“At this point in my life, I want to help people who remind me of the young man I once was.”
A. Hamid Andalib leans forward for emphasis before finishing the thought that has come to define the next chapter of his life.
“I want to multiply myself in the lives of others.”
Andalib isn’t talking about another startup or business venture. After building companies, earning national recognition and spending decades helping shape Chattanooga’s civic life, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga alumnus has set his sights on something less tangible but, to him, more meaningful: investing in students.
Beginning in spring 2027, Andalib will return to his alma mater as an adjunct instructor in UTC’s Gary W. Rollins College of Business, teaching “Entrepreneurship: The Mindset and Skillset,” a course designed to introduce students across campus to entrepreneurial thinking.
The appointment comes only months after he received the 2026 Ellis Island Medal of Honor, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors recognizing immigrants whose lives exemplify leadership, service and opportunity.
For many people, the award might have marked the culmination of a remarkable career. For Andalib, it confirmed that the next chapter should look very different from the last.
Rather than building another company, he wants to help young people build lives of purpose. He hopes to replace uncertainty with confidence, teach students to see opportunity where others see obstacles and convince them that entrepreneurship is less about launching businesses than creating possibilities for themselves and others.
That mission is personal because, in his mind, it wasn’t all that long ago that he was the young person searching for hope.
Andalib was a teenager from Iran who arrived in the United States alone. He washed dishes to survive, slept only a few hours a night while earning an engineering degree at UTC and eventually transformed an idea into a multimillion-dollar company.
Along the way, he became a restaurateur, entrepreneur, philanthropist and one of Chattanooga’s most engaged civic leaders.
Yet when he reflects on that journey today, Andalib doesn’t begin with the businesses he built or the honors he’s received.
He begins with the people he now hopes to help in return.
A childhood shaped by generosity
Long before he became an entrepreneur, Andalib learned lessons about generosity from parents who had almost nothing to give.
He was born in Dezful, Iran, into what he describes as a “very poor family.” Childhood illnesses claimed many young lives in his community, and his parents worried he might not survive. Although they had little money, they bought him a small pair of gold earrings and pierced his ears as an act of faith.
The earrings weren’t intended as jewelry. If he lived, his parents planned to sell them, buy bread and feed families who had even less than they did.
That story, he says, became the first chapter of his philosophy about life.
As a boy, his mother would send him to buy two loaves of bread, handing him enough money for four because she knew what he would do next. Halfway home, he routinely gave away half of what he carried to neighbors who needed it.
“My mother knew if she gave me money for two loaves of bread, I’d give one away, he says. “So she’d give me money for four, knowing I’d come home with two and another family would have two.”
The lessons continued in school, though under far more painful circumstances.
Before educators understood learning disabilities, Andalib says he struggled with dyslexia and attention deficit disorder. Teachers interpreted his mistakes as laziness or a lack of intelligence. Wrong answers often brought physical punishment, and he still points to disfigured fingers that were broken during those years.
Yet the same mind that struggled with simple arithmetic eventually excelled in advanced mathematics and science.
“I knew I wasn’t stupid,” he says. “I just learned early to work harder than everyone else. If someone else could remember something after reading it once, I’d read it three times.”
Those early struggles taught Andalib something that would shape the rest of his life: determination could compensate for almost any obstacle.
A wall, a crowd and a visa
By the late 1970s, Andalib had become one of the top students in his high school and was preparing for college. Then the Iranian Revolution upended those plans.
As political unrest spread across the country, thousands of people crowded outside the U.S. Embassy in hopes of securing one of the last visas before it closed. He remembers families waiting for days in a crowd growing more anxious by the hour.
Standing amid the chaos, Andalib saw only one way to restore order, so he climbed onto the embassy wall and said, “Whether you like it or not, I’m your leader,” he remembers. Then he numbered slips of paper from one to 100 and tossed them into the crowd, creating an impromptu lottery that convinced people to wait their turn instead of surging toward the gate.
When Andalib finally made it inside the embassy, an armed guard pointed him out to the woman reviewing visas.
“’This is the kid who calmed the crowd,’” he remembers the guard saying. “So, she smiled and gave me my visa.”
Within months, Andalib landed in the United States expecting to be greeted by the family sponsoring his immigration. Instead, he learned they had divorced and never came to the airport.
At 17, he was alone in a country where he knew few people and had nowhere to live.
Before long, he found work washing dishes in an Atlanta restaurant, gradually earning promotions to waiter and assistant manager. Then, one evening, while serving customers from Chattanooga, he mentioned he wanted to continue his education. They told him about an opening at The Loft, one of Tennessee’s premier restaurants.
He seized the opportunity, packing his belongings for Chattanooga and enrolling at UTC – a decision that would shape the rest of his life.
Building a life in Chattanooga
For the next several years, Andalib lived at a pace few people could sustain.
He attended engineering classes during the day, worked at The Loft nearly every evening and slept only three or four hours a night.
The restaurant itself became an education.
At the time, The Loft was among the largest restaurants in Tennessee, seating more than 600 guests and employing roughly 85 people. Andalib quickly moved from waiter to assistant manager and eventually became general manager – all before completing his degree.
