Kidnappers Held a Gun to His Head and Pulled the Trigger. The Terror of That Moment Fueled His Billion Dollar Startup. Two decades ago, Omair Tariq survived a nightmare that left him with deep trauma. But the ordeal also gave him a ravenous drive to succeed.And he funneled that ambition into founding a billion-dollar business.

Cold, hard, metal.

Omair Tariq tries to make sense of the object against his temple, where — seconds earlier — he felt nothing but a cool breeze through the open window of his rented black Honda Civic. He's stopped at a red light in Karachi, Pakistan. His buddy, Waqas, is next to him. The local pop song "Duur" by Strings blares on the radio — its lyrics all about someone who comes from afar to steal your heart, which Tariq can relate to. At age 16, he, too, is in a long-distance relationship with a girl he has traveled across the ocean to visit. And yet, now…what is this thing touching his head? He turns and sees a bearded man standing at his window.

It's a gun.

Until this moment in December 2001, Tariq had been unstoppable. The youngest of three children, he was born in Karachi and a month later moved to Dubai, where he grew up feeling acutely aware of his outsider status. Not only did his family struggle financially amidst the glitzy wealth of the Emirates, but he was a Pakistani citizen. After flunking third grade, he developed a kind of I'll show them attitude — intent on surging past the classmates who laughed at him. And he did: He graduated high school two years early, at age 15, and aspired to be a NASA astrophysicist. The following year, his family moved to Houston, where Tariq began studying finance at the University of Houston while delivering pizzas and cleaning bathrooms for $6 an hour to pay for school. He also kept up with his girlfriend, a student named Sundas Khan, whom he'd met in Karachi after high school when she was 14. Right away, he knew he'd marry her. They were already engaged.

But now, who knows? This stranger is holding a pistol to his head. The bearded man shoves his way into the driver's seat, gesturing roughly for Tariq to move over onto his friend's lap. A second bearded guy climbs into the back seat. They're talking in Pashto, probably from Afghanistan. Although Tariq speaks four languages, this is not one of them.

As the driver speeds off, Tariq bounces around on Waqas' lap without a seatbelt until he's ordered to climb in the back with Kidnapper No. 2, who points his gun at him and demands his wallet, money, and clodhopper Ericsson phone.

Related: How to Make the Most of Your Ambition

The driver heads for a shopping area and pulls up at a milk shop, which No. 2 then goes in and robs. This doesn't look good. The kidnappers repeat the routine at two more places before hitting a big grocery store. The next thing Tariq knows, No. 2 comes scrambling out of the building toward the car, the owner in hot pursuit blasting a shotgun. After the kidnapper makes it into the backseat, the grocery store owner starts splashing the car with bullets as the boys hunker down to dodge them.

The driver careens out of there. Now No. 2 is demanding Tariq's sweater to tie around his hand, which is bleeding profusely. It's such a nice sweater, Tariq thinks miserably. Dwelling on his clothing is easier than thinking about what will happen next.

After about 10 minutes, the car stops. The kidnappers order Tariq and Waqas out. All the boys can see are mountains. No one for miles. "They're taking us to kill us," confirms Waqas, who, it turns out, speaks Pashto. Tariq starts pleading: "Guys, just take my money, take my car. I'm 16 years old." The kidnappers don't care. Get on your knees and say your Kalima, they command, referring to the prayer Muslims say before they die, to reaffirm their faith and receive help for an easy passage.

Tariq bends down, softly crying. He mumbles, La Ilaha illal-lah…

Soon he feels that gun at the back of his head. It's oddly warmer now. The man pulls the trigger.

Tariq's life, just like they say, flashes before him — and in astoundingly granular detail. The first time his mom spanked him. The first time he had a crush on someone. His first game of cricket. The first time he hurt his knee…the whole reel spinning at lightning speed as he starts to think: I haven't accomplished jack shit. If I die right now, nobody'll know. My mom and dad will cry. My fiance will be devastated — and that's it. They'll bury me and then I'm just a name on a frickin' stone. Like, who cares about Omair?

What drives great BIZ Experiencess? It can't be just motivation, which many people have. No, it's a kind of extreme determination — a fuel that propels them out and away from the pack, allowing them to do what others deem impossible. It's a furious impatience, to hurtle toward daunting goals with the hubris to believe they're accomplishable.

For many founders, it comes from hardship. Maybe it's a traumatic event or loss. Maybe it's being underestimated. Being told "no" too many times. For Tariq — who, against all odds, survived that day in the Karachi mountains — it was seeing his life, so ordinary at 16, flash by in the abject terror of it all. That unthinkable strike of fate rewired him with a raging need to overcome. And at high velocity. Already an overachiever, this accelerated drive would shape many successes — including an ambitious $1 billion startup that is playing out today.

