Pirouz Nilforoush

Hello world! I am proud to say that I have finally setup my own personal blog and scratched off a big one from my ever growing “to do” list. My name is Pirouz Nilforoush, the Co-Founder and President of NetShelter Technology Media and here’s my story…

My Story

My passion for creating community websites and blogs goes back to over 10 years ago when I started my first website out of my parent’s basement in Toronto, Canada. I was a teenager spending most of my free time experimenting with different things online and it just so happened that my favorite TV show at the time was Comedy Central’s hit show South Park! As a fan of the show it became increasingly frustrating for me when time and time again I found myself not being able to keep up with Comedy Central’s schedule for new episodes. That’s when me and a couple of my friends, whom I had gotten to know through my interactions online got together and launched a website dedicated to making all episodes of the show available to users worldwide and SPDownloads.com was born! Over the next year or so the site grew very quickly and was reaching well over 4 million unique visitors on a monthly basis. A site that I had built to solve for a specific problem was now reaching millions of users online and as a result it started gaining the attention of other media portals and destination websites.

At the time I was having a very tough time monetizing this large audience that SPDownloads was attracting — you have to remember that this was back in 1999 where online advertising as an industry was very much in its infancy stage and smaller publishers had very few options to monetize their content. I was struggling every single month just to pay off the high web hosting costs of my website - it was not cheap to run a site that made large video files available for users across the globe to download for free! Fortunately this was also a time where large corporations were extremely excited about the potential of online advertising and were experimenting with this new advertising medium by spending millions of dollars with top online media outlets. One of these companies was UGO.com which was way ahead of the curve with the destination website model of aggregating original content and at the time had more advertisers knocking on their door than they could handle. Not being able to fulfill the demand they were seeing from advertisers on their own website representatives from UGO approached me with the idea of placing advertisements on SPDownloads.com and sharing the advertising revenues with me. Given the fact that I had no other way of monetizing the site at the time and was barely able to keep up with the ever growing web hosting costs I could not be happier with this offer and was able to build a steady revenue source to support SPDownloads through this partnership over the course of the next few months. In my interactions with other independent publishers I was hearing from them over and over again that they too were struggling to monetize their content and even the largest independent publishers didn’t know how they could get any attention from advertisers that would be of interest to reach their audiences. This led me to come up with the idea to create an entity that would bring together the web’s most credible independent publishers and give them access to the same level of resources and tools that large media companies had become accustomed to. I approached my brother Peyman with the idea and in December of 1999 NetShelter was born.

Over the course of the next few years we made many mistakes, accomplished more than we could have ever imagined and in the process gained a lot of experience as first time entrepreneurs. In December of 2008 we raised over 11 million dollars and closed our first round of capital from our good friends at Rho Canada, JLA Ventures, and GrowthWorks Capital. Since then we have established our headquarters in San Francisco and have grown to become the largest technology media company in the world reaching over 120 million users worldwide!

I now spend most of my time in between San Francisco and Toronto and am excited more than ever for our next stage of growth!