By the time he graduated from UTC in 1985, another opportunity – and another challenge – was waiting: The Loft was for sale.
Most people thought purchasing a multimillion-dollar business without money was impossible. That assessment became his motivation, Andalib says.
“I wasn’t interested in owning the restaurant until somebody told me it couldn’t be done,” he smiles.
Andalib immersed himself in learning the mechanics of entrepreneurship – writing business plans, navigating Small Business Administration loans and convincing lenders to believe in an ambitious young immigrant with little collateral.
Eventually, he and a partner purchased the restaurant.
Years later, after becoming sole owner, Andalib expanded with additional restaurants before learning another lesson: customers weren’t coming only for the food – they were also coming for him.
Every evening he greeted guests, shook hands, seated customers, carried trays, washed dishes and remained visible throughout the restaurant. When he opened multiple locations, he realized he couldn’t replicate that presence.
“I realized I was part of the product,” he says.
Instead of viewing the expansion as a failure, he viewed it as an education about leadership and knowing his own limitations.
Reinventing an industry
After years in hospitality, Andalib saw an opportunity few others recognized.
Gift cards already existed, but they functioned almost exclusively as consumer products. He imagined something different.
Rather than giving customers a gift card tied to a single retailer, he envisioned a platform that would allow businesses to reward employees or customers with the freedom to choose whichever retailer they preferred.
The concept eventually became VIPGift, a company he founded in 2000 that helped pioneer electronic gift card redemption in the incentive industry.
The idea grew into a national business generating more than $120 million in annual revenue before its acquisition by a Silicon Valley firm in 2008.
The sale took Andalib west, where he spent years investing in businesses and mentoring entrepreneurs while maintaining ties to Chattanooga.
On paper, he’d reached the level of success many entrepreneurs spend their lives pursuing. Yet something continued pulling him home.
“I’ve always believed life unfolds in phases,” he says. “First you survive. Then you learn how to live. Then you strive to succeed. But success by itself is never enough.”
Having survived and succeeded, Andalib found himself searching for something more enduring.
Beyond success
Long before returning to Chattanooga full time, Andalib had become deeply involved in civic life.
Over the decades, he served on numerous nonprofit and civic boards, workforce development initiatives and community revitalization efforts, helping organizations ranging from the Chattanooga Area Food Bank to Children’s Hospital.
He recalls helping the Food Bank during its early years and recently visiting its modern facility. Seeing how far it had come left him unexpectedly emotional.
Walking through the Food Bank, he reflected on the small part he’d played decades earlier in helping the organization grow – a contribution he modestly describes as “a little tiptoe.”
“Significance looks like millions of meals going to people who need them,” he says. “I started crying.”
The word “significance” comes up repeatedly in conversation with Andalib. For him, it’s become the standard by which he measures achievement.
“If your success doesn’t include helping people along the way, you might reach the top, but you’ll find yourself alone,” he says. “And if you fall, you’ll meet the people you stepped over on the way up.”
Andalib’s philosophy is rooted in a simple image.
He often tells people they were born with a spoon longer than their arm, making it impossible to feed themselves directly. The only way to eat, he says, is by feeding someone else first.
“When I help others, I help myself,” he says. “Every meaningful success I’ve had began with helping someone else.”
Returning to where it began
That philosophy ultimately led Andalib back to UTC.
University leaders approached him about teaching entrepreneurship, believing students would benefit from hearing from someone who had occupied the same classrooms before building businesses across multiple industries.
For Andalib, the opportunity represented far more than teaching business.
He sees students entering adulthood at a moment of extraordinary uncertainty. While his generation worried about finding a place in a new country or a way to make ends meet, many of today’s students wonder how artificial intelligence will reshape their careers before they’ve even begun.
Rather than allowing fear to dominate those conversations, Andalib wants students to think differently.
“Plan A is to land your dream job,” he says. “Plan B is to create your own.”
His course will cover the practical mechanics of entrepreneurship – writing business plans, incorporating companies, raising capital, protecting intellectual property and pitching investors – but those lessons aren’t the heart of the class.
He hopes students leave more resilient than they were when they arrived, seeing in their own setbacks the same opportunities that shaped his life. And perhaps most importantly, he wants them to believe that purpose can become a competitive advantage.
“The science of success can be taught in books,” he says. “The art of success is learned through experience – through obstacles, setbacks, failures and perseverance.”
The next generation
Near the end of the conversation, Andalib is asked what he hopes students will remember most after taking his class.
Rather than imagining successful startups or higher profits, he pictures a former student saying the course had changed the direction of their life.
“First, I want them to become better human beings,” he says. “Better sons and daughters. Better fathers and mothers. Then I want them to understand that when your purpose is bigger than yourself, a power bigger than yourself shows up.”
The young man who once climbed an embassy wall to bring order to chaos now hopes to help students navigate a different kind of uncertainty.
If Andalib succeeds, his greatest legacy won’t be measured in companies founded or revenues generated, but in the students whose lives are changed because they came to see entrepreneurship not simply as building businesses but as building lives marked by a commitment to serving others.
As Andalib sees it, that’s been the lesson all along.
“No matter how smart you are, how hard you work or how much faith you have, if those things aren’t rooted in a love for humanity, you haven’t lived your purpose.”