Hip young crowd opens pockets at Parsa Community Foundation's annual gala
By Caroline Zinko (San Francisco Chronicle)
Former Silicon Valley executive Noosheen Hashemi is nothing if not competitive. That's part of the reason she was able to get 580 fellow Iranians to the Westin St. Francis for the second annual Parsa Community Foundation Persian Garden Gala.
Hashemi, a former finance vice president at Oracle Corp., founded the nonprofit, devoted to Persian arts, culture and social entrepreneurship programs, in 2006 to spur philanthropy among her expat countrymen and women.
Attendees who paid $500 a ticket to attend included Bita Daryabari, founder of the Unique Zan Foundation in Menlo Park, who gave $2.5 million to Stanford University for a Persian studies program earlier this year; YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley; Salar Kamangar, vice president for product management at Google; Jeff Mallett, former president and chief operating officer of Yahoo, and his wife, Claire (he is now part owner of Women's Professional Soccer); Farhad Mohit, founder of Bizrate.com; and Farzad Nazem, former chief technology officer at Yahoo and Hashemi's supportive husband, to name a few.