Bobby Yazdani
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Babak "Bobby" Yazdani (born 1963) is an
Iranian-American Iranian-Americans, also known as Persian-Americans, are United States citizens or nationals who are of Iranian ancestry, or who hold Iranian citizenship. Most Iranian-Americans arrived in the United States after 1979, as a result of the Irani ...
entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones. An entreprene ...
and investor specializing in early-stage, private U.S.-based modern enterprise technology companies. In 1997, he founded Saba Software, a provider of
Human Capital Management Human resource management (HRM) is the strategic and coherent approach to the effective and efficient management of people in a company or organization such that they help their business gain a competitive advantage. It is designed to maximize em ...
(HCM) software solutions. He took the company public in 2000. Yazdani founded Signatures Capital in 2006 and co-founded investment firm Cota Capital in 2014, where he serves as a Partner. Yazdani was ranked #1 out of 2000
angel investor An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital to a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertible de ...
s in a 2014 report by CB Insights as having the most successful track record for investing in companies that received follow-on funding. Yazdani began investing in 1989 and is an early investor in companies such as
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
,
Dropbox Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and Client (computing), client software. Dropbox w ...
, Klout, Salesforce and Uber.


Early life and education

Yazdani was born in Tehran to a middle-class family. He left Iran in 1980 for the United Kingdom, where he completed his high-school education. Yazdani moved to the United States at age 19 and graduated with a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, University of California at Berkeley.


Career


Oracle

From 1988 to 1997, Yazdani held various senior management positions at Oracle Corporation.


Saba Software

Yazdani founded Saba Software in 1997 and took the company public in 2000. He was identified as an industry pioneer in creating the Human Capital Management category. Under his leadership, Saba acquired THINQ Learning Solutions in May 2005, Centra Software in 2006 and Pedagogue Solutions and Comartis in June 2011. Yazdani stepped down as CEO in 2013 when Saba was acquired by Vector Capital. The following year, Yazdani agreed to an SEC-negotiated claw back of $2.5 million in bonuses. Yazdani was not charged with any wrongdoing. In February 2020, Saba was acquired by Cornerstone OnDemand for $1.3 billion.


Signatures Capital

In 2006, Yazdani founded Signatures Capital, which serves as his family office and focuses on early stage investments. Yazdani’s first investment was in medical technology company Masimo, for which he provided capital but also wrote software to improve the accuracy of Masimo’s early neonatal pulse oximeters. According to the Huffington Post, Yazdani has invested in more than 100 companies in the technology sector via Signature Capital. Through Signatures Capital investments, Yazdani invested, among others, in Dropbox (service), Dropbox,
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
, Uber, Masimo, Nextbio (acquired by Illumina),SoundHound, Salesforce, Clever Sense (acquired by Google), Greensmith Energy (acquired by Wartsila), Baarzo (acquired by Google), Bina Technologies (acquired by Roche) and Checkr.


Cota Capital

In 2014, Yazdani co-founded Cota Capital, a technology investment firm that partners with technology companies to help them grow and develop "the opportunity for improving lives." Since its inception, the firm has invested in numerous private and public technology companies, including Berkeley Lights, Capella Space, Cloud Lending (acquired by Q2 Holdings), Tubi (acquired by Fox Corporation, FoxCorp), Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll), Mission Bio and Movandi, OpenGov, ParkourSC and Truebill (acquired by Rocket Companies), and Rhombus Systems.


Philanthropy

Bobby Yazdani is a founding member of the Persian Tech Entrepreneurs network and a member of The Reset Foundation. He also underwrote the Signatures Innovation Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, between 2015 and 2019, which supported "data science projects with commercial promise." In 2022, Yazdani and other members of the Iranian-American community established the American Legacy Fund, an endowment program meant to support the development of youth soccer in the United States. He serves on the board of trustees of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and he is a supporter of the Maryam Mirzakhani Endowed Professorship, created in honor of the late Fields medalist.


Cota Impact Fund

The Cota Impact Fund provides grants to a number of philanthropic institutions, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, International Red Cross, the World Central Kitchen and UNICEF.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Yazdani, Bobby Living people American technology chief executives American people of Iranian descent UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni 1963 births Place of birth missing (living people) Businesspeople from San Francisco