Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer
CEO at AirPR
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.
Who is your hero? (In business, life, or both.)
I’d say my “everyday heroine” is my Chief Strategy Officer Rebekah because she provides much of the connective tissue among our team. She’s a huge part of our company’s culture. Lofty heroes like Warren Buffett and Peter Drucker are great but there’s usually someone around us that deserves an accolade, so cheers to my team for being a crew of discreet superheroes.
What’s the single best piece of business advice (unorthodox tips welcome!) that helped shape who you are as an entrepreneur today, and why?
Follow your passion, not the money train. If you’re not passionate about what you do, it will be nearly impossible to be successful. Passion can help you become the very best at something. And if you are the very best at that one thing, you will make money doing it.
What’s the biggest mistake you ever made in your business, and what did you learn from it that others can learn from too?
Building the type of product that does everything, but not one thing particularly well. Before we got to where we are today, we built a marketplace that connected startups with different options for PR representation. It did everything from creating contracts to allowing users to rate different vendors. Later on, we discovered that there was a greater need for further development of our PR analytics tool, so we shifted focus away from the marketplace. When we focused tightly on what our core constituency needed, we got much more traction than when we tried to do a lot of different things under one umbrella brand.