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hen Pejman Nozad arrived in San Jose in the 1980s, he was 23 years old, had $700 with him, and only spoke a few words of English. Today, as the Founding Managing Partner of Pejman Mar Ventures, he is considered one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capitalists, investing both time and funds in the development of the technology sector’s most promising start-ups. He is perhaps most well-known for his early involvement in the development of Dropbox, a cloud storage system whose two founders (Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi) met Nozad at a conference in 2007. After Nozad introduced them to executives from Sequoia, the venture capital firm that eventually helped make their vision a reality, Houston and Ferdowsi thanked him by providing him with a stake in the company.[1] But of course, the path to getting where he is today wasn’t easy. Nozad began his career in the United States as a rug salesman after responding to a want ad placed by an older Iranian immigrant named Amir Amidi who owned a carpet business in Palo Alto. Recognizing that they were living in the technology capital of the world during technology’s most important moment, the Amidi family and Nozad decided to launch an investment fund together. They named it Amidzad, combining the two last names.[2] Today, Nozad invests independently, but he has never forgotten the mentorship that allowed him to achieve his success. He seeks to pay it forward by fostering innovation in the next generation of entrepreneurs, particularly Iranian American entrepreneurs. In July of 2015, Pejman Mar Ventures announced its inaugural startup challenge for UC Berkeley companies, the winner of which would be given $250,000 in seed funding and would become part of the Pejman Mar portfolio. DotDashPay, a payments platform, was announced as the winner in December.[3] Nozad spoke to Perspective Magazine to answer some of our questions about his experience in Silicon Valley. How has your experience as an immigrant affected your path? As an immigrant, you go to an unknown place: a different culture, different food, a different language. And you need to adapt. The process of adaptation teaches you a lot. For me, as an immigrant coming from Iran to America in my early twenties, it really helped to shape my character. It helped me to face the challenges and overcome them. Any immigrant will tell you that leaving your comfortable life and coming to a new place really makes you a new person. I owe so much to the process of immigration. Entrepreneurs today, they all take risks. They’re not just people with comfortable jobs at a big corporation, but rather they want to solve a real problem. And I feel myself in them, these people who are taking risks and want to achieve more and there’s no limit to their dreams. I can really resonate with what they do. Now that you’ve spoken to your experience as an immigrant more broadly, I’m wondering how your Iranian background in particular has affected your career. Do you think the Iranian culture has affected your path? Yes, in two ways. First, I think Iranians are all very kind to others. And when I started out in venture capital, I started out by helping founders and engineers by making myself available for them in any way I could. That comes from my background: from my grandma, my grandparents, telling me you should always do the right thing and that you have to be kind to others. The second thing is that if you look at Iran histor-
ically, it’s a place where science and math played a very important role in society. Some of the best mathematicians and some of the best physicians came from Iran, like Farabi. That has roots in our society and even, I could say, in our DNA. Looking into innovation and technology has really inspired Iranians because of what they have done for the last 2,000 years. We hear a lot about Iranian Americans in technology, so what role would you say the Iranian American community plays in the Silicon Valley? I think it has been a uniquely successful community. You look at it today, and Iranian Americans are some of the best Ph.D. students that are admitted into top universities. Historically, some amazing Iranian people have been really impactful at large tech companies. Farzad Nazem was the Chief Technology Officer of Yahoo, Omid Kordestani was the business founder of Google, and there’s so many other examples all the way up to today, when you see Arash Ferdowsi as the CTO of Dropbox (I think he’s one of the amazing people we’re going to hear more from). So I think Iranians in the Bay Area and especially in Silicon Valley are a very powerful group, and they all know each other. One great thing about the community is that because of how successful it is, it’s setting the tone and the example for other young entrepreneurs and Iranian Americans to come join this community. And that’s fantastic. Tell me about the challenge for UC Berkeley startups. What was the inspiration, and what are you hoping to accomplish? We started this program called the Garage at Stanford, and every year we selected 15-20 students from Stanford and provided them with mentorship, with office space; we made them part of our community and met them every week. We help them find problems they’re passionate about and hope to build a company around, and we don’t make any equity. In the summer, Berkeley reached out to us and said we could do the same thing there. The venture capital community doesn’t pay as much attention to Berkeley, but if you look at it, historically UC Berkeley has been at the forefront of innovation and technology. So we said, “Ok we should do something over there. There’s so many amazingly talented people in Berkeley, so why don’t we take the first step and do something meaningful?” This is in the hopes that other people come and do the same thing and we can foster innovation technology, and hopefully they’ll make really good companies. So we started the Berkeley challenge. We got about 100 applications, and we picked DotDashPay as the winner and we are utterly excited about the future. It’s a really exceptional team with a great vision, a big market; I think you’re going to hear a lot about DotDashPay. And this is just the beginning of us working with UC Berkeley. There are amazing opportunities over there. We really are honored that the UC Berkeley community opened its arms to us. If you could offer one piece of advice to the millennial generation of Iranian Americans, what would it be? The only limitations on our dreams are the ones we create ourselves. So don’t be afraid to dream really big, and don’t be afraid of failure. And as an Iranian, I think it always pays to be very kind to others. You won’t believe how far it goes.
[1] Barret, Victoria. “Pejman Nozad’s Rugs to Riches Story.” Forbes, April 21, 2012. [2] Ibid. [3] Johnson, Lily. “Pejman Mar Ventures Announces DotDashPay as Winner of $250k Startup Challenge at UC Berkeley.” PRWEB, December 22, 2015. 18 Perspective