aamir virani

About

Present

Aamir wants to liberate data and make it more accessible to everyone both in terms of availability and understanding.

He has worked at two outstanding startups working to achieve this goal in different areas:

Xobni provides person-based context around your communication. When you’re communicating with anybody, Xobni wants to be there, augmenting your knowledge of the person and his/her status, helping to strengthen your ties and interaction opportunities.

PowerReviews brings reviews and the sharing of user knowledge to everyone. Before PowerReviews, only the big guys (Amazon, Best Buy, etc.) had product reviews on their websites. PowerReviews provides a product review engine (and its associated user-generated content) to companies of all sizes, and aggregates the information in one place (buzzillions.com) so that the consumer can make a well-informed decision before spending his/her hard-earned money.

Aamir currently serves as Chair for the SF Bay Area section of the International Professionals’ Network (IPN), a professional networking organization which began in the Ismaili Muslim Community but is now non-denominational. He also likes volunteer opportunities that bring the understanding and excitement of computers, technology, and the Internet to everybody, not just the technology-literate.

Aamir has a loving mom and dad back in Houston as well as an amazing brother and sister currently living in New York. He is single and passes his free time by running half-marathons and playing MarioKart.

Aamir’s main presences online (besides this home page):

Future

Aamir is always interested in talking to people working on new ideas that involve data and signal processing. If you’re trying to disrupt markets, monopolies, and information brokers, I’m listening: resume dot 187 at aamirvirani dot com.

At some point, Aamir would like to run for mayor of Houston. It’s a much cooler city than you think, and the people there are amazing.

Other long-term goals:

• break 100 on an 18-hole golf course of reasonable difficulty
• learn to swim
• step foot on all seven continents (3 down, 4 to go)
• serve as technology advisor in government at the city or national level

Past

Houston -> Austin -> Palo Alto -> San Francisco

Mom, Dad (always) -> Kinder Care -> La Petite Academy -> Webster Primary -> McWhirter Elementary -> Webster Intermediate -> Clear Creek High -> Rice -> UT-Austin -> Stanford -> Life (always)

Aamir Virani was born in Houston, Texas in 1978. He attended public schools during his childhood, which likely explains his odd desire to be both preppy and hip-hop at the same time. Aamir graduated from Clear Creek High School in League City, Texas, in 1997 and then made the long trek to college.

Thirty miles later, he arrived at Rice University, located in the middle of Houston. There, he studied electrical engineering with a focus on signal processing and systems. Aamir graduated in 2001 with a Bachelor’s of Science in Electrical Engineering.

He then made a big leap by moving three hours away to Austin, Texas, and joining National Instruments as a hardware engineer. He worked on digital logic design and played an important role in developing the NI-STC2 by organizing and leading digital and analog simulation testing. After three amazing years in the multifunction I/O group, though, he decided to go back to graduate school.

This time, Aamir actually left Texas and attended Stanford University for two years as a master’s student in Electrical Engineering. He again focused on signal processing, but his interests shifted towards software and computer science, especially in the areas of adaptive processing and machine learning.