Bobby Yazdani
Babak "Bobby" Yazdani (born 1963) is an Iranian-American entrepreneur and investor specializing in early-stage, private U.S.-based modern enterprise technology companies. In 1997, he founded Saba Software, a provider of Human Capital Management (HCM) software solutions. He took the company public in 2000. Yazdani founded Signatures Capital in 2006 and co-founded investment firm Cota Capital in 2014, where he serves as a Partner. Yazdani was ranked #1 out of 2000 angel investors in a 2014 report by CB Insights as having the most successful track record for investing in companies that received follow-on funding. Yazdani began investing in 1989 and is an early investor in companies such as Google, Dropbox, Klout, Salesforce and Uber. Yazdani was born in Tehran to a middle-class family. He left Iran in 1980 for the United Kingdom, where he completed his high-school education. Yazdani moved to the United States at age 19 and graduated with a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley. From 1988 to 1997, Yazdani held various senior management positions at Oracle Corporation. Yazdani founded Saba Software in 1997 and took the company public in 2000. He was identified as an industry pioneer in creating the Human Capital Management category. Under his leadership, Saba acquired THINQ Learning Solutions in May 2005, Centra Software in 2006 and Pedagogue Solutions and Comartis in June 2011. Yazdani stepped down as CEO in 2013 when Saba was acquired by Vector Capital. The following year, Yazdani agreed to an SEC-negotiated claw back of 1.3 billion. In 2006, Yazdani founded Signatures Capital, which serves as his family office and focuses on early stage investments. Yazdani’s first investment was in medical technology company Masimo, for which he provided capital but also wrote software to improve the accuracy of Masimo’s early neonatal pulse oximeters.