Full Name Behnam Behrouzi Name Ben Behrouzi | Home town Danville | |
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Born January 23, 1981 (age 43) ( 1981-01-23 ) Tehran, Iran Occupation Silicon Valley Entrepreneur and Technologist
Founder, President & CEO of DotNext Inc. and Reply.com Education University of California, Davis | ||
Ben Behrouzi (born January 23, 1981 in Tehran, Iran) was raised in California, attending the University of California, Davis.
Contents
- Early life
- Business Ventures
- Accolades
- Controversy
- Articles by Ben Behrouzi
- Television appearances
- References
Early life
Behrouzi was born in Tehran, Iran on January 23, 1981 as a Bahá'í. At age 4½, his family escaped the growing persecution of the Bahá'ís in Iran. With the help of smugglers, his family secretly fled their birth country through the night into Pakistan. His family lived in Lahore, Pakistan for 18 months before moving to Saint Petersburg, Alaska with only $50 to their name. After several months Behrouzi moved to California where he attended the University of California at Davis and studied Philosophy. Behrouzi actively speaks about the history and turmoil of the Baha’i Faith through his blog and articles.
Business Ventures
Behrouzi has founded a number of businesses although currently all companies that he founded are out of business.
Behrouzi founded DotNext and served as the President & CEO. In his late teens Behrouzi founded his first company. His past companies have included Reply.com, iMotors.com, AgentConnect.com, OpenAuto.com, CarClub.com, ePerks, RealtyNow.com, iCastle.com, iHype.com, Brabus Ventures and LeapFish.com.
In 2001 at the age of 20, Behrouzi founded Reply.com (with cofounders John Truchard and Payam Zamani), a performance based marketing company targeting the automotive, real estate, home improvement and lending markets. Behrouzi served as Chief Technology Officer and Chief of Product at Reply.com which achieved several million in funding and over $30 million in annual revenues. During his tenure, the company produced performance based marketing brands including Reply! Real Estate, iMotors.com, AgentConnect.com, OpenAuto.com, CarClub.com, RealtyNow.com, iCastle.com. In February 2010 Reply.com announced the filing of an S1 for a $60 million IPO.
In Q4 of 2006 Behrouzi phased out of his operational duties at Reply.com and in 2007 founded his next business venture DotNext, a privately held performance based marketing company offering search engine marketing, social media branding and search engine optimization services under independent brands including LeapFish and iHype.com. In January 2007 DotNext raised $2 million in financing from Behrouzi who remained Chairman and CEO of the company.
Accolades
Behrouzi has been featured as a “Multi-Million Success Story” by Young Money. He has also made appearances on Fox Business Network, NBC Bay Area and FastCompany.tv. During his period at Reply.com Behrouzi was also recognized in the “Young Millionaires: Class of 2004” by Entrepreneur Magazine.
Controversy
Ben Behrouzi's company LeapFish (which has a telemarketing team consists of 80 sales persons) has had a mixed reception from users of sitepoint forums, from bloggers and other regular web users. LeapFish has been widely criticized on the internet for its questionable business model and the aggressiveness of its sales team which has also been accused of committing click fraud.
Ben Behrouzi's Realty reward program ePerks was widely criticized over a controversial lawsuit which Brabus Ventures filed against minor blogger Vlad Zablotskyy on June 4, 2008 which led to blogger Greg Swann announcing a legal defense fund and a general community led re-branding of the company as eJerks. Brabus Ventures asserted that Zablotskyy had defamed the company by stating that it had falsely accused Zablotskyy of being a child molester on Yahoo! Answers. Although the allegedly defamatory copy does not directly attribute the molestation charges other bloggers have attempted to tie IP addresses associated with Behrouzi Brabus Ventures with the claims.
On June 7, 2008 Trace Richardson published evidence that strongly suggested that Ben Behrouzi's company Brabus Ventures had plagiarized the content of its Company Values and Culture web pages from Chevron.com and Mervyns.com respectively.