Mariam Naficy

Mariam Naficy is an American entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of Minted, an online design marketplace that has products in 70 million homes.[1] In 1998, Naficy co-founded Eve.com, the first major online retailer of cosmetics.[2]

Mariam Naficy
NationalityAmerican
OccupationBusinesswoman

Education

Naficy was born to Iranian and Chinese parents who are graduates of Georgetown University and were stationed abroad throughout Africa and the Middle East.

Her parent was a United Nations development economist, and she spent her childhood in six countries, including Egypt, Tanzania, and Iran.[3]

Naficy is a graduate of Williams College.

She also graduated from the Stanford Graduate School of Business around 1998.[4]

Career

Naficy worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs early in her career.

While in business school, Naficy published The Fast Track: The Insider's Guide to Winning Jobs in Management Consulting, Investment Banking, & Securities Trading, which has sold 50,000 copies.[2]

She started Eve.com in 1998, at the age of 28, along with co-founder Varsha Rao. In 2000, Eve.com was sold for a reported $110 million to Idealab, then four months later all employees were fired and operations ceased on October 21, 2000. Subsequently, certain assets including Eve.com's customer list and website name were sold to Sephora.[5][6][7]

Naficy founded Minted.com, an online stationery store, in 2008. The company began by offering familiar retail brands online, with a small section for crowdsourced, competitively chosen designs. The business stalled at first, but the custom designs gradually proved popular,[8][9] and grew to dominate sales. She raised $89 million in venture funding.[8] Raising $208 million in 2018, it was the largest funding transaction that year involving a startup led by a female founder.[10] In 2019, Pitchbook said Minted's valuation was $733 million.[3]

She is on the board of Yelp.[4]

Personal life

Her husband, Michael Mader, also works at Minted.[3] They have two children.[4]

Works
  • The Fast Track: The Insider's Guide to Winning Jobs in Management Consulting, Investment Banking, and Securities Trading, Broadway Books, 1997, ISBN 9780767900409.[11]

References
  1. "Mariam Naficy: The Money Episode". Masters of Scale.
  2. Mcmahon, Regan (November 14, 2010). "Mariam Naficy went from makeup to Minted.com". San Francisco Chronicle.
  3. A Dot-Com Era Survivor Is Back With Minted, A $700M Stationery Startup For The Instagram Generation, Forbes, 2019
  4. Parents, Entrepreneur
  5. "Makeup Web Sites Not Pretty / Eve.com is latest to go out of business".
  6. Miles, Stephanie (November 7, 2000). "Sephora.com Buys Assets Of Defunct E-Tailer Eve.com" – via www.wsj.com.
  7. "In 2000, 28-Year-Old Mariam Naficy Sold Her Startup For $110 Million — Will History Repeat Itself?". Business Insider. Archived from the original on 2013-05-08.
  8. "Mariam Naficy: The Money Episode | Masters of Scale podcast — WaitWhat". WaitWhat. Retrieved 2018-03-19.
  9. This Founder Almost Shut Down Her Design Business After Year 1. Now It Has 400 Employees and a 9-Figure Revenue, Inc.com, 2019
  10. Funding For Female Founders Stalled at 2.2% of VC Dollars in 2018, Fortune, 2019
  11. Earl G. Graves, Ltd. (June 1998). Black Enterprise. Earl G. Graves, Ltd. pp. 1–. ISSN 0006-4165.
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