Saeed Amidi, Plug and Play — Pressure Is the Prerequisite
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Saeed Amidi is the founder and CEO of Plug and Play Tech Centers, and his own story starts about as far from scrappy as a founder story can: by his account, one of the most spoiled kids in America, until the 1979 revolution took 99.9% of his family’s wealth in 90 days. Recorded live in front of an audience at Plug and Play San Jose, the conversation runs from that moment through the plastics and bottled-water company he still calls his “day job,” the “lucky building” on University Avenue whose tenants included Peter Thiel, Andy Rubin and Google, and why he won’t back a founder with a plan B — to the AI Center of Excellence he’s building in San Jose, and why he thinks the AI revolution is 10 to 20 times bigger than mobile.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
“We lost 99.9% of our wealth in 90 days”
Some of the people who watch this podcast don’t really know about Plug and Play, or how you came to be — and I know the story is really interesting. Could you start us off with the lucky building, and how you got into this?
There is something about life that is lucky and important. And I was lucky in 1978 to land on Sand Hill Road. Quite frankly, when I came to Sand Hill Road and was going to Menlo College, I didn’t know what was happening on Sand Hill Road. Now I try to be on Sand Hill Road with the VCs — or inside Sand Hill Road at Sharon Heights Country Club, playing golf.
People ask, “Saeed, are you born an entrepreneur, or do you become an entrepreneur? When did you decide to start a company?” It’s a different journey for everybody. For me, it was the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
At that time I was living in a townhouse on Sand Hill Circle. I had a great life. I would go on one vacation, come back, and plan my next vacation. Anytime I was running short of money, I used to call my father’s secretary and ask for $10,000 pocket money. No questions asked.
Then in 1979, suddenly my father shows up, my mother shows up. They really ruined my style. I thought it was my house, but apparently it was my father’s house. And I really look up to my father. Within two weeks he sat me down with my brother — and I can guarantee you we were the most spoiled kids in America. We had maid service, a cook. You cannot believe it. He said, “You’re welcome to live here. You can have food and whatever you need. And I will pay your tuition at Menlo College. But for your pocket money, you’re on your own, starting two weeks from now.”
To pay for gas, I remember I had a five-gallon water bottle in the corner of my room. I emptied it out, and there was about $170 in there. So imagine being the richest kid, spoiled, and suddenly losing everything. And it was not his fault. We lost 99.9% of our wealth in 90 days.
So I’d say for an entrepreneur, you have to have a purpose. My purpose was to not lose my standard of living. I had rich friends — private jets, Ferraris. I was very poor. I only had a Cadillac at 19. But when you want to do something, even running the San Jose office, you have to ask, “What is my North Star? What is my purpose?”
The $1 billion “day job”
My father, rest his soul — even though he shocked me — when I told him I wanted to start my own company, quite frankly, I had worked with him for three months. I helped him start Medallion Rug. I had a deal with him to make 5 or 10% on every rug I sold. Suddenly I sold $600,000 worth of rugs, and he said, “Saeed, that wasn’t worth $30,000.” So I said, “Dad, I think we have worked together far enough.” Instead of the $30,000 commission, we negotiated — I don’t remember exactly — a third of what we had agreed.
Then I said, “Dad, I want to do something on my own.” I had, I think, $15,000 in my pocket, and I really wanted to stand on my own feet. And he said, “Saeed, this is a big statement. Are you sure you’re big enough, man? Why don’t you go think about it for a few days and then come back?”
Fast forward: I started the company that summer. He was kind enough to give me $5,000 a month of runway for six months. I was always so close to making money, but I didn’t make money. Then my brother, who had a factory in Pennsylvania, came and said, “Saeed, I can give you $5,000 more for six months.” So this was like pre-seed money, or seed money. But I had to turn the corner, and I did. I had a transaction in El Salvador and a transaction in Saudi Arabia.
The name of that company is ALPS — American Liquid Packaging Systems. It has one division that sells plastics packaging from ExxonMobil, and it has a bottled-water division. That company today has $1 billion in revenue and 4,000 employees, and I call it my day job. I still run it as chairman, and it has incredibly good cash flow. I like not raising money and building a company. But it is a different game now for an AI company, for technology.
