Darian Shirazi jumpstarted his career when he was just 15 years old, reselling computer components on ebay. He did a very impressive job in terms of sales that ebay eventually offered him an internship for the next two summers. From then on, he was able to build some strong connections in Silicon Valley and got hired as Facebook's first intern, back when the social media site had only 12 employees. Yahoo reports that he worked directly under CEO Mark Zuckerberg for almost two years before pulling himself out to go to college.
His time at Facebook helped him earn more money than most people of the same age group could ever imagine and he did not stop there. He launched a startup called Fwix, a local news collector that crawled the web for news or related content. It became a tool for media companies to use to generate leads.
The company did well and Google offered to acquire it for a sum of $35 million. Most 24-year olds would have taken the money but Shirazi did otherwise because he saw the bigger picture.
"I felt as though if [Fwix] was good enough for Google, it's probably good enough to build something independent," Shirazi told Business Insider. "Of course, I was afraid [to decline the offer] but it was worth the risk. The juice was worth the squeeze."
After turning down Google, Shirazi revolved his company and began targeting all kinds of businesses instead of just media companies. He eventually turned it into a predictive marketing software called Radius, which looks at millions of data signals to identify potential customers. It then helps run marketing campaigns that acquire these customers and analyze performance. Three years since its revolution, Radius has become one of the most popular marketing software companies preferred by top Valley investors. On Wednesday, it announce a $50 million round led from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, with Jerry Yang's AME Cloud Ventures, Formation 8 and Salesforce Ventures.
"We want to become the de facto marketing platform for CMOs," Shirazi said. "I want to build a company that's going to be here forever."
