Press Materials

Chuck Taylor, Chief Executive Officer

Chuck joined Doostang from Affinity Circles, where he was responsible for all marketing and business development activities, including setting market strategy, overseeing strategic partnerships, and running brand, field, product and channel marketing efforts. Taylor has experience developing innovative consumer and enterprise web services and has been frequently quoted in articles about recruiting in a web 2.0 world. Prior to joining Affinity Circles, he was director of product marketing for Yahoo!, where he had product P&L responsibility for HotJobs, a $100+ million Yahoo! property serving the online recruitment advertising market. He also worked as a product manager for Progressive Insurance, where he ran a national marine insurance business with over $7 billion in assets insured. As a consultant for Bain & Company, he advised Fortune 100 business leaders on a host of strategic issues, and as an operations manager for Procter & Gamble, he boosted manufacturing capacity and return on capital assets within the company's consumer paper products division. Taylor earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Engineering degrees in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University, and his Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School. He resides in the San Francisco bay area.

Mareza Larizadeh, Founder

Mareza founded Doostang while completing his MBA at Stanford University. Previously, he was a Vice President at Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) ePlanet Ventures. During his tenure, the fund invested in Skype (eBay) and Baidu, and he personally sourced and led its investments in End2End Mobile (MACH), Ember Corporation and Groxis. Mareza started his career at Merrill Lynch as a trader in the bank’s Global Credit Derivatives Group. He is a graduate of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and School of Engineering.