March 22, 2006

Saeed Amidi
Founding General Partner
Saeed has been a technology investor since 1996 and co-founded Amidzad with Pejman and Rahim in 2000. He is a serial entrepreneur and a seasoned executive with over 23 years of experience in founding, operating, and growing successful companies.
He has been closely involved with more than twenty new emerging growth companies, of which 2 became public companies (PayPal (acquired by eBay) and Preview Systems). His investments include DoveBid, Crosslayer Networks, Paypal, Affinity Engines, Gabbly, Sigma Quest >>> Bio

Rugs to riches
By Matt Marshall
Mercury News

Only in Silicon Valley, perhaps, can Persian rug merchants turn into venture capitalists.

For years, Saeed Amidi and his family have shown off elegant Persian and other Oriental carpets to customers of their store, the Medallion Rug Gallery, on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto.

The upscale area isn't a bad place to run a rug store, given the number of affluent executives and entrepreneurs willing to buy nice carpets for their homes. The store became a base for networking with well-heeled venture capitalists, who whet the appetite of Amidi and his brother to navigate the VC waters themselves.

The Amidis have invested in more than 20 companies since 1998 and are now picking up the pace. In January, Amidi, 46, and his brother bought and transformed a 150,000-square-foot building in Sunnyvale into an incubator for high-tech start-ups called Plug & Play.

"We're very entrepreneurial,'' says Amidi, referring to himself and his brother, Rahim. "We're big risk takers and didn't want to be left out.''

It is all part of the transformation of the Amidi family and their business, the Amidi Group.

Saeed Amidi arrived in the valley in 1979 with the rest of his family after the Iranian revolution. The Iranian government nationalized most of his father's 11 factories, which had employed 7,000 people >>> See

Sent by Sheila K

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