Buddy-movie Tech Entrepreneurs
After a decade laboring for others in Silicon Valley, two Berkeley Engineering alumni — Farshad Ghaffari at left and Sid Yenamandra — friends since college, started their own company.
CLIENT
Berkeley Engineering — School of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley
ASSIGNMENT
Wrote and photographed article for Berkeley Engineering, the school’s e-newsletter.
“The reason we are where we are now is because it’s ‘two for the journey’ as opposed to just one,”
says Yenamandra, 37, who along with Ghaffari, 38, co-founded Entreda in 2011. Their company offers a cloud-based package of IT applications, including data backup, wifi, networking, storage and cybersecurity.
Fittingly, in their office overlooking downtown San Mateo, California, these computing comrades sit at twin desks. They say that this year, their 15-employee company is on track to break even for the first time, with a sales pipeline in the $5 to $10 million range.
Right now, they are bubbling with excitement about the prospects for Unify, an integrated IT software suite they designed for small businesses.
Their product has been gaining traction with registered investment advisors, who nationally manage more than $2 trillion in assets. Unify aims to do for financial services firms what credit card fraud-detection systems do for companies like Visa and Mastercard.