But at what cost?

Back in 2001, after the kidnapping, Tariq returned to Houston with what he now assumes was PTSD. "In the Pakistani culture," he says, "people don't really believe in therapy, which in hindsight, honestly, I should have gotten." Once a carefree optimist, he became, as he puts it, a radical pessimist. He worried about everything. If something was a little off, "I just assumed it was the absolute worst thing that could happen," he says.

To cope, he stuffed down the fear and pushed himself to find a benefit of the ordeal. In many ways, he'd beaten the odds — and that was freeing. "It allowed me to think big," he says, "to think without regrets." Anything that scared him became something he had to do. "I never wanted to regret that I didn't."

He threw himself into big life decisions. He married Khan, his girlfriend from Pakistan, at age 20. Then the two set up a stall at a local flea market to sell Pakistani jewelry that her mother sent over. When they couldn't lure customers amidst the sea of booths, they came up with a strategy: Invest in a comfy chair, where Khan would thread people's eyebrows. As customers sat, now captive among their bracelets and necklaces, they often bought one. It worked so well that the couple expanded to six locations, and they used that money to finish college.

Related: Could BIZ Experiencesship Be a Trauma Response? 5 Ways Our Emotional Past Manifests in Leadership

By the time he was 25, Tariq had ideas for other businesses — but Khan got pregnant with their son, Eshan, and he decided he needed a job with health insurance. So he went to interview for a cost accountant position at an e-commerce operation called Blinds.com. As it turns out, he was the only one there in a suit.

"What do you want to be doing in five years?" the CEO, Jay Steinfeld, asked.

"Your job," Tariq replied.

He got hired.

Jay Steinfeld started Blinds.com in 1996. It survived the early 2000s dot-com bust, in large part because he understood that if you grow too fast, you can't build a solid foundation underneath. He applied the same philosophy to bolstering his team, believing that people would stay with the company longer if he could help them achieve their personal ambitions. That's why he liked to identify future leaders and foster them — although Tariq, it seemed, was not one of them.

"At first I didn't actually see leadership potential in Omair," Steinfeld says. "He was very smart, way above average intelligence. But because he was so quick, and he was used to always knowing the right answers, he was condescending."

That made him difficult to work with — a problem Tariq himself became aware of when two people on his team quit. He asked them why, and they said he was too exacting and intimidating. One of them started crying. What did I do to her? he asked himself, shaken. But he didn't fully get it until, at a meeting one day, Steinfeld put it to him straight.

"What will prevent you from ever being a senior person in the organization is the fact that you're too arrogant and you do not lift other people," Steinfeld told him. "You actually put them down. That is your fatal flaw."

After a lot of soul-searching about why he was like that, Tariq eventually realized, "My arrogance didn't come from thinking that I was the smartest guy in the world. It came from overcompensating because nobody thought I was the smartest guy in the world — and the difference was being an immigrant, a minority, someone who didn't have the Ivy League education people around me did. The nine out of 10 times when I was right, I was like, I don't have any of the shit you guys have and I'm still right. Like, what the hell? So that became a spiral, which I needed to really, really think hard on."

With Steinfeld's help, Tariq began to see how his attitude quashed other people's ideas, closed his mind to opposing views, and stopped people from asking for his help — all of which could severely hamper a company. "You have to make that transition from being like the smartest guy in the room to being the dumbest guy in the room," Tariq says of what he learned then. "And that was huge." He also came to understand something about his ravenous ambition, which the kidnapping had unleashed. It could help him rise quickly, yes, but, "I was moving so fast that I left a bunch of dead bodies behind me," he says. "At Blinds.com, I learned about scaling, making acquisitions, raising capital — all of those mechanical, tangible things you put on your resume. But the biggest takeaway was how to bring people up so they want to work for you. How to become someone who is not only right, but helps them be right. Understanding how to be a leader."

In 2014, Blinds.com was doing $115 million in annual revenue and got acquired by The Home Depot. Tariq went on to become chief financial officer, then chief operating officer of The Home Depot's Blinds.com division. But by 2020, he was itching to do something bigger — to be an BIZ Experiences. And he had an idea, the kind of bold vision his ordeal in Karachi had opened him up to. It was an all-in-one e-commerce platform to help companies of every size manage sales and fulfillment. Nothing like it existed. "I was like, man, if we could figure out how to become the spinal cord for every brand in the world, we could build a trillion-dollar company," he says.

