Nazem started his technical career in the VLCBX Division at Rolm Corporation, This effort of the early 1990s was meant to bring information and entertainment to consumers’ homes by providing the software platforms for Video Serving and other services to Telcos. By the time Nazem left Oracle, the company had grown from 350 to around 35,000 employees. When Nazem was recruited by
Yahoo! in 1996, the company was less than a year old and had yet to go public. At the time,
Lycos,
Infoseek and
Excite were considered established and more popular internet search engines while Yahoo! was better described as an internet directory. Nazem was brought to Yahoo! to build the engineering organization, take over site operation, and complete the executive team in preparation for the company's public debut. Under Nazem, Yahoo! became an internet giant. Nazem led several initiatives that helped Yahoo! grow rapidly and distinguish itself from competitors including a very scalable infrastructure composed of farms of small generic servers with a free operating system (FreeBSD). The cost effectiveness and the scalability translated to a more reliable user experience while having the highest profit margins in the industry. In 1997, Yahoo! entered the crowded email market and quickly added hundreds of millions of users, becoming the most popular mail server. Additionally, through all the innovations, Yahoo! became a web portal and originator of the personalized web experience, My Yahoo. Throughout Yahoo!’s surge, Nazem spearheaded over 50 company acquisitions, which helped in building out the different services offered by Yahoo!. Almost all of the acquisitions were technology companies and he was in charge of the integration of the people and the services. Because of its dedication to innovation and Nazem’s strong and effective leadership, Yahoo! was one of three companies (the other two being
eBay and
Amazon.com) that survived the
internet bubble burst of 2000 and 2001. Collectively these companies were dubbed the “3 horsemen of the Internet.” Particularly significant, Nazem was the only remaining executive from the first phase who remained through the burst and into the second phase of Yahoo!’s growth. As such, he provided stability and continuity and set the groundwork for continual innovation. On May 30, 2007, at age 45, he announced that he would retire and leave Yahoo! in June of that year. After he left Yahoo! the company named
Terry Semel as the CEO days later, due to disgruntled investors. ==Post-Yahoo!==