fled Iran during the 1979 revolution has been named one of Fortune magazine’s Top 10 Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs in the United States. Mariam Naficy, 40, is an author, entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer who started several online companies, including the cosmetic company Eve.com and the stationary company Minted.com. She was named this year by Fortune as one of the most powerful women entrepreneurs in America. As part of the award, Naficy was invited to its Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington, D.C. in October, where fellow speakers included President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Warren Buffett. Naficy was interested in business early on, earning her BA in political economy at Williams College in Massachusetts and her MBA at Stanford University in California, while simultaneously publishing a book entitled: The Fast Track: The Insider’s Guide to Winning Jobs in Management Consulting, Investment Banking, & Securities Trading. The book sold 50,000 copies, a huge quantity. In 1998, shortly after graduating, she began Eve.com with a partner, combining her business background with her love of skin and hair care products. At that time, the idea of online cosmetics shopping was a foreign concept, Naficy said. “Trying to bridge the gap between New York and the Bay Area was not easy,” she said. But her efforts paid off. The two started with about $200,000 in seed funding, raised $26 million, reached $10 million in annual sales the first year and sold the company after two years for $100 million in cash as the dot-com bubble was bursting. Naficy was only 29 at the time. She told the San Francisco Chronicle that she started Eve.com partially because she realized how slow the climb up the corporate ladder could be for a woman. “I thought, ‘Why don’t I take my skills to the consumer market, which is totally honest?’ There is no prejudice. It’s a true meritocracy. Your product is either good or it’s not,” Naficy told the Chronicle. After selling Eve.com, Naficy and her husband Michael Mader—the current vice president for marketing at Gap Inc. Direct, the clothing company’s ecommerce division—spent a few months traveling. But when they returned, Naficy was ready to get back to work. “I need a high level of intellectual engagement to be happy,” she said, adding, “I’m always thinking about how I can keep growing and learning and challenging myself.” Sticking with what she knew best, Naficy took a job as vice president and general manager of e-commerce for the Body Shop—one of the largest cosmetic franchise companies in the world. Around the same time, she helped start Movielink.com, which was sold to Blockbuster in 2007. Then in 2008, she founded Minted.com, a high-end, online stationary business whose designs are chosen through competitions. Minted sold items from high-quality wedding invitations and holiday photo cards to personalized stationery and personalized calendars. The company has reportedly been growing at a steady pace despite the state of the current economy. She had a leg up on others who were interested in business and the economy from the start. Her Iranian father was an economist who worked for the United Nations Development Program in Iran. He met her mother, a UC Berkeley graduate from China, when they were going to graduate school at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Naficy was sent to English or American schools in the various countries where they lived: Kuwait, Lebanon, Tanzania, Egypt and finally Iran. As Iran grew unstable at the end of the 1970s, Naficy’s mother took her two daughters to Chevy Chase, Maryland. Naficy was just nine at the time. Each of them brought with them only one suitcase. After the three fled, Naficy’s grandfather, who had stayed in Iran, was arrested and thrown in jail. Her father had also stayed behind, hoping the crisis was temporary. When he realized the revolution was not temporary, he left the country with much trouble. “We spent about a year not knowing when we would see him again,” she recalled. When the family finally reconnected in the United States, Naficy’s father became an American citizen and began doing contract work for the US International Development Agency. The family moved to Cairo when she was 11, then back to the United States permanently when she was 14. She told the Chronicle that moving from country to country and then finally settling in the United States as a teenager was hard, but she wasn’t about to let other people define her. “I had a hard time fitting in at school and I decided I had to not let other people define me. I had to figure out how to cope on my own. From growing up overseas, I had this outsider’s perspective. And what happened to my parents created a sense of me having to take responsibility. It affected me deeply,” she said. Naficy and her husband now live in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow neighborhood with their two children, six-year-old Alex and 3- 1/2-year old Sabine. Once in New York, Saeidi- Azcuy enrolled in the New York Film Academy while simultaneously working there and at the Ridley Scott Film Production House. After getting her filmmaking certificate, she decided to try something new. “I was making $90 a day at the time, working 13 plus hours a day,” Saeidi- Azcuy told the Iran Times. “So I decided to go to law school.” Saeidi-Azcuy, known on “The Apprentice” for her strong personality, credited her time at Brooklyn Law School for her confident demeanor. “I went to law school, it gave me a lot of confidence,” she said. Saeidi-Azcuy, now 29, wasn’t the only one who noticed her own confident and tough personality. In one of the very first episodes this season, host Donald Trump‘s daughter Ivanka said, “Mahsa, you‘re a very strong person and you have very, very strong opinions.…” But Trump initially attributed her strong personality to her role as a prosecutor, defending her and saying she was “tough.” According to Saeidi-Azcuy, however, it was that tough, confident personality that caused some of the girls on the show to see her as a threat. “A lot of people on the show are manipulative and strategic and act in a way so that nobody tries to go after you. If you don’t seem like a threat, people will think, ‘She’ll be easily killed off’ and they won’t go after you. But after the first boardroom, there was a big X on my back. Some of my teammates were against me; that wasn’t easy,” she said. When asked if the woman portrayed on the show was the real Saeidi-Azcuy, she said, “Absolutely. I stayed true to who I was and I don’t regret any of it. The only thing I will say is that sometimes the blond girls would snicker at me, but they wouldn’t show what the girls would say. They would show my reactions without showing their instigations. But that’s me. I’m fabulous and I have a better future than all of them,” she said, adding that last week she was a legal commentator on Fox News discussing a murder dubbed the Honeymoon Killer case. As for regrets, she told the Iran Times that, if given another chance, she would have stayed strong and not broken down during her last boardroom session in the seventh week. “I would have never mentally broken down,” she said, “but I just wanted it to stop. During the episode I was fired, we were in the board room for four hours with Trump verbally attacking me. I was pointed at and lashed out at and I was told that I was a horrible prosecutor. But you know, I was a strong character and it was like they were trying to ‘slay the dragon.’ I was like, please, just fire me. Get me out of here!” Despite how things ended, Saeidi-Azcuy said she didn’t regret being on the show because it has been a longtime dream of hers. “I had never tried out for a reality show before trying out for ‘The Apprentice.’ It was a dream of mine to be on ‘The Apprentice.’ I just really saw myself kicking butt. I used to have a lot of respect for Donald Trump.” When asked who she thought deserved to win from both the men‘s and the women‘s team, she said, “Actually, this might sound surprising, but Liza. Despite everything I said [on the show], she has always been one of my favorites. I love her and we’re still friends. From the men’s team, I’d say Stewart. They’re the most honest, respectful people left. I think they have the most integrity.” Saeidi-Azcuy resigned her job as an assistant prosecutor in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office after her bosses found out she had taken a two-month leave of absence to compete on “The Apprentice.” Now, having been fired from the show, Saeidi- Azcuy is debating her next move. “I’ve been wanting to be some television personality. I went to law school, it gave me a lot of confidence. I loved being a prosecutor. But a lot of people have contacted me because of my time on ‘The Apprentice’ and now I’m looking to move on to something new,” she said. “I am grateful for the experience, but I chose to stand up for myself and speak out against Mr. Trump and because of that I was punished,” Saeidi-Azcuy said. ping there. He’s currently working on a range of inventions—from a portable device that can detect heart failure from a person‘s breath, and a gizmo that can assist in more accurate placement of stents in coronary arteries, to an implantable monitor for a heart patient’s blood flow once they leave the hospital, remotely monitoring the patient’s heart. He is also working on devices to transmit energy through the skin without wires to power implantable medical devices and as a non-invasive method to fight infections caused by stents, pacemakers, other implantable devices. Another project Mussivand is working on is a tiny gadget that extracts and analyzes DNA from a single skin cell. The prototype does the job in less than five minutes, but Mussivand hopes his device will accomplish the same job in only 15 seconds. The advancement could help both law enforcement officials involved in crime-scene identification and could also help in the area of biometric security. What makes Mussivand’s success all the more interesting is that he grew up as a shepherd in a poor family in Iran. As a teen, Mussivand tended to his family’s sheep and goat herds in the highlands of Iranian Kurdistan. But his upbringing within a family of little financial means did not stifle his love for learning. He told The Ottawa Citizen he learned to read and write by the light of a kerosene lamp, and that his inquisitive mind and constant questions finally led his father to send him to school. “At night we used to go on the roof of the houses in the summer and stare at the stars. I’d ask, ‘Why is that, why am I here, what’s my purpose?’” Mussivand recalled. “I was bothering my father with these questions, but he didn’t know. Eventually, he got tired of me asking.… He put me in a school…. Only in Canada some shepherd boy like me could come and get this opportunity,” he said from the boardroom near his fifth-floor Heart Institute office, where he typically begins his 18-hour work days around 5 am—all for no salary. “I never give up,” Mussivand said. “The tougher it becomes, the more exciting it becomes to me.” He emigrated to Edmonton, Alberta, in1965, when he was 22 years old. Speaking just two words of English, “yes” and “no,” Mussivand washed dishes part time while studying graduate- level hydrology on a full scholarship at the University of Alberta. After graduating, the newly-minted engineer rose to become a senior executive for an Alberta utility company, and went on to make millions in real estate. But Mussivand’s rags-toriches story didn’t end there. He had to start from nothing again, when he lost his estimated $35- million fortune after interest rates plummeted in the early 1980s. It was then that Mussivand followed his wife, Dixie Lee, into medicine, ending up at the Cleveland Clinic Hospital and Research Foundation in Ohio. Realizing his love for both engineering and medicine, Mussivand began looking into a revolutionary new concept for an artificial heart; one that was fully implantable in the thoracic cavity, remotely powered, remotely monitored, with no wires or tubes. In 1989, Mussivand left the United States and returned to Canada after he was contacted by heart institute founder Wilbert Keon. It was at the heart institute where his HeartSaver invention spawned the World Heart Corp., in which Mussivand held senior positions. But the company eventually relocated to the United States in 2004 when it failed to attract enough investors. In addition to the aforementioned devices Mussivand is working on, he told The Ottawa Citizen he is also working on an idea for a “wearable thermal therapy device.” He came up with the concept in 2002, when he was relaxing in a hot spring in Japan where he teaches part of each year. “When you come out, you are really relaxed. I asked myself, ‘How come I’m so relaxed?’ There is a chemical in the body called nitric oxide, a vassal dilator, it opens the vessels, so the more blood goes to my brain cells, I’m happier.” A related phenomenon, called heat shock protein, can prevent some types of cell death. Mussivand and his team believe that their $500 to $1,000 thermal device, which would look like a simple T-shirt or vest, could transfer heat and raise the body’s core temperature between one to three degrees—potentially reversing some of the physiological issues associated with heart failure. Mussivand received his undergraduate education in engineering and management at Tehran University and his doctorate in medical engineering and medical sciences at the University of Akron and Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine.
