With the goal of harnessing the untapped potential of Iranian-Americans, and to build the capacity of the Iranian diaspora in effecting positive change in the U.S. and around the world, the Iranian Americans’ Contributions Project (IACP) has launched a series of interviews that explore the personal and professional backgrounds of prominent Iranian-Americans who have made seminal contributions to their fields of endeavour. We examine lives and journeys that have led to significant achievements in the worlds of science, technology, finance, medicine, law, the arts and numerous other endeavors. Our latest interviewee is Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer.
Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer is the Co-founder and CEO of AirPR, a technology solution to measure the impact of PR. He was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Shasta Ventures focused on consumer internet and the social graph. Prior to joining Shasta, Sharam was a Senior Associate at Sierra Ventures focused on consumer internet, enterprise software (cloud computing / virtualization), and mobile. He served on the Board at Makara (sold to RedHat) and TouchCommerce (sold to Nuance). Sharam began his career as a technologist at Appian, a BPM software startup where he managed the first enterprise-wide tracking system for the Department of Homeland Security. Sharam has lectured at universities, events and conferences, and judged business plan competitions at Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Syracuse. He is also an advisor and mentor to eLab (Princeton University's Accelerator), Dorm Room Fund (First Round Capital's Accelerator), and Acceleprise (Enterprise Technology Accelerator). Sharam graduated with honors with a BS in Computer Science from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He played NCAA D 1 ice hockey and is fluent in Farsi. Follow him on twitter @sharamfm.
Tell our readers where you grew up and walk us through your background. How did your family and surroundings influence you in your formative years?
I grew up in central New York near Syracuse. I’m half Persian and was an only child with a bit of a weight problem. My parents put me in a multitude of sports so I’d gain the social awareness of having siblings and get in better shape. Of the five sports they enrolled me in, I played hockey the most and was recruited to play Division 1 ice hockey at Princeton University. I was a computer science major, and had a few job offers when I graduated. Some were with startups, some with larger companies like the IBMs of the world, and government agencies. I also had a couple offers to play in the NHL.
The interesting thing was that while the job offers from the startups were the lowest paying, I ended up taking one anyways because I was most passionate about being surrounded by really smart people and having a lot of responsibility (welcome to startup life!). I figured I would learn the most there.
In terms of how my family influenced my formative years, much like other foreign-born parents, my mother was hyper-focused on education, athletics and music. She was hyper-focused on me being the best at what I was going to do. If I was going to play hockey, they wanted me to be the very best at hockey. Both my mom and dad drove me to ice hockey practice at 5 a.m. in the morning so I could catch the extra ice sessions, and they even built an ice rink in our backyard so I could get the most experience possible.
My mom is very talkative, gregarious, and a phenomenal negotiator in true Persian style. My dad is shy and quiet, but a brilliant man. He reads entire books every few days and has a thirst for knowledge. As an only child between those two influences, it made me who I am today.
What has been your personal key to success? Who and what were the biggest inspirations for your career?
My parents were big influences on me. My mom is a doctor and my dad is an attorney who quit his job so he could open a series of gas station and convenience stores around central New York, which was his entrepreneurial spirit shining through.
I also had a professor named Ed Zschau at Princeton who inspired a pivotal career moment for me. I took a class of his called high-tech entrepreneurship my senior year despite already having enough credits to graduate. This was when entrepreneurship became a part of my DNA. When it came time to accept an offer post-graduation, I asked my professor if he thought I should accept the startup position and he said it sounded like I already made my choice.
Could you tell our readers what AirPR is?
AirPR is a SaaS company that allows you to measure the real impact of PR for the very first time.
How are you solving PR problems by applying big data?
Let’s look at the recent United Airlines fiasco to illustrate a point. This was clearly a crisis communications moment that required a response from the company’s CEO, but it didn’t go well for a few reasons.
The CEO’s comments in response to the event came off lacking empathy and more concerned for United as a company rather than the well-being of its customers. With a crisis of this magnitude, where millions of people saw and empathized with the affected United customer, it’s not best to stick to the party line and respond with legalese.
