Quick Facts
Biography
Darian Shirazi (Persian: داریان شیرازی, born December 23, 1986) is an entrepreneur, angel investor and founder of Radius. At age 19, he became the first intern hired by Facebook.
Career
Shirazi started his career at age fifteen with eBay. He had been purchasing computer components in bulk from Asia and marketing them on eBay. His sales got eBay’s attention, and Shirazi was offered an internship, which he worked for two summers during high school.
In 2005, at age 19, Shirazi became Facebook’s first intern. 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.
Shirazi launched San Francisco-based Fwix in 2008. 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. In 2012, Shirazi turned down $35 million offer by Google to purchase Fwix. Google wanted to prioritize Fwix’s local business data for lead generation, Shirazi decided that was a good idea and pursued that himself. In early 2012, Fwix was rebranded as Radius.
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. 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.
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.