Syed, Dilawar
President, Freshdesk
Dilawar is President at Freshdesk, heading up the cloud-based software company’s North America business overseeing enterprise sales, marketing, customer success and partnerships. Backed by Tiger Global, Accel Partners and Google Capital, Freshdesk has rapidly grown to more than 50,000 customers globally and has raised $94 million in funding.
Prior to joining Freshdesk, Dilawar was C.E.O at Yonja Media Group and launched social and digital brands in the Turkish market. Earlier, Dilawar was head of platform strategy and operations at Yahoo!. In this role, he led strategic planning and operations at Yahoo’s platform division. In parallel to his entrepreneurial track, Dilawar is a leader in civic efforts globally. Dilawar is co-founder of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Victory Fund, a voter mobilization effort targeted at the 18 million-strong Asian American community.
In 2010, President Barack Obama appointed Dilawar to the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) and he led White House's engagement with the AAPI entrepreneurs across the U.S. As President of OPEN Global, an entrepreneurship non-profit with a mission of supporting diaspora entrepreneurs, Dilawar is leading the charge of building a global network of high-impact entrepreneurs. Dilawar holds an M.B.A. from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA from the University of Texas at Austin