My name is Nasser Jaber.

Where I started

I was born in Jordan, grew up in Ramallah, and went to a Quaker school there. I landed in New York two weeks before 9/11. My first months here I was selling phone clips on the street in the South Bronx, which is where I learned Spanish. A friend there, Carlos, told me that if I wanted to eat, I should work in restaurants, because restaurants give you family meal. So I did. I studied economics and finance at Baruch College and paid for it waiting tables, including at Ilili, and I sent money home when I could. For a long time I was embarrassed to say I was a waiter. I’m not anymore.

One dinner, then a movement

In 2017 a friend called about a Syrian refugee who had just arrived in New York and needed work. I couldn’t afford to hire him, but I could host a dinner. Friends bought tickets, he cooked, all the money went to him, and he told his story. What surprised us was that the ask mattered more than the dinner. He said what he needed, and someone at the table helped. By the end of the night he had a place to stay and a job. We turned that into Komeeda and the Displaced Kitchens series, with dinners in New York, Austin and Washington, D.C., and the 2017 Refugee Food & Art Festival. My mentor Johanna Mendelson Forman calls it gastrodiplomacy. For me, food is an access point to bigger change. That work took me to Turkey to build community kitchens with Syrian and Yemeni women, and to Morocco.

From 20 meals to 6 million

In 2019 I co-founded The Migrant Kitchen, and that same year I started Jabber Dorado Enterprises (JDE). I sold both in 2024. In 2015 I co-created Haram Green Cards, a card game that sold out and was acquired in 2020. The night New York shut down in March 2020, a friend at Sloan Kettering asked me for 20 meals for her ER. We had 1,000 in the fridge. Within weeks we went from 100 meals a day to 10,000, for hospitals, shelters, pantries, senior centers, public housing, a Queens mosque and families sick with COVID, and we kept feeding New York until the end of 2023. We paid our kitchen $20 to $25 an hour. On Election Day 2020, Feed the Polls brought free meals to voters. After the Beirut port explosion we fed the hardest-hit neighborhoods and Palestinian refugee camps, and I flew out to work with the team. We fed hospitals in East Jerusalem during COVID. More than 6 million meals in all.

What I build now

Every failure pushed me forward, and at every step somebody came through for me. Today I build and run Jaber Industries, a government contractor, and S3i, an AI platform that turns raw match footage into tactical insight. I’ve raised more than $500K in venture capital with Antler. I also consult. Most recently I worked with Endless Access, part of Endless Studios. We took its education-through-gaming program in Jordan from 1,500 kids to 10,000 in a year. I advise LEAP Learning Program, ProMedia Studios and EFE Benefit. Next, I’m building a company in men’s self-care, with a nonprofit for children affected by war built in from day one.