Shervin Pishevar, Managing Director, Menlo Ventures, Menlo Park, CA
Mr. Shervin Pishevar is Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, a venture capital fund with over $4 billion under management. Mr. Pishevar is a visionary technology entrepreneur, angel investor, published researcher, start-up advisor and incubation expert, and start-up visa activist. Mr. Pishevar has raised over $50 million in venture funding for his start-up ventures and invested in over 40 start-up companies. Mr. Pishevar is the founder and Executive Chairman of SGN, one of the leading social and mobile gaming companies and was founding President and Chief Operating Officer of Webs.com. SGN was acquired by Mindjolt (now renamed SGN), a leading social gaming company on Facebook and the web. Webs.com was just sold to Vistaprint for $117.5 million in cash.
The Pishevar family is originally from Iran and was poor. Mr. Pishevar speaks of his father as having great ambition who brought his family with him to the United States to pursue a graduate degree. After his father received a Master’s degree, the family returned to Iran in 1978, before the Iranian Revolution began, where he was promoted to the head of Radio and Television for large part of the country. He was in a position to broadcast to foreigners on how to leave the country. Mr. Pishevar says it was a heroic thing for his father to do, but as a result his father was included on the execution list. His father escaped and the Iran-Iraq war began. Mr. Pishevar was reunited with his father in the United States over a year later but not before seeing the Saddam Hussein's bombs fall in Tehran. His father took a job as a taxi driver and his mother cleaned hotel rooms and the Pishevar family started over in the United States. For the sacrifices made by his parents, Mr. Pishevar wanted to make his parents proud and was diligent with his studies. His brother became a lawyer and his sister earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is a professor and he went to the University of California at Berkeley. At Berkeley he published in the Journal of the American Medical Association at 20 years old and Berkeley filed a patent on his independent research on malaria. Mr. Pishevar initially planned to go to medical school, but followed another dream to become an entrepreneur and bring his ideas to life.
Mr. Pishevar became a naturalized citizen in 1987.