After moving to Los Angeles from Nigeria at age 14, twin brothers Joel and Jeffrey Ezugwu wished they could enjoy TV shows from their culture, but discovered there wasn’t a central place to do that.
“Telemundo has it for Latinos, BET has it for black Americans, but if you think about it, there’s nothing for Africans,” says Jeff.
The brothers, now 30, decided to address the gap in the marketplace and launched Zugu TV, this summer, livestreaming broadcasts from Nigeria, such as sporting events.
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They are targeting Nigerians who want to connect with and learn more about a culture they were once immersed in. “There are a lot of people like us,” says Joel.
The co-CEOs have already attracted early subscribers and are in the process of looking for outside funding, with the goal of bringing more Nigerian and African content to the diaspora in the U.S.
Their goal is to eventually stream popular programs such as “Big Brother Naija,” a reality competition show, Nollywood movies, African music videos, documentaries and their own original shows such as “Nigeria Today,” which, they envision, will look at life in Nigerian slums, where many people live without electrify or reliable clean water supply.
The co-founders, who have teamed up with operations manager Wisdom Mugudu, are now spreading the word among members of the Nigerian communities in the U.S.
“They may be far away from home, but many of them really wish to get this local content, our social, cultural content, raw, original, in the U.S., because they could not access it being away from home for 15, 20 years,” says Mugudu.
The Ezugwu brothers are part of a long tradition of entrepreneurial immigrants, who play a disproportionate role in fueling the business culture in the U.S.
While immigrants make up 14 to 15% of the population, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the U.S. government’s most recent Annual Business Surveys show 24.2% of new business owners in the U.S. are immigrants, based on data from 2014-19.
That percentage has risen from 18.7% in 2007.
Think about the person who leaves everything behind in their home country, whether they are forced or doing it voluntarily, travels thousands of miles to a place they’ve never lived before and says, ‘I’ve got to earn a living,’” says Steve King, a founder of Emergent Research, a consultancy that studies the small business economy.
“That takes a lot of gumption—one of the attributes of entrepreneurship.”
Many of these founders are pioneering innovation in the U.S. Among AI-related or venture-capital backed firms, immigrants represent up to 40% of owners, depending on the niche, according to the NBER report.
They are also contributing a disproportionate share of intellectual property (IP) to the economy.
Immigrant-owned firms generate more patents per employee than the average and are more likely to create new innovations and bring them to market, according to the NBER report.
That IP helps some businesses to scale to significant sizes. Currently, 44% of U.S. unicorns—privately held companies with a billion-dollar valuation—have a foreign-born founder, according to Crunchbase data.
When the National Foundation for American Policy studied 582 U.S. unicorns, 55% had at least one immigrant founder, and 64% were founded or co-founded by immigrants or children of immigrants.
Many of these scaleups, in turn, become significant job creators. The 2022 study, Immigrant Entrepreneurs and U.S. Billion-Dollar Companies, found that the top five job creators among them were REEF Technology (15,000 employees), SpaceX (12,000), Stripe (7,000), Epic Games (6,356) and Better.com (5,800 jobs).
Other well-known employer firms started by immigrants include DeepMind, Anthropic, Open AI, Moderna, Stripe, PayPal, Uber, WhatsApp, eBay, Coursera, Houzz and Chobani.
But the Ezugwu brothers are just getting started. To raise their startup’s profile in the Nigerian community, they became a bronze sponsor of the 2025 Umu Igbo Unite Convention, held August 7–10 in Dallas, Texas.
The event brought together professionals from Igbo culture, an ethnic group from Southeastern Nigeria, from across the U.S. and the diaspora for a celebration of their heritage and professional networking.