Had they looked at the historical data on how other companies have worked through crises successfully, they would have seen that it’s not best to ignore the human element. The right move from a PR data perspective would have been to leverage empathy, admit the mistake, and say that you’re going to do better.
PR data can help drive decisions for how to respond in moments of crisis. And that example just illustrates tone… We do what we do at AirPR to help people realize that PR data can drive other decision making and desired business outcomes too.
What problem is AirPR designed to solve?
Our goal is to make sure companies can deliver the right message to the right person at the right time via the right media channel.
How does AirPR help in tracking competitor PR activity?
Our technology automatically captures all the digital content from earned and owned media about our customers’ competitors. This allows them (our customers) to view how those competitors are being talked about in the media, what they’re publishing in terms of owned media, and how those mentions are affecting their brand. The data can help our customers define their own strategies.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced in your career?
Only six months into my first job at a startup, I found myself pitching nine directors at the Department of Homeland Security. My argument was that there shouldn’t be nine separate tracking systems for their data. Instead, there should be one which could replace all their existing tracking systems, and if they did this it would save them a massive amount of money while streamlining everything.
One of the most prominent directors at the agency stood up and said the plan wouldn’t work. They didn’t want to participate. That moment was career defining for me. There I was, only half a year into my first job out of college, having my pitch shot down by a director from the DHS. I felt like a kid compared to everyone in the room. But I held strong and told each one of them that the thing they’d been using was not the right technological solution and promised we would be done in four months instead of 18.
While I didn’t make a lot of friends through that conversation, we did end up deploying a full enterprise solution to all of their divisions within 3.5 months. It was so successful that the director of the agency that spoke out ultimately decided to use us for additional work. All in all, it was a huge challenge but also a huge win and the reason I was ultimately promoted to a managerial level so early in my career.
What are some of the most pressing PR issues today? What is the future of PR?
The perennial issue in PR is how to tell a better story that’s heard by the right audience. It’s a challenge to figure out how to best disseminate that story so it’s heard by the right ears.
Once you’ve done that, then you have to figure out how to measure and showcase the value driven by that work in a way that your CEO, CMO, or board members appreciate, understand, and respect. The metrics we’ve used in PR historically don’t fit any of those criteria. For example, the old-world PR metric “impressions” has nothing to do with the number of people who actually see and read an article. It has to do with the number of people who visited that publication over the course of a month.
I could write 10 articles for Forbes and report a half a billion impressions (hypothetically) but it wouldn’t tell me if anyone who read my article bought my product or engaged with my brand. This is how PR is dramatically shifting. Gone are the days when you could just show up and get press. Now, the question is whether or not you’re getting the right press on the right media channel focused on the right audience, and if that’s driving business impact. PRTech can help brands tell better stories and report in a way that gives PR a seat at the table.
What is your plan for the future of your company?
Our goal is to grow into a big business, and positively affect the messaging and stories told by companies all over the world.
What advice do you have for a company seeking PR?
Figure out what differentiates you — what does your company do better than anyone else? Once you know, use historical data to figure out how to tell that story in a way that matters to people right now. That could be topical given what’s going on in the news right now.
For early-stage companies, you’ll likely begin by sharing those stories on your owned media channels before moving on to journalists and the other millions of new storytellers that exist today (other brands included).
Think about how to use data to drive business outcomes, repeat the process when you see success, and measure everything in between. If the goal is to drive demand, target publications that help with that. If the goal is to hire a dozen people by end of summer, there are better publications and channels for that too.
Can you share your thoughts on your Iranian-American identity? What does it mean to be an Iranian-American to you?
My Persian mother (and both of my parents for that matter) always had incredibly high expectations for me. If I got an A in class, it was great. They would congratulate me and say, “Hey, let’s celebrate!” But then we’d talk about what I could have done to get that A+.
It sounds intense, but there was an immense amount of love and support always surrounding me. They wanted to help me excel and do better. They also taught me the concept of kindness and hospitality at a very young age. I’m so grateful for this, and I want to raise my kids like this someday too.