Mandana Salehi
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Mandana Salehi is an American entrepreneur. Mandana started Ziba Hub in .[1]
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Mandana Salehi, founder of Ziba HubCareer
Early Career
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Ziba Hub
Mandana started Ziba Hub in . They detail the beginnings of their company in their Starter Story interview: [1]
Q: How did you get started on Ziba Hub?
I was born in Iran at the onset of the Islamic revolution in 1979. The first eight years of my life were spent in a turbulent environment as ground war raged between Iran and Iraq. Some of my earliest childhood memories involve standing in line at the market with my mom for rations of milk and retrieving to the fallout shelter below our home during air raids in the dark of night.
My father was a pilot in the Iranian military and often away on assignment in extremely dangerous conditions and my 12-year-old brother was at a pivotal age where boys began pseudo-military training and received plastic ‘keys to heaven’ in preparation for martyrdom. It was around that time that my mother started cosmetology school and opened a private hair salon in my brother’s old bedroom in our condo and began chopping mean mullets and “Oribe '' cuts for the neighborhood women. It would be years later that I would learn that my mom’s motives for learning the trade had little to do with her passion for hair and more to do with her wanting to acquire a universally recognized skill-set in preparation for our immigration journey that would empower her to provide for our family regardless of where we landed.
We arrived in Portland, Oregon in December of 1987, and over the next 3 decades as I finished school and eventually found my way to a career in tech as a sales leader, I watched my mom, a licensed esthetician, struggle with basic career tools like finding a viable space to lease to provide her services or maintaining her clientele after the relocation. It always seemed strange to me that there was no central database where beauty professionals maintained digital profiles and could browse career opportunities like me and my peers did on LinkedIn so in 2019 I decided to create it myself.
The beauty industry is unique in that about half of all beauty professionals are independent contractors, like my mom, renting a space in which they provide services. The other half are either hourly employees or commission employees, which is a whole other anomaly often involving questionable practices. This is why traditional job boards that list only employment opportunities and have filters for minimum desired pay don’t work for someone like my mom who is more interested in knowing how much the rent costs if there are long-term contracts, and what amenities are included in the price of rent. These are all issues we’ve addressed in the Ziba app to make career searches less tedious and more tailored to our users.
The other thing that makes our industry unique, and is a driving factor for me, is that it is staffed by a 90% women workforce and is extremely diverse.
Source [1]
References
Contributors
Contributors to this article:
- Pat Walls, Founder @ Starter Story
- Wiki Updater
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