The lucky building
My hobby: I was on University Avenue in Palo Alto, in the lucky building, and as soon as I made enough money, I bought the building. I used to have 400 square feet of office space, and my neighbor, Pierluigi Zappacosta of Logitech, had 800 square feet. As I was building my bottled-water and packaging business, I saw Pierluigi raise money, grow the company and take it public. Even today it’s worth something like $6 billion.
He was very nice — he’s Italian-Swiss — and on Tuesday he came to the Italian Consulate in San Francisco to see me be knighted. I’m a knight of the Italian Republic for contributing to entrepreneurship in Italy more than anybody else. The truth is, we accelerated 700 startups in Italy and invested in 73 of them. One of them just raised €50 million at €200 million pre — and you could say they could have done that on their own. We have four offices in Italy, including Turin and Milan, and we run an aerospace and defense accelerator. Here, we run what we call a physical AI accelerator with PG&E.
But the lucky building: my first tenant was Peter Thiel, and we got a chance to invest in PayPal. My third tenant was Andy Rubin, who did Android, and we were able to invest in Sidekick. Then another tenant that was pretty cool was Google. They came to the building when it was Larry, Sergey and Salar. I saw them raise money, and then they hired Omid Kordestani to help them with the business plan. Omid went from zero to $10 billion in revenue faster than anybody in the world — except now Anthropic and OpenAI.
So I’m lucky to be where I am. Lucky to be in Palo Alto and on Sand Hill Road. But when luck knocks, you have to open the door. So I also opened the door.
“Failure was not an option”
You talk as if you were lucky, and if you listen to the story, it sounds like you were very fortunate. But I know life doesn’t work that way. When you had your packaging startup, you went through the $5,000 and you were done. What made you keep going? Why didn’t you quit? I’m sure even with all this luck you’ve wanted to quit.
There are some of my younger colleagues here, so I’m telling this story to them as much as to you. The first time I went to Saudi Arabia to sell plastic, I had enough money for one trip. I didn’t have a clean suit, so I borrowed my brother’s suit. I didn’t have a credit card, so I borrowed my father’s credit card. I went to Jeddah, and I was going to stay there two weeks, sell something and come back. I couldn’t go back there again — I was running out of money.
So I’m telling you: if you don’t have pressure, you’re not going to be successful. If you don’t put deadlines on yourself for what you’re going to accomplish… I went to Saudi and I said, I’m not coming back till I sell something.
“If you don’t have pressure, you’re not going to be successful.”
— Saeed Amidi · Inspiring Founders Podcast, S2, Ep. 01
Honestly, I didn’t know business. But I said to Savola, the Saudi vegetable oil and ghee company: you’re buying high-density polyethylene at $700 a ton. If I get it to you at the same quality or better at $680, would you buy from me? If they said yes, I would sign a letter of intent, and then I had enough money to air-freight a sample to test the material.
You can call it luck, but I remember I had two weeks of hotel money. I was paying $350 a night, because there were only two hotels in Jeddah. There was a rug shop next to my Sheraton hotel. I went in, and the owner gave me tea, and he said, “I have a big apartment upstairs, a cook upstairs. Why are you staying in the hotel alone? Why don’t you come see one of the rooms and stay here?” So instead of two weeks, I stayed in Jeddah 45 days. I made my first two transactions — with Adel Fakeih of Savola, and with Clorox — before I came back. And then I suddenly realized I was an expert in blow molding of plastic and packaging. To this day, I export polyethylene from ExxonMobil.
It’s easy to think that was just fortune — serendipity, meeting the right people. Some people might say no, you just have a lot more courage than everybody else, or you’re fearless. Is there anything you have — skills, nature, personality — that helped you attract this good fortune?
Again, I go back to: why are you starting a company? I had to start a company. I wanted to live like I was used to. And I would go as far as to say I wanted to be successful. Failure was not an option.
It’s funny — nowadays, before I invest, I ask an entrepreneur, “What is your plan B if this fails?” And if they have a plan B, like going back to finish their PhD or their research, I say you’re not going to be a good entrepreneur. You have to have so much conviction.
And nowadays, with all of these search engines and OpenAI and Anthropic, you have to be the most knowledgeable person in the room — for sure more knowledgeable than our 150 people. If we have more knowledge about applied AI for optimizing PG&E’s atomic energy plant than the founder does, then that person is not going to build that AI engine. So you have to be passionate. You have to have knowledge. I love engineering schools, robotics schools. You have to be capable technically to build a product that people are willing to pay for.
