Robert Herjavec moved to Canada at age 8 from Yugoslavia (now Croatia) after his father, a young political prisoner, protested the communist government one too many times and was forced to leave.

Herjavec’s parents spoke little to no English and so he found himself handling a lot of responsibility from a very young age. His life changed one day when he was 12 and he came home from school to find that his mother had been conned by a salesman into buying a vacuum cleaner worth almost more than their monthly rent.

His family went through months of hardship paying off this industrial vacuum—from that point on, Herjavec was incredibly driven by the desire to take care of his family and never let them be taken advantage of again. From there, Herjavec went through a series of careers from news production to a job at IBM.

Today, Herjavec is one of the leaders in the Internet technology space and a star on the popular business pitch show Shark Tank—not to mention its Canadian version, Dragon’s Den.