Shayan Zadeh

Shayan Zadeh (born 1979) is the co-founder of Zoosk, the largest romantic social network and one of the Wall Street Journal’s Top 50 Venture-Funded Companies. Born in Iran, Zadeh immigrated to the U.S. for graduate school and worked at Microsoft for several years. He founded Zoosk with Alex Mehr in 2007. Today, he is co-CEO of Zoosk, as well as an advisor and investor for other start-ups.
Early career and education
Zadeh was born in Urmia, Iran to a Kurdish middle class family. He studied computer science at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran as an undergraduate. There he met future co-founder Alex Mehr.
Zadeh and Mehr moved to the U.S. to attend graduate school at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2000. To get their visas, Zadeh and Mehr had to journey to Turkey—on foot—because the U.S. has no embassy in Iran. He also earned his MBA at the University of Washington.
In 2008, Zadeh got his green card and became a permanent resident of the U.S. The process had taken four and a half years. Zadeh wrote letters to his local representatives and First Lady Laura Bush, expressing his dissatisfaction with the process. He believes it would have taken even longer if he hadn’t done so.
Zoosk
While working at Microsoft, Zadeh stayed in touch with Mehr. They tossed back and forth different business and project ideas, like a WiFi, remote-controlled cat feeder. To promote the tool and get customers using it, they created games leveraging the same technology as their market research product. One of the games had romantic implications, and became very popular. When the men realized that the dating side project was growing faster than their main project, they decided to transform their company into a romantic social network. They relaunched as Zoosk at the end of 2007.

Zoosk is a romantic social network application, originally designed for Facebook. Today, Zoosk has a popular destination side in addition for the most popular dating application on Facebook plus native applications on iPhone and Android mobile platforms. Zoosk is a social network, as opposed to the “bulletin board” format of competing dating services such as Match.com or eHarmony. Because it is a social network, Zoosk feels more natural for singles and has less stigma attached to it.
In 2009, the company benefited from $30 million of Series D funding from investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Canaan Partners and ATA Ventures. By 2011, Zoosk was making $90 million in annual sales.
In addition to running Zoosk, Zadeh is an advisor and angel investor for other start-up companies.<ref name="ANG" /><ref name="CB" />

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