March 15, 2019
Goli Ameri, who was a small business woman before running for Congress in 2004, has now returned to the small business arena with a new business helping other people to start small businesses.
Ameri, now 62, was the founder of a small telecommunications consulting firm in Portland, Oregon, in the 1990s. In 2004, she decided to run for Congress from Oregon, and defeated two fellow Republicans in the primary to take on incumbent Democrat David Wu.
Her fund-raising skills impressed the national Republican Party, which got behind her. She was dubbed one of the national Republican Congressional Campaign Committee’s Super Six candidates. Of all the challengers in either party taking on incumbents that year, Ameri raised the most money, with a great deal of help from Iranian-Americans all over the country.
The contest drew even more attention when Wu was found to have been disciplined for attempted sexual assault of a classmate in college. Ameri mailed copies of an article about the attempted assault throughout the district just before the election. Some think voters had a negative reaction to that. At any rate, Wu won easily with 58 percent of the vote and Ameri’s political career came to a quick end.
(Wu resigned from Congress in 2011amid allegations that he had tried to sexually assault the daughter of a campaign donor.)
Ameri went on to work as a US delegate to the UN under President George W. Bush and then served as assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs for the last 10 months of the Bush Administration. She later worked for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
But then it was back to the business community. She has now started Start It Up, a mobile technology platform providing resources to people aspiring to start their own small business. She has recently partnered with Long Beach, California, to help its residents.
Her business is headquartered in Pasadena.
The core of her business is an app that works as a pocket coach. Ameri explains, “It takes them by the hand and walks them through the process step-by-step.”
While small businesses are the big employers in the United States, a majority of small businesses fail within two years. One of the perpetual challenges of the free enterprise system has long been how to help more small businesses succeed.
Ameri came to the United States in 1974 to attend Stanford University. She became a US citizen in 1989 and has two sons.
