Shervin Pishevar

Shervin Pishevar is an entrepreneur, super angel, and venture capitalist of Iranian descent currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States. He is a partner at SherpaVentures along with Scott Stanford, and a co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors at Hyperloop Technologies. He is most famous for being an early major investor in Uber, an on-demand transportation company.[1][2]

Early life and education

Pishevar was born in Tehran, Iran. His father Abraham was a television and radio executive and his mother was a teacher.[3] Pishevar migrated to the United States from Iran with his parents in 1976, but his father returned in 1978.[4] His father was placed on an execution list for airing instructions for foreign nationals on how to leave Iran in 1979 prior to the Iranian Revolution, but successfully escaped to the United States, where he worked as a cab driver while studying in a graduate program for a Ph.D.[3] Pishevar credits his experiences in those years, and the knowledge of the sacrifices his parents made for him, with shaping the attitudes he brought to his professional life.[5][4]

Pishevar was encouraged by his parents to pursue medicine.[3] He studied molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a Presidential Fellowship to continue research on the magainin peptide that he had started in high school.[4][3] At the age of 19, he got a patent on a new method of lysing malaria-infected red blood cells.[3]

At the age of 20, he published an article in JAMA focusing on the involvement of doctors in torture. Pishevar's work on the subject is credited as an influence for the Istanbul Protocol that banned physicians from participating in torture.[4][3][6]

Career

Entrepreneur

Pishevar was initially interested in pursuing medicine, but in 1993, while he was using a library search system for malaria research, the potential of the web to facilitate search dawned upon him. He decided to switch to entrepreneurship to have a larger impact.[5][4] He started a company called WebOS, from which HyperOffice (in which he continues to be a shareholder) spun off.[4][3] He then went on to co-found Seges Capital and Ionside Interactive, and helped create advanced 3D graphics and an AI engine for the PocketPC. His game Argentum is the best selling game for the PocketPC platform.[3]

From 2005 to 2011, Pishevar served as founding president, COO, and board member for Webs Inc, which ran Webs.com, a social publishing community.[3][4] The company sold to Vistaprint for $117.5 million.[4][7]

He also founded the Social Gaming Network (SGN),[3][5] an internal spin-off from Webs.com, in 2008. SGN was acquired by MindJolt in 2011, and the combined entity renamed itself to the Social Gaming Network in February 2012.[7]

Pishevar is a co-founder of as well as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Hyperloop Technologies.[2][8]

Menlo Ventures: 2011-2013

In June 2011, it was reported that Pishevar had joined Menlo Ventures as a managing director, focused on seed investments in the social web, consumer Internet, and mobile.[9][10][3][1] He led Menlo Ventures in the Series B investment in Uber and also made a personal investment in the company in February 2013.[1] Other companies he invested in while at Menlo Ventures include Warby Parker, MachineZone (creator of Game of War game) and Tumblr.[3]

Pishevar has publicly defended and praised Uber, going so far as to get a haircut to spell out the letters of Uber with his hair on the back of his head.[11] He has also spoken out against regulatory barriers to Uber's operation, writing in the Huffington Post:[12]

What we need is not a minimum fare law. We need a minimum modicum of courage. In the era when political power corrupts, social and crowdsourced power cleanses. We must stir the hornet's nest to build immunity to the sting of corruption. And Paul Graham is right. Uber is a litmus test for corruption and honesty in city governments. Paul recently tweeted: @paulg: Uber is so obviously a good thing that you can measure how corrupt cities are by how hard they try to suppress it.

SherpaVentures: 2013-present

In February 2013, it was announced that starting March, Pishevar was teaming up with former Goldman Sachs banker Scott Stanford to form venture capital firm SherpaVentures and associated startup foundry SherpaFoundry.[1][13][14]

In June/July 2014, SherpaVentures completed raising its first round of $150 million in financing from limited partners.[7]

In December 2014, Pishevar and Stanford announced that they were seeking $250 million for a new fund called SherpaEverest that would make investments in more late-stage companies (such as Pishevar's and Stanford's investments in Uber).[15]

In May 2015, it was reported that SherpaVentures was raising a new $175 million fund.[16]

Personal life

Pishevar was married to Anahita "Ana" Pishevar, who described herself on AngelList as co-founder and CMO of StyleBee, an "Uber for Beauty" app. In the spring of 2013, the couple separated, and they divorced later in the year.[17][18]

In 2014, ValleyWag and the Daily Mail reported that Pishevar was dating Tyra Banks, an American television personality, former talk show host, producer, author, actress, and former model.[17][18]

Pishevar discovered violinist Gabi Holzwarth playing outside a Trader Joe's and helped jumpstart her career. [19] Holzwarth later met Travis Kalanick, a close friend of Pishevar and CEO of Uber (in which Pishevar had invested), at a party hosted by Pishevar, and this led to Kalanick and Holzwarth dating.[20]

