Hooman Radfar


Hooman Radfar is an American entrepreneur and investor. He is a partner at Expa, a San Francisco-based start-up studio. Previously he was co-founder and served as CEO of AddThis. AddThis provides the most widely used marketing tools for web site creators. According to web measurement firm ComScore, in 2015 the platform was ranked #1 in AdFocus, reaching over 97% of users in the United States ahead of Google, Yahoo and Facebook. According to TechCrunch, AddThis was purchased by Oracle in 2016 for around $200 million.

Early life and education

At the time of the Iranian Revolution, his family immigrated to England in 1979. Radfar was born in London in 1980. His family later moved to the United States where he was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Radfar graduated from Upper St. Clair High School in 1998. In 2002, he graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in computer science and economics. In 2004, he earned his M.S. in information networking from the Information Networking Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where he researched social networking.

Career

AddThis (Clearspring)

In 2004, Radfar and Austin Fath founded Clearspring Technologies to create developer platforms based on their graduate research in web services and social networking at Carnegie Mellon. Clearspring launched the first content sharing and tracking service for web publishers in 2006. The company acquired AddThis in 2008, then XGraph in 2011, which was rebranded as AddThis in 2012.

Expa

In 2014, Radfar moved to San Francisco, joining Expa as an EIR. He became a partner at the firm alongside Uber co-founder Garrett Camp and Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai in 2015.