Hit by Covid in New York: Pulsd CEO Mareza Larizadeh (Part 1)

Covid has come as a nightmare for many entrepreneurs. Here’s a story of one in New York, coping with the perfect storm of being in the epicenter of the pandemic and in the hospitality business, the worst hit sector of the economy.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start from the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born? What kind of background did you have?

Mareza Larizadeh: I was born in Tehran, Iran. My parents are Iranian. We moved to London, England and I grew up in England. I moved to America for school. I moved in the late 90’s and I’ve been living here ever since. 

Sramana Mitra: You did your college in England?

Mareza Larizadeh: I came to America and went to Stanford. 

Sramana Mitra: What did you do in Stanford? Was it business school or graduate school? 

Mareza Larizadeh: No. I got a degree in engineering and I got my MBA there as well. 

Sramana Mitra: What year did you finish your Stanford MBA?

Mareza Larizadeh: 2006.

Sramana Mitra: What happened next?

Mareza Larizadeh: I started a venture-backed company. We were based in Silicon Valley. We had an office in New York. At the peak of it, we had about 50 people.

Sramana Mitra:  That’s not the way to do an entrepreneur journey story. Is that your first venture? You’re going to have to tell me the story of how you built that venture in a much more granular way. 

Mareza Larizadeh:  My friend and I found ourselves sharing jobs between friends. We started a website to help connect job seekers to people recruiting managers.

We had a hypothesis back in 2006 when we started this that if we invited our friends and we made it an invite only, we could make the recruiting experience for principal recruiters a lot better. The theory is that our networks would be similar and they would have similar friends in their network. Unqualified people would not apply for these jobs.

Very quickly this theory proved correct because what ended up happening was we got a lot of people from the leading schools and liberal arts colleges in the US and their alumni and finance firms. These were the harder to come by finance jobs and we were mediating the finance recruiting market. That’s the genesis of that product. 

Sramana Mitra: How much of that did you have in place when you went to raise venture capital?

Mareza Larizadeh: We had initially raised the seed round and at the time we had built a product. My partner was Russian, but he lived in the US. We offshored the prototype and we had a few thousand users and a few companies recruiting on the platform.

By the time we raised our venture round, it was definitely 60,000 to 70,000 high-quality users and a hundred companies recruiting on the platform. 

Sramana Mitra: What was the size of your seed round?

Mareza Larizadeh: It was about $1 million. 

Sramana Mitra: From?

Mareza Larizadeh: That was mostly from Andy Rachleff from Benchmark Capital, Mark Leslie who was the founder of Veritas, and other big names from Silicon Valley. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Hit by Covid in New York: Pulsd CEO Mareza Larizadeh
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