A Determined Woman’s Story of Overcoming Obstacles and Making an Impact

Susan Akbarpour, co-founder & president of Mavatar, a consumer-driven shopping platform, represents a story of professional success radiating with (sometimes unbelievable) personal strength. 

A Stanford grad, she created Mavatar to, in her words, “empower consumers to receive the information and support needed to narrow their purchase decisions with ease, saving them time and money. It allows consumers, influencers and retailers to accurately aggregate and optimize data and create shoppable content.” And even after three other successful entrepreneurial ventures, she is not done yet, concentrating energy on making sure that Mavatar — which already sports a memorable motto: “Your life is sweeter when you feel smarter” —  plays a role in shaping the future of e-commerce.

This cutting-edge endeavor has its roots in an archetypal tale of journeying to America and overcoming obstacles: Susan was born in Iran, lost her mother in a car accident when she was thirteen, her father to cancer when she was twenty, and was left on her own to care for two younger brothers and manage the family business.

She was lucky that, as she notes, her parents had instilled good core values, especially emphasizing bravery, and had also believed in the independence of women. “They also taught me there can be no gain without risk, and that I must constantly grow and learn in order to be the force they both thought I could become,” said Susan.

Breaking a Journalistic Barrier – But Not Without Consequences

Despite the emotional disruption during her college career, with her father’s death and managing the family business, she graduated  from Ferdowsit University of Mashhad on time with a Bachelor of Arts and was nominated to receive a scholarship for “higher education abroad.”

Susan notes, “I needed every bit of that strength when I became a journalist at the largest daily newspaper in (Mashhad), the second largest in the nation. Forced to wear a veil and hidden away in a curtained-off office, I was determined to prove my worth and earn my place among my peers. I set out to transform that environment with my endless energy and became a top producer, turning out more newsworthy articles than anyone, continuing to challenge the old rules and prejudices. In just nine months, I broke the “glass ceiling” and was accepted to the editorial board to manage over twenty writers, correspondents and employees.”

After her newfound success and impact on journalism, The International Journalism Festival selected her as the “interviewer of the year” out of over 12,000 journalists. Soon after, she was banned from writing and had no choice but to leave her homeland with $2,000 in her pocket.

“To this day, I am honored to know that my legacy lives on. I still hear from young women working there, whom I never met but who call me their role model. This experience taught me that you can change the toughest environment, and win real victories against institutionalized bigotry and closed-mindedness if only you can leverage your focus, energy and enthusiasm to find a way to your will,” explains Susan. 

An Immigrant Becomes an Innovator

After arriving in the U.S. in 1997, and settling in the balmy – and tech-oriented – city of San José in California’s Bay Area, Susan got to work and created three ventures that embodied self-made entrepreneurial success.

First, she started a monthly news platform called Iran Today with a total investment of $700, and grew it until it was bringing in $85,000 by the end of the first year. Secondly, she learned how to write a formal business plan, took courses in desktop publishing, design and communications, and convinced investors – to the tune of $250,000 — that there was a need for a magazine called Silicon Iran for the high-tech community in Iran.

Once launched – successfully – she built a database of over 10,000 industry veterans, expanded the venture to be an all-inclusive networking event that would include the U.S. tech community, changed the venture’s name to Teksia, and started the International Technology Forum (ITF) to connect the U.S. to emerging tech markets, particularly in Asia.

She was not done yet: moving her base of operations to Menlo Park, she created Linkore, a management consulting firm to train professionals in the nuts-and-bolts of tech entrepreneurship, including raising capital, creating IT infrastructure and marketing strategy. (Read here for an article from 2004 about Linkore and her other endeavors.)

She succinctly sums up the success of all of these companies with a classic American-flavored observation: “I did not have a ton of money to throw at my enterprises, but I found, to my satisfaction, that hard work and ingenuity would suffice when cash was in short supply.”

A Genius Idea is Born after Buying Jeans

Despite her many business successes, in 2009 she decided she wanted to make an impact on society as a whole, not just in the corporate sector, and, with the support of her mentor at that time, Stanford professor William Miller, the CEO of SRI International, enrolled in the Stanford Graduate School of Business at the age of forty to mull over ideas for a new endeavor.  Little did she know that the inventive  concept she was seeking would arise after a self-observation regarding her collegiate fashion sense.

As Susan explains it, as a vivid, aha-moment recollection: “When I entered Stanford in 2009, it didn’t take me long to notice that no matter how hard I tried, I showed up to my classes overdressed. So I went online and purchased seven pairs of jeans in one sitting. To my surprise, after this “drastic” shopping behavior, my browser was flooded with banners imploring me to buy more jeans…promotions were chasing me everywhere, online and offline! It was a constant, unbearable reminder, screaming at me, ‘You bought seven pairs of jeans in one sitting!’ ” This jean-buying nightmare caused her to realize that, as she phrases it, “recommendation engines, and targeting/re-targeting technologies are flawed by pouring too much information onto their consumers.”

