MeUndies' Founder Went to Prison and Befriended a Bank Robber. It Was Great for Business.
It was too early. And too loud.
Shok -- as the founder of MeUndies had become known in federal prison -- shook himself awake, pissed. The 29-year-old from Beverly Hills had gotten used to sleeping in a cell, but actual sleep was sometimes hard to come by, given that his bed was across the hall from the “black TV room” (as everyone called it). Guys could get noisy in there. And on this morning, as the halls of the prison were still largely quiet, they were having a heated conversation about politics with the door wide open. So, scrawny as Shok had become behind bars, he got out of bed determined to shut their door -- even if it led to a confrontation.
What he found, in the middle of that room, was an intimidating dude named Grease, who couldn’t have been less happy to see him -- and who, to both of their great surprise, would help define a new direction for MeUndies. But at that moment, nobody was talking business. The question was which one of them would end up on a stretcher. And really, it wasn’t much of a question. Where to start.
SHOK / Zip Code 90210
In early 1985, Jonathan Shokrian was born into a clutch of Persian Jews in Beverly Hills. Most had fled the 1979 revolution when Iran became Islamic, figuring they’d go back when it all blew over. But Shokrian grew up sensing the struggle of a community that realized they were stuck here. “There was a big identity crisis between the old world that our parents came from and this new world that we were living in,” he says. “I was told how I had to dress, who I could date. I was forced to take Farsi classes and groomed into taking over the family business.” He hadn’t even graduated college at Southern Methodist University in Texas when he started working for his dad’s real estate company.
But Shokrian found that business cutthroat and impersonal. At the same time, he compared himself to his childhood friends, who were doing amazing things. Escaping like a heady steam from their tiny pressure cooker of a Persian Jewish community, they’d been launching some of the buzziest startups of the moment -- companies like FabFitFun, Alfred Coffee, and Sweetgreen. Shokrian could feel the intensity of their entrepreneurialism; it pushed them not only to be part of this American culture but to define it. “I had never been more excited by anything,”
