Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee (Part 1)

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Aydin Mirzaee is the co-CEO and co-founder of Fluidware (formerly Chide.it), an Internet software company which offers feedback solutions in the form of FluidSurveys and ReviewRoom. Prior to co-founding Fluidware he was the CEO of bOK Systems Corp, and he also has experience working R&D at Nortel. He is a graduate of the University of Ottawa.

Sramana: Aydin, let’s start by reviewing your personal background. What prepared you for your journey as an entrepreneur?

Aydin Mirzaee: I grew up in New York City. When I was 12 years old, I had an interest in entrepreneurship. I started shoveling snow for people and that interest morphed into something more serious when my brother and I got introduced to the web. We started building websites at a young age. We then got into the web hosting business a bit as well. As we went to college, we knew we wanted to build a company of our own, and we wanted it to be a big company.

Sramana: What year was it when you started building websites for people?

Aydin Mirzaee: That would have been around 1998 and 1999. It was in the early days of the Internet. It was not as early as Amazon.com. I got my first email account in 1997. There were a lot of organizations that wanted websites and there were a lot of tech entrepreneurs who were celebrated in the media as heroes. We looked at all of that, and it really cultivated our interest in entrepreneurship.

The very first time we did a web building project, we were still pretty young. My brother did the coding and while I dabbled in that as well, I thought that we could probably sell that service. I remember going from room to room in Yahoo chats with a generic copy and paste message offering to build websites really cheap. After an hour of doing that we got a lead. Somebody asked for my phone number, and when I saw that I got pretty excited. I was worried that she was going to think that I was too young so I tried to make my voice sound deeper so I could pass off as a university student. It worked out and we built our first website for $200.

Afterwards I went to my mom and told her that we got paid to build a website for someone in Illinois. She then referred us to other people. It was really cool to do that. You can work for people you have never met and provide them value they are willing to pay for.

Sramana: Where did you go to college?

Aydin Mirzaee: I went to college at the University of Ottawa. I basically skipped two years of high school and went directly to college. I did a year of school at a school in New York before my parents moved. I ended up in Ottawa, Canada, and did the remaining three years of school here in Ottawa.

Sramana: Are you still based in Ottawa?

Aydin Mirzaee: Yes. My parents moved back to New York, but the company got established here. I travel back to visit quite a bit.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee
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