Darian Shirazi

Darian Shirazi
Born December 23, 1986
Palo Alto, CA
Occupation Entrepreneur, angel investor
Known for Founder of Radius

Darian Shirazi (Persian: داریان شیرازی‎‎, born December 23, 1986) is an engineer, entrepreneur, angel investor, and founder of Radius.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] At age 19, he became the first intern hired by Facebook.[8][9][10][11]

Career

Shirazi started his career at age fifteen with eBay.[11][12] He had been purchasing computer components in bulk from Asia and marketing them on eBay.[2] His sales got eBay’s attention, and Shirazi was offered an internship, which he worked for two summers during high school.[2][12]

In 2005, at age 19, Shirazi became Facebook’s first intern.[10][11] He worked at Facebook for more than two years, both in part-time and full-time positions reporting directly to Mark Zuckerberg before quitting to study philosophy and computer science at University of California, Berkeley, at his parents’ request.[10][12]

Shirazi launched San Francisco-based Fwix in 2008.[11][13] Fwix was a hyper-local news aggregator that crawls the web to curate a range of business data encompassing everything from license registrations and Yelp reviews to Facebook likes, Twitter posts and Foursquare check-ins.[5][6] In 2012, Shirazi turned down $35 million offer by Google to purchase Fwix.[7] Google wanted to prioritize Fwix’s local business data for lead generation, Shirazi decided that was a good idea and pursued that himself.[2] In early 2012, Fwix was rebranded as Radius.[7][10]

Radius tracks 26 million small businesses in the United States in real time and has over half a million pieces of data, which include: social data; government data; people data; business listing metadata; daily deals, like those found on Amazon local; news articles and reviews.[1] Radius surfaces this information for customers in CRMs. Shirazi is founder and CEO of Radius, and also writes about small businesses, entrepreneurship and startups for Forbes.[4][7][10][14]

Aside from Darian’s position at Radius, he has invested, advised, or founded several other companies including: Homejoy, Udemy – the online education platform, Wedding Party – guest photo albums for weddings, MessageMe – great mobile messaging, 50cubes – the creators of Mall World on Facebook.

Darian briefly studied Philosophy and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.[15]

References

  1. 1 2 Brent Leary (May 4, 2012). "Founder of Radius Intelligence, Darian Shirazi: Sales Intelligence Comes to Small Business". Small Business Trends. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Jason Ankeny. "A Facebook Alum Builds an Intelligent Sales Platform". Entrepreneur. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  3. ↑ Kim-Mai Cutler (April 24, 2012). "Fwix Becomes Radius, A Tool For Salespeople Targeting Local Businesses". TechCrunch. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  4. 1 2 Victoria Barret (April 24, 2012). "Radius: How Facebook's Youngest Hire Is Tackling The Local Data Problem". Forbes. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  5. 1 2 Kate Freeman (June 27, 2012). "States With the Most Social Small Businesses". Mashable. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  6. 1 2 Adrienne Burke (January 25, 2013). "A "big data" company helps small businesses target sales". Yahoo! Small Business Advisor. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Tim Gallen (April 12, 2013). "Phoenix small businesses among most Web-savvy in the country". Phoenix Business Journal. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  8. ↑ Rebecca Grant (January 23, 2013). "Facebook’s first intern leads small-business revolution". VentureBeat. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  9. ↑ Leena Rao (January 23, 2013). "Local Business Sales Intelligence Platform Radius Raises $12.4M From American Express And Others". TechCrunch. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 Owen Thomas (January 23, 2013). "Facebook's First Intern Has A Startup That American Express Invested Millions In". Business Insider. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  11. 1 2 3 4 Krystal Peak (May 20, 2011). "Location, location, location". San Francisco Business Journal. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  12. 1 2 3 David Weir (January 20, 2011). "Berkeley Dropout Darian Shirazi's Plan to Win the Hyperlocal Game with Fwix". 7x7SF. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  13. ↑ Steven E.F. Brown (March 18, 2010). "Fwix inks local news deal with New York Times". San Francisco Business Journal. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  14. ↑ "Darian Shirazi". Forbes. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  15. ↑ http://www.crunchbase.com/person/darian-shirazi
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