as a security guard, was a janitor — did all the stuff. Eventually he started a company and did pretty well. Had about $5 million to $6 million saved up in the bank. And then, this was a crazy: In Saudi Arabia, if you’re not a citizen, which most people are not, your your business accounts have to be through a local sponsor. And that guy took all the money away.

“And here’s the incredible part. I haven’t heard my dad complain about that once. And this happened back in ’95.”

The Faraz family moved to the United States shortly after. Syed’s dad first job was at McDonald’s. “He would walk us to school, walk to his shift at McDonald’s, and walk back,” Faraz recalls. “Now he works as a baggage handler for American Airlines and I’ve never heard him complain about losing $6 million.

“The larger story of LunaCap is about helping people who are like him. Paul’s story is incredible. There’s people, there’s other veterans, there’s other people of Mexican descent, who have even more challenging backgrounds. And the beauty is, how do you overcome it? And then the second thing — the more important thing — is: How do you lift your community up with you?”

THE IDEA BEHIND THE FOUNDATION

Paul Capon, founder of LunaCap Scholarship Foundation, while deployed as commander of an embedded training team (ETT) at the interim logistics facility (ILF) Kabul, Afghanistan. LunaCap photo

Paul Capon couldn’t throw away the advantages he had been given in life. That drive to make a difference was the spark that led to LunaCap.

“I just had this feeling that I needed to give back, that I couldn’t take this opportunity for granted,” he says. “If I’m, as my mom says, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, what could somebody else do if they were given that opportunity, and how many other people could they help out? The exponential power that that could be — I think that was the nugget.

“I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, or how that would manifest itself, but through business school was where things really started. I started sharpening the pencil on the idea. And so I started LunaCap Ventures. And then, after that, the foundation idea came to me.”

Capon says of all his varied and remarkable experiences, his two years at both Columbia and London Business School had the biggest impact.

“And having come from a military background as well, I also recognized that there were so many people out there that I’d met — who came from really hard backgrounds — that just needed that opportunity. They didn’t have the money to go to the MBA program. The GI Bill only covers a very small amount.”

As someone with a military background and Mexican heritage, it’s no wonder Capon wants to help those two groups. But those groups have connections beyond his personal story, he says.

“When I tell people, ‘We help out Mexicans and veterans,’ there’s a moment and a pause of, ‘Why these two groups? Did you throw dart at just different people, and that’s what you came up with?’ And I think, ‘It’s just my personal background’ — but what I do like about it is, once people from these two groups meet each other, they might come from both sides of the aisle, but they meet each other and they realize that they have so much more in common, and so much more similarities than there are differences and it’s bridging that gap,” Capon says.

“And so there’s that underlying current and tone and relationship that I’m also trying to build.”

3 THINGS

When a LunaCap scholarship is awarded, Capon tells the recipient three things.

“Number one is, always answer the call. And what I mean by that is, if somebody from LunaCap calls you, you pick up the phone.

“Number two, you always send the elevator back down. ‘You guys are going to get somewhere, and even if you’re in your second-year MBA and you still have a job, you can help out — go back to the people that you mentored in your previous jobs and bring them in.’ That is sending the elevator back down.

“And then number three is to make a positive impact in one person’s life — that’s it, to make a positive difference, a positive impact in one person’s life. And I basically said, ‘You do that, it is going to exponentially grow. And that one is going to turn into 10, and 10 is going to turn into a 100.’ And if we do that, and we all pull it in the same direction and as a group we work together, in 10 years, in 20 years, in 30 years when these guys are the top politicians, when they are the CEOs, and we all get into a room and say, ‘How are we going to make the world a better place?’ Then we can all pull together. So that’s the vision, that’s the idea.”

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