Juliana Cardona Mejia comes from a family that is used to finding or creating a path where there is none.
Two generations before her, her grandfather was a “liberal” who grew up in a conservative town in rural Colombia. He knew he would be executed before he could cast his first vote. With political assassins literally at his doorstep, he escaped through a rooftop and set out for Medellín, where years later he started his own factory.
“He always had that spirit. If you can’t go backward, you can only move forward,” says Cardona Mejia, CEO of Street Entrepreneurs, a nonprofit accelerator for small businesses. “That was my first lesson in entrepreneurship.”
The second lesson came from her mother. While the family was still in Medellin, her mother opened 10 restaurants in five years, but they left everything behind to move to the U.S. to escape the drug-fueled Colombian armed conflict.
Her parents immediately opened a restaurant in the U.S., but it failed in the economic…
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