Alumni Hall Of Fame

Shayan Zadeh

Photo of Shayan Zadeh
Graduation Year:
2002

Shayan Zadeh is CEO & Co-Founder of Gear Zero, a stealth tech startup in San Francisco. Shayan started Gear Zero to work on bringing artificial intelligence to the enterprise.

Previously, Shayan co-founded Zoosk, one of the world's largest online dating platforms and a top 10 grossing app in the Apple App Store. Shayan led Zoosk as CEO for 7 years, raising over $60M in venture capital and growing the company to over $200M in annual revenue. Prior to founding Zoosk, Shayan was a program manager and software engineer for Microsoft.

Shayan received a MS in Computer Science from the department and an MBA from University of Washington. While completing his undergraduate degree in computer science at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Shayan met co-founder Alex Mehr. Shayan and Alex initially intended to pursue careers in academia, but ultimately decided to become entrepreneurs while they were roommates at the University of Maryland.

In addition, Shayan is an angel investor and advisor to startup companies including Loup, PaperKarma (acquired by reputation.com), Identified (acquired by Workday) and AppComputing.

Inductees

Photo of Narendra Ahuja

Narendra Ahuja
PhD 1979

Photo of Michael Antonov

Michael Antonov
Bachelor's 2003

Photo of J. Gary Augustson

J. Gary Augustson
Master's 1969

Photo of David Baggett

David Baggett
Bachelor's 1992

Photo of Suman Banerjee

Suman Banerjee
PhD 2003

Photo of Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin
Bachelor's 1993

Photo of Paul Capriolo

Paul Capriolo
Bachelor's 2006

Photo of Anthony Casalena

Anthony Casalena
Bachelor's 2005

Photo of Charles Dyer

Charles Dyer
PhD 1979

Photo of Martin Farach

Martin Farach
PhD 1991

Photo of Gary Flake

Gary Flake
PhD 1993

Photo of Rajiv Gandhi

Rajiv Gandhi
PhD 2003

Photo of Howard Gobioff

Howard Gobioff
Bachelor's 1993

Photo of Naresh Gupta

Naresh Gupta
PhD 1993

Photo of Patrick Jenkins

Patrick Jenkins
Bachelor's 2006

Photo of Vipin Kumar

Vipin Kumar
PhD 1982

Photo of Ronald Larsen

Ronald Larsen
PhD 1981

Photo of Haroon Mokhtarzada

Haroon Mokhtarzada
Bachelor's 2001

Photo of Idris Mokhtarzada

Idris Mokhtarzada
Bachelor's 2010

Photo of Zeki Mokhtarzada

Zeki Mokhtarzada
Bachelor's 2001

Photo of Shmuel Peleg

Shmuel Peleg
PhD 1979

Photo of Andrew Reisse

Andrew Reisse
Bachelor's 2001

Photo of Glenn Ricart

Glenn Ricart
PhD 1980

Photo of Debanjan Saha

Debanjan Saha
PhD 1995

Photo of Pooja Sankar

Pooja Sankar
Master's 2004

Photo of Jagdeep Singh

Jagdeep Singh
Bachelor's 1987

Photo of Aya Soffer

Aya Soffer
PhD 1995

Photo of Lee Spector

Lee Spector
PhD 1992

Photo of Granger Sutton

Granger Sutton
PhD 1992

Photo of Qiang Yang

Qiang Yang
PhD 1989

Photo of Shayan Zadeh

Shayan Zadeh
Master's 2002