| Hooman Radfar | |
| Birth Date: | July 14, 1980 |
| Birth Place: | London, England |
| Occupation: | Entrepreneur |
| Education: | University of Pennsylvania (B.S.E/B.A.) Carnegie Mellon University (M.S.) |
Hooman Radfar (born July 14, 1980, London, England) is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He is co-founder and CEO at Collective, the first online back-office platform designed for freelancers, consultants and other businesses-of-one. He is currently a Venture Partner at Expa, a San Francisco-based start-up venture firm and studio where he was a founding partner. Previously, he was co-founder and CEO of AddThis. AddThis provided the most widely used marketing tools for web site creators. According to web measurement firm ComScore, in 2015 the platform was ranked #1 in AdFocus, reaching over 97% of users in the United States ahead of Google, Yahoo and Facebook.[1] According to TechCrunch, AddThis was purchased by Oracle in 2016 for around $200 million.[2]
At the time of the Iranian Revolution, his family immigrated to England in 1979. Radfar was born in London in 1980. His family later moved to the United States where he was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Radfar graduated from Upper St. Clair High School in 1998. In 2002, he graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in computer science and economics. In 2004, he earned his M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University where he researched social networking, multi-agent systems, and their applications to computational economics.[3]
In 2004, Radfar and Austin Fath founded Clearspring Technologies to create a platform for website developers to grow their traffic and engagement, based on their graduate research in web services and social networking at Carnegie Mellon.[4] Clearspring launched the first content sharing and tracking service designed for web publishers in 2006.[5] The company acquired AddThis in 2008,[6] then XGraph in 2011. Clearspring was rebranded as AddThis in 2012. AddThis was acquired by Oracle in 2016.
In 2014, Radfar moved to San Francisco,[7] joining Expa as an EIR.[8] He became a founding partner at the firm alongside Uber co-founder Garrett Camp and Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai in 2015. He led the investment program at Expa before founding Collective.
Radfar co-founded Collective with Ugur Kaner and Bugra Akcay. The company officially launched September 29, 2020[9] and is funded by General Catalyst Investors, QED Investors, Expa, Gradient Ventures, and Sound Ventures.
Radfar is an investor in 40+ companies including Uber, Sweetgreen, Sleeper, Onfido, Unit, Fabric, SpaceX and more via his investment platform 10e9.