Bio
Born: 1963, Tehran, Iran
Residence: Atherton, California, United States
Organization founded: PARSA Community Foundation
Education: Stanford Graduate School of Business, San Jose State University
Omid R. Kordestani is an Iranian-American businessman and founder of the PARSA Community Foundation.
Mr. Kordestani has been the Executive Chairman of Twitter since October 2015. A few years ago, he was Senior Vice President, the Chief Business Officer, and a special advisor to the CEO and founders at Google from 2014 to October 2015. In addition, to all these top positions, Omar was also a Non-executive Director at Vodafone from March 2014 to October 2014. In May 1999, he was a Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations till April 2009.
Early life
Born in Tehran, Iran, Omar Kordestani grew up attending a Catholic school where the main emphasis was on education and language skills. When he turned 14, young Omid moved to San Jose, California after the tragic death of his father.
Career
Omar Kodestani has more than a dozen years of high-technology consumer and enterprise experience whilst attending San Jose State University including key positions at Internet Pioneer Netscape Communications. During his years at the communications agency, he became the vice president of Business Development and Sales and contributed immensely towards the development and expansion of Netscape’s website revenue from an annual income rate of $88 million to a staggering $200 million just within 18 months.
Mr. Kodestani started his career at Netscape as the director of OEM Sales, and just after four years, he was promoted and was responsible for establishing major customer relationships with Citibank, Intel, Amazon, Intuit, Travelocity, @Home, eBay, and Excite. Above all, Omar still held positions in marketing, product management and business development st the 3DO Company, Hewlett-Packard and Go Corporation. In May 1999, he joined Google and he controlled the development and implementation of the company’s initial business model.
Mr. Kodestani was also the Senior vice president of worldwide sales and field operations until he left Google in April 2009. His work was highly appreciated by Google as he played a huge role in their worldwide revenue generation efforts as well as their daily operations.
In June 2014, Mr. Kordestani returned to Google with the sole aim to fill the vacancy of Chief Business at Google after Nikesh Arora, who ironically replaced Omar when he left Google back in April 2009.
Later in October 2015, Kordestani left Google again and became Executive Chairman at Twitter.