Related: 5 Honest Truths About Starting A Business

That August, Tariq decided to message a guy who'd reached out earlier to him on LinkedIn. It was a fellow Houstonian named Jim Jacobsen who kept a low profile but whose companies have a combined enterprise value of $3 billion. They decided to meet. By another flip of the odds, Jacobsen had also been thinking about building an all-in-one e-commerce platform, and he even had a name for it: Cart.com. The trouble was, the domain name was already taken, and it would cost $5 million to buy it.

That night, Tariq was settled in with Khan watching Game of Thrones when he got a text from Jacobsen: "Hey, I just bought the Cart.com domain." He wanted Tariq to join him and build what they'd talked about.

Tariq froze. It seemed insane. He just met this guy! But then, those rewired instincts kicked in: No regrets. Move fast. Take the risk.

He paused the show.

"What's up?" Khan said.

"I think I'm going to leave Home Depot to start my own company," he told her.

"Babe, just go to bed," she said. "We'll discuss it tomorrow." She thought it was crazy talk. But the next day, he quit.

The reason for Cart.com seemed obvious. When a new brand wants to sell something online, a platform like Shopify can power its store. But as sales rise past $1 million a year, the company often needs more sophisticated tools for marketing, analytics, inventory, fulfillment, and more. This requires a patchwork of new services, which is time-consuming and costly. Tariq and Jacobsen wanted to engineer all of them into one seamless service.

When they launched on November 9, 2020, their first question was: How do you do that? They agreed they needed to move fast — to beat any competitors who had the same idea, but also, to build the entire thing upfront instead of starting out with a smaller product. Jacobsen invested another $20 million and Tariq brought in a guy he'd met judging startups at a pitch competition, Remington Tonar, who became Employee No. 1. At first it was the three of them working nonstop out of a self-storage facility. "Jim was drinking White Claws, Remington would get his fancy wine and I'd have my Diet Coke," Tariq recalls. "And we'd go into the wee hours."

Speed, of course, was not a problem for Tariq, who now got to apply the leadership lessons he'd learned at Blinds.com. And Tonar saw them in action. "Omair recognizes that we cannot, as a company that's trying to move this fast, have any myopia where we just go, 'This is the one right direction and we're gonna do this,'" he says. "That creates fragility. We need to be prepared for any situation by constantly figuring out the best path. And Omair does that. He's always trying to maximize the number of scenarios in which we might be successful at any given time."

That helped them navigate a big question: How do you actually sell this end-to-end e-commerce platform? Investors liked the idea of it, but customers were hesitant. The Cart.com team eventually realized it was a matter of communication: Their sales conversations were framed around the product, rather than their customers' problems. Once they switched to saying, "Hey, we can help you grow by selling on more channels," sales rose dramatically.

The pivot was emblematic of another lesson Tariq had learned along the way — the one about being open to other people's suggestions. This idea had come from Gary Specter, Cart's president. "Ten or 15 years ago I would've told Gary there's no way he can be right," Tariq says. "And now, every day, I pick up the phone and ask my team, 'How am I wrong here?' It's definitely the better way to lead."

Tariq also discovered he was wrong about what customers would buy. He'd figured that they would fully adopt Cart.com's system, but instead, they wanted to start piecemeal — with just one or two services. Noah Chaimberg, a typical case, founded the hot sauce company Heatonist and was already comfortable with his suite of tools. But he decided to try Cart's website solution to improve his conversion rate. "I wanted to start out with nuts and bolts, stuff you can really measure, before considering their other offerings," he says. Similarly, Sana Javeri Kadri, founder of Diaspora Co., which sells spices grown in Southeast Asia, only needed fulfillment. "But what was tempting about choosing Cart over our other options is thinking, as we grow, we can plug into more and more of their stuff."

Related: Obstacles Are Opportunities: Use Them to Take Your Business to the Next Level

Hearing from clients like these, Tariq realized he needed to think differently about product development. Like his wife's eyebrow-threading business at the flea market, if Cart could draw customers in with a single offering, they'd look around to view the other ones. But that meant every offering had to be stellar. At the start, Cart's solutions were good in the way they all worked together — but nothing special as standalone products. Still a small startup, it didn't have the people, capital, or time to massively upgrade them. So Tariq pivoted to an aggressive acquisitive strategy, buying companies with deep expertise in each offering—building a Cart that was just as strong being a la carte.

To do this, he started raising more serious money — nearly $400 million so far — which helped Cart acquire 11 companies and hire 1,600 people in just two years. It's a bet that seems to be paying off. With more than 6,000 brands, the startup did nearly $200 million in revenue in 2022 and is on track to be profitable this year. "I've already gotten three or four times my money back and still have significant ownership in the company," says Jacobsen, whose role is now chairman of the board. And it continues to move at an unusual clip. Having expanded to 3.5 million square feet of space for fulfillment operations, Cart recently announced a partnership with FedEx Dataworks to improve delivery and inventory logistics. At its last raise it became a unicorn, valued at $1.2 billion.

