Shaygan Kheradpir

Shaygan Kheradpir was born in London and grew up in Iran where his father was one of the pioneers of Otolaryngology in the country. After attending Aiglon College for high school, Kheradpir moved to the United States, earning a bachelor's, master's and doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University where he developed one of the early control algorithms for obstacle avoidance of autonomous robots.

Early work

Kheradpir's first job was at GTE Laboratories in 1987. There he worked on network routing, management, and control and patented a real-time algorithm. He eventually became chief information officer at GTE Corporation, "earning respect for delivering new products on schedule," according to The Wall Street Journal.

Verizon

In 2000, GTE merged with Bell Atlantic to form Verizon Communications. Kheradpir initially served as the president of Verizon's e-business division, before becoming the company's first CIO/CTO. At Verizon, Kheradpir contributed to the company's diversification into a broader range of telecommunications products & services, as well as the automation of operations.

In 2001, Kheradpir formed small teams that were each responsible for coming up with and developing new products. Kheradpir implemented a 30-day prototype cycle to rapidly test and modify new technologies in development. His team of approximately 10,000 staff often worked late hours, but positions at Verizon were in high demand, because of the department's rapid pace. According to InfoWorld, he led technology development for strategic initiatives such as FiOS (United States' largest fiber to the premises initiative at the time), process and systems transformation, and many new customer-facing products." In 2003 his team created iobi, which manages address books, caller ID and other features across devices over the internet. The Verizon One, a combination phone, router, modem and smart portable device, was developed from his department the following year. In 2010 they unveiled live TV on the first generation iPad streamed via FiOS TV as a cloud service. In the process he generated a number of product patents for internet-based multi-media communication services. His division also reengineered many of Verizon's core network system, including call center, website, automated customer service systems, and integrated formerly separate systems from predecessor companies GTE, Bell Atlantic and NYNEX.

During Kheradpir's tenure at Verizon, the company reduced its information technology budget from six percent of revenue (the industry average) to four percent. From 2000 to 2003, he reduced IT staff by 20 percent and reduced purchasing from technology vendors by 30 percent. He negotiated aggressively with vendors to reduce prices and lobbied Verizon to eliminate its policy against purchasing IT equipment being auctioned on eBay by failed dot-com businesses. He globalized many contract programming positions through creation of Verizon's own software development group in India called VDSI which grew to a multi-thousand force. Additionally, new software was installed that improved Verizon's utilization of IT hardware.