A Facebook Alum Builds an Intelligent Sales Platform Darian Shirazi turned down a $35 million acquisition offer from Google, and leveraged his massive local database to provide real-time information for sales teams targeting the U.S. small-business market.

Most people start their professional lives working fast-food jobs or retail gigs, but Darian Shirazi isn't most people. At age 15 he began purchasing computer components in bulk from Asia and marketing them on eBay, generating such impressive sales that the online auction giant soon offered him an engineering internship. After two summers at eBay, Shirazi began exploring other opportunities, and in 2005 he became the first-ever intern hired at Facebook, then a fledgling startup whose dozen staffers worked close to Shirazi's family home in Palo Alto, Calif.

"They were guys not that much older than me, working on something I thought was cool," Shirazi recalls, admitting, "It wasn't clear to me if it would become anything big or not."

Shirazi exited Facebook after two years--his parents insisted he leave to attend college--but by that time it was clear big things were in store not only for the social network but for him, too. He dropped out of the University of California, Berkeley, within a year, and after traveling the globe returned to Silicon Valley in 2008 to launch San Francisco-based Fwix, a hyperlocal news aggregator that trawled the web to curate a range of business data encompassing everything from license registrations and Yelp reviews to Facebook likes, Twitter posts and Foursquare check-ins.