Interviewing President Clinton Shaped His Life

When Sina Kevin Nazemi ’03 interviewed then-President Clinton in the sixth grade, it changed his life. Scheduled to last just eight minutes, the interview lasted half an hour and aired nationally as an NBC Special Report.

The project began as a class assignment at the Fairview Elementary School in Columbia, Missouri. Although his teacher dismissed his choice of a US president as impossible, Nazemi persevered.

Every day, before and after school, he called the White House—dozens of times. Finally the White House operator connected him to the director of media affairs. After three more weeks of calls, Nazemi won approval. “I just didn’t think that interviewing the President was impossible,” he says.

Later, as a high school junior, Nazemi served as head page in the U.S. Senate, where he met Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates. And, after graduating from MIT, he landed a job as associate product manager at Microsoft. He quickly rose to country manager, then global business manager, traveling to 22 countries around the world. Five years later, he headed back to the East coast, where he earned an MBA at Harvard Business School and a master’s in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2011.

Later, he co-founded and served as CEO of Done.com, an online marketplace for home services. Recently, Nazemi sold the company and moved to Manhattan, where he is now working on another venture, this time in the healthcare industry. “Long term, our ambition is to shake up the industry by putting the consumer experience first,” he says.

But it was that early interview, he says, that shaped his life and career. “My interviewing the President made me look at challenges through a non-traditional lens,” he says, adding that healthcare was high on Clinton’s legislative agenda.

“And,” he says, “it certainly propelled my ambitions. It taught me to think and dream big and to give anything a try.”

Watch Nazemi's 1993 interview with President Clinton.