Tech Evolution with Sanjay Parekh

<p>If your business ideas have ever been more of an airball than a total slam dunk, take heart: you are not alone. Sanjay Parekh is known for being ahead of the game as an entrepreneur, but even he’s had off-days. Take Pizza Impulse, his idea for pizza delivery that relied on random demand, random supply, and push messaging. His sales total on that project was a whopping two pizza pies. “There have been stinkers like that over time, but with the stinkers, you learn a lot,” he laughs. </p><p>Of course, you don’t know Sanjay because he’s a failed pizza emperor: you know him as the head of <a href="https://www.miragedata.com/" target="_blank">Mirage Data</a>, a start-up that protects your data without sacrificing usability, as well as a founder of <a href="https://www.togetherletters.com/" target="_blank">TogetherLetters</a>. In his past, he co-founded Digital Envoy and Prototype Prime, and ran events like 2015’s Startup Riot. He’s <i>also</i> a host of <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-talk-yall/id1208148970" target="_blank">Tech Talk Y’All</a>, a biweekly comedy tech podcast. Is there anything this guy can’t do? (Besides running a pizza company...but we’ll forgive him for that.)</p><p>Like many entrepreneurs, Sanjay got his start in middle school. He was a candy-bar broker: buying piles of the sweet stuff and then selling to his peers. “If you ask a room of 100 entrepreneurs, more than 50 of them will say they did something like that.” He turned his early earnings into comic books, some of which he still has today.</p><p>In 1999, after graduating from Georgia Tech, Sanjay had an idea that would “make the internet better.” He noticed that the FedEx and IKEA websites were still relying on customers to select their countries before they could begin shopping, but suspected there was a tech workout-around that would smooth out that step. At work the next day, his colleague told him, “It’s either impossible to do, or somebody’s already done it,” but nope: Sanjay found that it <i>was</i> possible and he