Five Questions with Jaxtr Co-Founder Touraj Parang

"Five Questions" is a regular feature of DubaiBeat.com. Successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists tell us about their experiences and stories in a Middle East context.

Touraj Parang is the Co-Founder & COO of Jaxtr. He has been involved with over 50 Silicon Valley companies since 1999. His experience includes making early stage investments in Internet and communications start-ups with Amidzad Ventures and Earlybird Venture Capital, a global VC firm. Touraj holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and majored in Philosophy and Economics at Stanford University. He talks to us about Jaxtr.

DubaiBeat.com: What is your elevator pitch? Can you tell us about your product in a couple of sentences?

Touraj Parang: Jaxtr brings voice to social networks and blogs. Use jaxtr to link your phones with your online network to receive the calls, voice messages and texts you want while keeping your phone number private.

DB: Specifically, how a user in the Middle East can benefit from your service?

TP: Signing up for our service is free and simple. Once a person signs up, they get a jaxtr link (such as mine: http://www.jaxtr.com/touraj ). Anyone in the world can then click on that link and call the person for free. People everywhere can sign up for jaxtr and make and receive free calls.

DB: What is your current and expected growth rate in the Middle East countries?

TP: We have just launched our service, but have been quite encouraged by the tremendous support we have received from users throughout Middle East.

DB: What sort of arrangements would you be most interested to have with Middle East companies? Resellers, Sales Affiliates, Marketing Partners, ...?

TP: We are open to working with any company that shares in our belief in open and free worldwide communications. In particular, social networking and blog platforms would work very well with our service, as it has been the case with MySpace, Orkut, Blogger, Freewebs and many many others for our users so far.

DB: Our last question is usually an unusual question: How many days and hours have you worked last week?

TP: I love my work, so I work pretty much every waking hour.