#151 - Samir Mirza | The Ups & Downs of Entrepreneurship

Samir Mirza is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Fifth Star Funds - a venture philanthropy fund investing in Black tech entrepreneurs at the pre-seed / "Friends & Family" stage in Chicago. He was formerly the Co-Founder and CTO of TapCommerce (acquired by Twitter for $100M).   He began his career in Chicago consulting for Fortune 500 clients while building robust content management applications, APIs, and backend distributed systems. In 2012, he co-founded TapCommerce in New York and created the industry's first mobile ad retargeting solution. As the Chief Technology Officer, he led the engineering team and built a backend platform that processes over 40 billion ad auctions per day with the ability to show ads to over 1 billion mobile users for the world's top mobile brands.    Samir then lived in Berlin, Germany where he served as a coding instructor at the ReDI School for Refugees and worked as a consultant for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) Digital Transformation Team.  Samir has a Computer Science degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business.   To connect with Samir: https://www.fifthstarfunds.com/