Ahsha Safai

"Iranian Americans have excelled in business, engineering and academia for decades," says Ahsha Safai between gulps of bottled water at a Mission District restaurant. "But there was always an aversion to politics. Unfortunately, it was ignored at our peril. When the Patriot Act, 'special registrations' and student-visa restrictions were legislated after 9/11, we didn't have a voice. It was a wakeup call."

Iranian Americans were wide awake by the time Safai put some in a room with Gavin Newsom in 2003. He organized the meeting as deputy director of field operations for Newsom's first mayoral campaign. "We had a good turnout of 150 and Gavin continues to meet with our community at least once a year," he says. "More and more of us are becoming politically active." He notes that Bay Area Iranian Americans have hosted fundraisers for Hillary Clinton, whom he met while working for a year in the Clinton White House.

Newsom and the Clintons are not the only political heavyweights on his resume. His Marin County wedding last summer to Boalt Hall law student Yadira Taylor -- they live in the Excelsior district -- was attended by his mentors at Northeastern, MIT and the White House: Michael Dukakis, the former Massachusetts governor, and Loretta Avent, President Clinton's deputy assistant of intergovernmental affairs. Safai, 34, has in turn mentored several Iranian Americans in the three San Francisco mayor's office positions he's held.

Safai laughs when he calls himself a Texan Iranian, but it's true. His mother, Marsha McDonald, met Ahsha's father, Ata Safai, when they were college students in Texas, then moved with him to Tehran. They raised Ahsha there until he was 5, when his mother moved him to the safety of Cambridge, Mass., during the chaos of the shah's overthrow in 1979. His father still lives in Iran. "I went back two years ago to visit him," Safai says. "My old house was replaced by apartments, but it's still the big city I remembered."

Since arriving in San Francisco straight out of MIT, Safai has worked for Mayors Willie Brown and Newsom on a variety of projects: opening a teen center at the Sunnydale housing projects, pushing immigrant rights legislation through the Board of Supervisors, overseeing grants to revitalize the Fillmore district, and now hiring young, low-income city residents to clean up litter and graffiti in the city's busiest commercial corridors as a community programs liaison. None of it is glamorous work, but he says it's gratifying because the problems are readily fixable -- unlike, for example, U.S.-Iran relations.

"Americans have a distorted image of Iran," he says. "They know about the hostage crisis and Islamic fundamentalism, but do they know that Persia was the first country to codify human rights or that it has the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel? They think of Iranians as terrorists, but none of the 9/11 terrorists were from Iran and there were candlelight vigils in Tehran the night after 9/11. As an Iranian American, I've had to live with the two governments being at odds since I can remember.""San Francisco Chronicle"

Fred Nazem is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist.
In the late 1970s he founded Nazem and Company, which has managed seven private venture capital funds and a joint venture, the Transatlantic Venture Fund in partnership with Banque National de Paris. Over the past four decades he has started, financed or guided more than three hundred cutting edge enterprises that have defined new fields in high technology and healthcare. Some of these companies have become multi-billion dollar enterprises. The most recent venture Mr. Nazem has founded is Flagship Global Healthcare, where he is Chairman and CEO. Flagship is a membership-based healthcare delivery system that provides its members with priority access to renowned physician specialists globally.

Mr. Nazem is also known for his work as a turnaround specialist. As Chairman of Oxford Health Plans, he led the reorganization and successful turnaround of the company when it experienced operational and financial difficulties in 1997. Oxford was sold to United Health Group in 2004 for $5 billion. Mr. Nazem also led the turnaround of one of ’s most prominent family fortunes, taking it from near bankruptcy to being highly ranked on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest people in the world. He has been managing private wealth for three decades and currently is the Managing Partner of Hedgeworth Capital, a private hedge fund he founded in 2003.

Noosheen Hashemi

Noosheen Hashemi is a philanthropist with a passion for entrepreneurship and economic development. Since 2003, she has led her family’s charitable giving through The H.A.N.D. Foundation which has committed significant resources to research and capacity building. She is co-founder and the Chairman of PARSA Community Foundation.

Between 1985 and 1995, she worked at Oracle where she took active part in software’s meteoric rise as an industry. She was appointed Director of Finance and Administration in 1988 and named VP in 1990. In 1991, she won Oracle's "Against All Odds Award" for her role in the company's financial turnaround. After becoming a Stanford Sloan Fellow in 1993, she became VP of Marketing and Business Development for Oracle’s Worldwide Education business. In 1996, Ms. Hashemi joined Quote.com, a profitable finance portal, where she was VP of Sales and Marketing.

Antonio Esfandiari

Antonio Esfandiari was born on December 8, 1978 in Iran and moved to San Francisco in 1988, where he still lives. He's the youngest player to win a televised World Poker Tour event, and also the youngest poker player to win a million dollar prize in a tournament. Before becoming a professional poker player, he was a professional magician.

Antonio Esfandiari's Poker Nickname:
“The Magician”

Elie Tahari

Elie Tahari is a designer of woman's clothing. He has evolved a $500 million business, with a presence on five continents, in more than 600 US stores and in five free-standing boutiques.

Tahari grew up in an Israeli orphanage and immigrated to the United States in the 1970s with little money. After his arrival in New York, he was desperate for work and went from showroom to showroom in looking for employment. Things turned around for him when he learned about retail. His position selling clothing from a boutique was an introduction to his first love – designing women’s fashion. Tahari’s determination to learn and his auspicious attraction to New York’s famed club scene, inspired the designs that propelled him into the ‘who’s who’ of fashion.

Elie Tahari survived the ‘70s and stayed focused on fashion. His designs were so well received, he was one of the first fashion designers who opened a boutique on Madison Avenue in 1974.

Parlaying his keen ability to predict what a woman wants from fashion before she even knows it, he turned his attentions in the 80’s to the tailored suit — a design effort that redefined a decade. Today, Elie Tahari continues to empower women with designs inspired by his belief that smart women can look sexy.

Even with these accomplishments, Elie Tahari felt something was missing. Just after he blew out the candles on his 46th birthday he met his wife. In his own words, “Rory is my greatest love, and therefore, my greatest inspiration.” In a truly collaborative effort, this unique husband-wife team has tripled the size of the company in the last five years, injecting the brand with new meaning and vigor with the launch of the Elie Tahari Collection.

Women have been drawn to Elie Tahari designs for over three decades, and this devoted following continues to revel in the feminine embellishments, sensual fabrics, and subtle textures that have come to define the Elie Tahari collection.

In the United States, Tahari has boutiques in New York, Boston, East Hampton, Atlanta, and Las Vegas. In the 2007 movie Enchanted, two characters are shown shopping at Tahari's New York City store.

New York fashion mogul Elie Tahari, is one of the many very successful individuals in the world hailing from an Iranian Jewish heritage. Even though he was born in Israel and came to New York 35 years ago without a penny to his name, Tahari now 55, commands a $500-million sportswear empire. In a recent interview with the online fashion magazine, Portfolio.com he revealed the reasoning behind his family leaving Iran in the 1950's after the late Shah of Iran was temporarily deposed.

Mohsen Moazami

Vice President, Internet Business Solutions Group
Cisco Systems, Inc.

Jimmy Delshad

Jamshid "Jimmy" Delshad is an Iranian-American politician from the state of California. On March 21, 2007 he was elected as Mayor of Beverly Hills, California [1]. Upon election, Delshad became the first Iranian-American to ever hold public office in Beverly Hills and the first person born in a Muslim country to hold major political position in the United States. He is an alumnus of California State University, Northridge.