But can Tariq pull off his big vision? There's much left to prove.

"The skeptic in me when I look at something like this is, it seems like they're taking on too much," says John Harmon, a senior analyst at Coresight Research, which specializes in retail and technology. "It doesn't make sense that a company would be involved in commerce and fulfillment. Each one of those is really hard. And then you'd have to be cheaper and better in all of these things."

Bala Parameshwaran, an expert partner and member of Bain & Company's technology and analytics and retail practices, agrees there are a lot of challenges — among them, competition. There's a market and a need for end-to-end platforms, he says, but "almost every technology provider in the e-commerce space is trying to expand their portfolio of offerings, either through acquisitions or capability building."

Aware of all this, Tariq mostly feels the heat of his biggest competitors. Shopify spent $2.1 billion in 2022 to acquire Deliverr, which will help it build out fulfillment capacity. Amazon's Buy With Prime, introduced around the same time, lets merchants offer its fast Prime delivery on their own sites. Even retailers are edging into the all-in-one space; American Eagle recently acquired a fulfillment company and is now offering that service to its competitors.

Tariq's answer — as always — is speed. "I think we have a window of time to become the household name for end-to-end infrastructure as a service," he says. "But we have to move fast."

A gun at my head. That day some 20 years ago, in Karachi…

Tariq kneels in the deserted mountains, weeping, waiting for the bullet to hit his brain, his life screeching toward its final moment. The bearded man pulls the trigger. Tariq hears the click.

But then, nothing. He is still here. Weeping. Breathing.

The kidnapper pulls the trigger again. Click.

Still, nothing. Three, four, five, six, seven times the assassin tries to shoot. Every bullet jams.

Now the kidnappers turn to each other in frustration. This gun is clearly broken, and No. 2 has emptied his weapon at the grocery store exchange. Tariq feels a fleeting relief, until the men go on to discuss other ways to dispose of them, including crushing them with rocks.

The only thing worse than getting shot in the head, it dawns on him, is dying from something other than a gun.

Then it just stops. All of it. The kidnappers seem to decide that bludgeoning is too messy and risky. They disappear.

Related: Trauma-Informed Workplaces Are the New Normal

For a long time, probably more than two hours, Tariq and his friend Waqas knelt there, staring at the ground, locked in what was supposed to be their last positions. Finally they drummed up the courage to look around and see that the men are really gone. The kidnappers even left the car, so the boys drove themselves to a police station, where another ordeal unfolded. The cops had heard about the robberies and considered them suspects, all of which took time and Khan's father to straighten out. At one point the grocery store owner with the shotgun showed up to give his account. In a moment that will haunt Tariq forever, the man walked over. "He shook my hand, and he said, 'You must be a very, very lucky son of a bitch,'" Tariq recalls. "'I had zero intention of leaving any of you guys in the car alive.'"

Today, looking back at what came of all this — the trauma, the PTSD, that insatiable need to succeed — Tariq says, "I'm not sorry. I'm grateful." Even the radical pessimism, where he expected everything to go disastrously wrong, is something he's learned to transform into what he calls "radical paranoia." It's an amplified vigilance of everything that could go wrong, and it plays out today at Cart.

Tariq often knows what a certain supervisor in one of his 11 fulfillment centers is doing at any given moment, but if not, he must find out in as much detail as possible. "I'm just hyperaware," he says. "Like, even today, if a small customer is upset, I get on the phone to apologize personally. People say I shouldn't be this accessible, but my take is, the one customer I didn't talk to is that one that could ruin the credibility of the company. Which is just radical thinking, right?"

He figures it has made him a stronger operator and a better BIZ Experiences. Sure, there are bigger things he could be doing with his time. "But so far," he says, "I feel like it has helped us more than it's hurt us."

The other thing he's learned to modulate is his drive for speed. Although it's his competitive advantage, it also puts the company at risk of going so fast in the wrong direction that they can't correct the mistake. "Even bullet trains have to stop at stations," he says. Now, every month he meets with his senior team to do something unstructured, like go-karting or hanging out at his home with no agenda. The idea is to purposefully slow down, take a step back, and question everything. Are customers still happy? Are they building the right products? If not, how should they iterate? And what lies ahead?

"He is so ambitious," says his wife. "And sometimes it just scares me, because what's going to happen if he actually doesn't get everything that he's dreamed of?"

It's all a bet. But so far, the odds have been in his favor.

Related: 5 Tips I Wish I Knew Before Starting My Business