What Plug and Play does is take an engineering project and make it product-market fit. We invest in at least 100 startups a year straight out of university. I just combined San Jose State with Santa Clara University: in Santa Clara County, I want to do 20 startups a year where we write a check, and help at least 100. We call it accelerating them. We usually invest in one out of 10, but here, because it’s so local, I want to do two out of 10.
“Get a job at Google, or build Google”
Let’s bring the conversation up to today. You have this amazing background, and now you have Plug and Play and assets to invest. This office in San Jose that we’re in is one of your newer ones — part of the AI Center of Excellence vision, right?
That’s exactly right. In fact, this is 7.8 miles from my office. It took 18 minutes to get here, and parking was not easy.
San Jose State, in my opinion, is 40,000 students. Its engineering school and all its schools are as big as or bigger than Stanford’s. Yet Stanford, to the best of my knowledge, produces 450 startups a year. I personally think San Jose State produces fewer than 10. And you have to ask why.
The why is the poster child: Larry and Sergey building Google. Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard building HP. We need to find the best poster child of San Jose State and publicize it. And from freshman year, when they get here, we have to say: you could either get a job at Google, or build Google.
Quite frankly, believing you can build something is, I would say, 50% of becoming an entrepreneur. The startups from Stanford, to the best of our research, raise $30 billion a year — that’s the last 10 years of statistics. And here I am in San Jose, less than 10 miles from my headquarters. We need to make San Jose State and Santa Clara come up to par with Stanford and Berkeley.
And that’s part of your vision with the AI Center of Excellence — your particular mission for this part of the county?
Some people used to ask me, “Saeed, why is your second-biggest office in the world in Stuttgart? Why is your most successful office in Tokyo?” Mercedes came to me and said, “Open an office in Stuttgart. We want to build the best mobility platform in the world, with 29 corporate partners.” So I was more reactive. Now I’m more proactive, especially with the new AI Center of Excellence. If PG&E and Matt Mahan and Prologis hadn’t wanted me to open this year, I would not have.
We have a company called Atomic Canyon that did a POC with PG&E’s atomic energy plant, and it has changed production and safety incredibly. And Prologis became best friends with Patti, the CEO of PG&E, and with Matt Mahan, and suddenly they are building a data center in downtown San Jose.
The reality is, I want to build in San Jose the best AI center of excellence for construction, advanced manufacturing, applied research and data centers. Google has $205 billion of capex this year alone, and we can walk to Google if we have to. They are in Santa Clara County. So we need to engage them with San Jose State and show how San Jose State professors and engineers can help them build a better — we call it a sustainable future for data.
“The tip of the iceberg”
As a professor at San Jose State, I was teaching yesterday, and I had a class full of new students and transfer students coming in from all over the county. We had a little discussion about AI. Some of them have a lot of hope for the future with AI, but some still have a lot of concern about how it’s going to affect their lives and their ability to make a living. From all you’ve seen around the world, what’s your take — your hope for the future, and what students and young founders can do to be prepared?
I’m old enough to remember the internet. I used to use faxes and telexes to communicate with Saudi Arabia. The internet was an incredible revolution. It created the first internet bubble and the first internet products. Then the revolution I’ve been involved with is the mobile revolution. It is almost incredible how we use this for research, for communication, for social networks.
I personally think the AI revolution is 10 to 20 times bigger than the mobile revolution, and we are at the tip of the iceberg. OpenAI, Anthropic — these big models are like the infrastructure of AI. And I was at an event — the open-source AI companies, mostly from China, are 10 times better than OpenAI and use a tenth of the energy. You could use them and save 90% of your token cost, if they had good security and sovereignty.
But for young people, I think you just have to do it. You have to go deep and ask, “Can I find the energy and enthusiasm to make applied AI for robotics, or industrial AI?” It’s the tip of the iceberg, and it will take 10 years to mature. I wish I were 30 or 40 years younger. I would start one AI company every year, have other people run it, and then go start another one.
I think it’s the best time to be an entrepreneur and the best time to be an investor. The future is very bright.
More conversations with founders on the Inspiring Founders Podcast.