Politics

Pishevar acted as a donation bundler for several hundred thousand dollars in donations (estimates vary between $500,000 and $700,000) to the Barack Obama presidential campaign, 2012, to which his then-wife Ana also contributed.[17][18][21] Pishevar and his wife also contributed $122,000 to New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker.[21]

New York has described Pishevar as Silicon Valley's information broker with the political class in Washington, D.C., and described him as focused on pioneering a more collaborative approach between the two. According to New York, Pishevar is critical both of isolationist libertarian and anti-government tendencies of the sort expressed by Chamath Palihapitiya, Peter Thiel, and Balaji Srinivasan, and of regulatory obstacles faced by companies like Uber and Hyperloop Technologies.[22]

Pishevar, who received an award in 2012 from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service naming him an ‘Outstanding American by Choice,’ is also a supporter of expanded opportunities for high-skilled migration, and has voiced support for plans for a startup visa.[23]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "#81 Shervin Pishevar". Forbes. Retrieved July 17, 2015.
  2. 1 2 "Shervin K. Pishevar". Bloomberg L.P. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Schreiber, Hope (April 27, 2015). "Find Out Why Financial Times Calls Shervin Pishevar "Bill Gate's Worst Nightmare"". First Slice. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Yeung, Ken (February 10, 2013). "Living the dream: Menlo Ventures’ Shervin Pishevar". The Next Web. Retrieved July 17, 2015.
  5. 1 2 3 "Shervin Pishevar’s Dream: Social Gaming Network (Part 2)". April 30, 2009. Retrieved July 17, 2015.
  6. ↑ Reventlow, Miriam; Kjaer, Susanne; McColl, Helen. "Health Professionals in the Fight Against Torture" (PDF).
  7. 1 2 3 Lawler, Ryan (July 16, 2014). "Shervin Pishevar And Scott Stanford’s SherpaVentures Closes $150 Million For Its First Fund". TechCrunch. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  8. ↑ "Board of Directors". Hyperloop Technologies. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  9. ↑ Rusli, Evelyn (June 13, 2011). "Moving Into Social Web, Menlo Ventures Adds Partner". New York Times. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  10. ↑ Ha, Anthony (June 14, 2011). "SGN’s Shervin Pishevar joins Menlo Ventures, plans incubator". VentureBeat. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  11. ↑ Ho, Matthew (August 17, 2013). "The Uberization of services. My initial experience with Uber". Inspired Worlds. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  12. ↑ Pishevar, Shervin (July 10, 2012). "DC: Uber Right or Uber Wrong?". Huffington Post. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  13. ↑ Malik, Om (February 10, 2013). "Shervin Pishevar of Menlo VC to start Sherpa, a startup foundry". GigaOm. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  14. ↑ Swisher, Kara (February 10, 2013). "Menlo Ventures’ Pishevar and Goldman’s Stanford to Found Sherpa, a Startup Aimed at Making New Startups". AllThingsD. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  15. ↑ Lawler, Ryan (December 5, 2014). "Early Uber Investors Shervin Pishevar And Scott Stanford Raising $250M For SherpaEverest Fund". TechCrunch. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  16. ↑ Lynley, Matthew (May 11, 2015). "Shervin Pishevar and Scott Stanford’s SherpaVentures Is Raising $175M For A Second Fund". TechCrunch. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  17. 1 2 3 "Tyra Banks Is Dating Oversharing Uber Investor Shervin Pishevar". ValleyWag. January 11, 2014. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  18. 1 2 3 "What a catch! Tyra Banks dating Iranian billionaire Shervin Pishevar with couple spending holidays together 'vacationing near St Barts'". Daily Mail. January 15, 2014. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  19. ↑ Bowles, Nellie (May 28, 2014). "Playing “Billionaire” for the Billionaires: A Violinist’s Ironic Wink". Re/code. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  20. ↑ Zennie, Michael. "Comedian who called Uber CEO's girlfriend a 'b****' and made 'racist' remark at 'Silicon Valley' awards show faces angry backlash". Daily Mail.
  21. 1 2 Choms, Russ (December 17, 2013). "Did Fundraising Land Some in Obama’s Meeting Today?". Open Secrets. Retrieved July 18, 2015.
  22. ↑ Roose, Kevin (February 9, 2014). "The Valley Politic. As the tech sector vies for a larger role in national politics, it has to contend with the libertarian isolationists in its ranks.". New York. Retrieved July 19, 2015.
  23. ↑ "One Venture Capitalist's Personal View On Innovation and Immigration". Forbes. February 27, 2012. Retrieved July 19, 2015.

External links

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