She explains further that the experience stuck with her so much that during a Stanford course taught by Amazon’s former Chief Scientist, she suddenly realized the antidote to the automated insistence of the jean-marketing frenzy: “I asked myself — what if [the buyer] were in charge of her data and rewarded for sharing it? Why are all the tools and technologies making retailers smarter about consumers, but there is nothing to process information for consumers to make better and more-informed buying decisions? If you make the customer feel unable to process enough information, they drop the ball!  They not only don’t buy, but also ignore your constant flood of communications.”  And so the idea of Mavatar was born, to provide “a new, consumer-centric e-commerce and shoppable content platform” (or, as Mavatar’s website itself puts it simply: “One shopping cart, all over the web, and your devices”).

She quickly consulted with a Stanford PhD student, Panagiotis Papadimitriou, who had done massive research on new advertising models and user privacy, and condensed her observations above. Ten minutes after receiving her initial email, he sent her a message back; an hour later she was in his office at Stanford Infolabs, “sketching the idea on a white board for the next five hours.”  He became her first partner, and seven months later, in January 2011, she hired a second person, Dr. Brom Mahbod, also a Ph.D in computer science, and formally founded the venture known as Mavatar.

The company has attracted the admiration – and investment funds — of no less than Chris Kelly, former Chief Privacy Officer at Facebook, who notes, “What I see in the company more than anything else is the possibility of empowering consumers.”  And Bill Fernandez, Apple’s very first employee, now a designer of interfaces, came up with the observation that Mavatar is “the Amazon of name-brand retailers.” Those retailers now include Neiman Marcus, Macy’s, Saks, the Gap, and Sephora, among many others.  

Lesson: Skills Learned Early Can be Invaluable

Despite these heady elements to Mavatar’s success, Susan notes that as with the jeans-buying scenario, the thing you might consider least likely to have anything to do with a twenty-first century venture was in fact key – and has come in handy in the tech world.

With her background of coming from the Middle East, Susan says that negotiation and competiveness are second nature to her; she recalls going to the shopping bazaar with her late mother and becoming “bored to tears with watching her negotiate to the last penny.”  But she says, “I knew she was not doing it out of need. She had to win that game! As I grew older, I started appreciating and then imitating her. “Mavatar” stands for “My Super Powerful Avatar” to win the biggest game ever: online shopping — where the data for smart shopping is abundant, but hard to make sense out of!”

About the purpose of this “facilitate-the-shopping-experience” invention, she notes, “Mavatar is the first viable, omni-channel and cross-device ecosystem for all three constituencies of the product: consumers, influencers, and retailers. Its savvy ecosystem empowers eight million American millennials who today spend $600 billion annually, will be spending 1.4 trillion per year and responsible for 30% of all retails sales by 2020 — changing all of our assumptions about shopping behavior and the “Push” model in advertising [as exemplified by the jean-buying experience].  Millennials tend to be driven more by product and better prices than loyalty to any particular brands. They take pride in…making independent shopping decisions.”

She says that she is especially gratified to have proven one of her professors, Stanford Sloan Distinguished Teaching Award recipient Jeffrey Moore – who went on to become one of Mavatar’s first investors – wrong when she chose “an unrealistically challenging” topic for a business paper (according to him), and told him then that he would  “be proud of her one day.”  Moore’s investment, in addition to that of Facebook’s Chris Kelly, Triton Systems CEO Ross Haghighat, and Dr. Afshin Graveli and his wife Anousheh, succeeded in adding $1 million in seed funding for Mavatar’s early stages. Other investors along the way included the former CFO of eBay, Steve Westly, and Jillian Manus and Mike Walsh, venture capital partners who also provided original funds to Uber.

Entrepreneurship and Adaptation

It may be clear at this point that Susan, more than many, seems uniquely qualified to offer insights about the entrepreneurial life.

She muses about several aspects thus: “You have to meet with at least a hundred  investors to find the one who appreciates your idea and business.  If you have created enough value, smart people are willing to chime in and partner with you! ” She says further that “success is all about the team sharing the same dream, values, pace, stage of life and work ethics,” and praises the idea of  the “open-office” set-up, which Mavatar adopted after a few year to improve its “feedback-oriented culture”: “Today, we are all sitting in an open space, facing each other to make our brainstorming easier and more efficient.  An intern can sit a couple of feet away from the CEO or me and can interrupt us with any questions.”

Still ensconced in the Bay Area, Susan’ s success as an entrepreneur embodies the timeless immigrant tale of resilience, vitality, the virtue of being able to adapt, and “embracing the new” – with, of course, a modern-day digital twist.  And her newest dream for Mavatar envisions taking it from its present-day, headache-free retail experience to a global, streamlined model for web use: “We can clearly see [in the future] one smart Mavatar cart carried by any shopper in this world, where a Chinese blogger can get paid for promoting a U.S. retailer’s product to be sold to a Russian consumer.”   So get ready, everyone…