Soraya Darabi is Founder & General Partner of TMV, an early-stage venture firm that invests in “purposeful startups reimagining the future,” including design-driven technologies and companies thinking about the future of work. In this episode, MBO Partners talks to Soraya about her life as an investor in this space but also about her own journey as a female founder, a number of times over, and what she sees as the trends worth watching in independent work and beyond.

Soraya talks about her experience being a female founder (her first company Foodspotting was sold to Open Table and later Priceline) and how she saw a need for a playbook to level the playing field for “non-obvious entrepreneurs” like herself and why she founded TMV to help fill that gap.  

She also talks about her prescient 2007 comment that “social media founder and their platforms will be more powerful than the President of the United States” and how that insight sprang from her early experience partnering with social media companies on behalf of traditional media industries. She goes on to talk about how corporate players and startups can partner to disrupt the status quo and closes by discussing the critical role and power of platforms, content, and community in creating transformative change for the 1099 workforce and how to design an inclusive, hopeful future of work in a world increasingly impacted by AI.  

About This Episode’s Guest

Soraya Darabi is Founder & General Partner of TMV, an early-stage venture firm that invests in “purposeful startups reimagining the future.” Soraya began her career as the first manager of digital partnerships and social media at The New York Times, where she positioned the global news leader on social networks such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, partnered with startups large and small, and established award-winning campaigns. She went on to co-found the application Foodspotting, named by Apple and Wired Magazine as an “App of the Year,” later acquired by OpenTable, then Priceline. She is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and is the host of Business Schooled - a Podcast by Synchrony, for which she travels the United States interviewing persevering founders who have made it past their startup days.  

About MBO Partners®

MBO Partners is a deep jobs platform that connects and enables independent professionals and microbusiness owners to do business safely and effectively with enterprise organizations. Its unmatched experience and industry leadership enable it to operate on the forefront of the independent economy and consistently advance the next way of working.  For more information, visit​ mbopartners.com.

Episode hosted by Aassia Haq; produced, edited, and engineered by Leslie Jennings Rowley. With music by Brian Burrows

MBO Partners © 2021