Former ‘Softie in Question: Shayan Zadeh

Former Microsoft role: Program Manager and Software Development Engineer

Current role: Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Zoosk

People eat up the romanticized story that entrepreneurs are just talented folks with a great idea and the rest takes care of itself (we’ve all seen The Social Network, right?). That said, that vast majority of entrepreneurs build a solid foundation of industry knowledge before striking out on their own.

Shayan Zadeh has lived his own fairytale entrepreneur story: from a kid in the Iranian countryside to becoming the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Zoosk, the largest social dating service with over 50 million members worldwide. But it was not a straight shot from tech student to tech stardom.

Shayan shrewdly started his career at Microsoft, where he learned not only how to create a successful company, but how to run that company once he got it off the ground.

Microspotting recently had a date with Shayan to hear about his past relationship with Microsoft and understand why – although they are no longer together - they had such good chemistry.

How did you get the idea to start Zoosk?
I was actually working for a social media market research startup and we created a flirting application as a promotional tool. It turned out that application was a huge success. The demand was amazing. Suddenly, I was in the online dating business and Zoosk was born.

And what made you think that you could take on the big guys like Match.com in what appeared to be a saturated market?
Those other sites were for relatively older people looking for committed relationships. If you did not end up getting married, the experience could be seen as a failure. We were aiming for something lighter. Zoosk is about meeting other people without all of the pressure. It’s about flirting and having fun.

And it worked. We blew by the others and are now the biggest dating site in the world with over 50 million users. Zoosk is in 60 different countries in 25 different languages.

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