Maha Al-Ghunaim characterizes her SF State experience as mind opening. Forbes Magazine three times listed her among the “World’s Most Influential Women.” Photo courtesy of Maha Al-Ghunaim.
Maha Al-Ghunaim(B.A., ’82) came to SF State as a 16-year-old Kuwaiti honors student who had won a scholarship from her government to study in the United States. She was thrilled at the beautiful campus and her classes in mathematics, but she also recalls her teenage excitement over 24-hour television and 31 flavors of ice cream.
“In our upbringing, there were maybe only three or four kinds of ice cream, and then I walk into Baskin-Robbins with my friends and my girlfriend is laughing at me!” Al-Ghunaim says. “Obviously it was a bit of a cultural shock for me, in the late 1970s, but I had a hell of a good time.”
Al-Ghunaim, now the vice chairman and Group CEO of Global Investment House, the company she co-founded in 1998, says San Francisco’s diverse population also made a strong impression. “There were all these people and their cultures that we were getting to learn all about — white, Black, Asian — and to us, we didn’t have any thought that one was more ‘American’ than the other,” she says. “I fell in love with the U.S. after that.”
SF State also surprised Al-Ghunaim with her first open-book exam, in an advanced math class on differential equations. “I realized at that point in time how fabulous the American education system is,” she says. Instead of the memorization and recitation she had experienced in English boarding schools, “this was all about concepts, and whether you understand and grasp those, and then it doesn’t matter if you open your book to find the equations or not.”
Beyond her math classes, Al-Ghunaim also took women’s studies and public speaking classes, introducing her to topics that have resonated throughout her career as a global financial leader, she says. “It just opened my brain, all the stuff you can learn and read about without inhibition and restriction.”
Al-Ghunaim took her skills back to Kuwait, where she worked in several investment banking and asset management firms before launching Global Investment House, now one of the largest investment companies in the Middle East. Al-Ghunaim travels frequently between the firm’s offices in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Dubai, and her leadership has drawn attention from global industry leaders. In 2008, The Wall Street Journal placed her on its “50 Women to Watch” list, and Forbes Magazine has listed her as one of its “World’s Most Influential Women” three times.
The geopolitical situation in the Middle East does worry some investors, “and unfortunately the media constantly portrays us as a war zone. Although we do have our challenges on that front, especially in certain countries, the region has a lot of promise,” she says. “It’s a region with very young demography, which means that in certain sectors like health care, education, retail and food and beverage, there is huge investment potential. GDP per capita is very high, so spending power is extremely high, and there is a lot of space for consumer goods.”
It’s a change from Al-Ghunaim’s college days, when Kuwait was mostly unknown to Americans, she says. “I remember at SF State I had a physics professor who asked me, ‘I’m curious, where are you from?’ And when I said Kuwait, he just looked at me and said, ‘Don’t tell me. I’m going to go to the library and research until I find out where your country is.’”