Allvoices bills itself as "the first open media site where anyone can report from anywhere," but two things that really set it apart are its geolocated citizen media posts from any device, and the zeal of its founder, Silicon Valley veteran Amra Tareen. Learn how her journey from computer scientist to venture capitalist to stereotyped Muslim woman to startup CEO has shaped allvoices. She describes her own citizen reporting efforts in Pakistan's tribal areas. She also addresses the challenge of community-building and how participants can share in allvoices' revenue. She addresses concerns that whether Allvoices' pervasive geolocated content could put some citizen journalists at risk, and comments on the "shocking" decline of the presence of women in the venture capital community.
Amra Tareen grew up in Pakistan and Australia. After the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, she joined Relief International as a volunteer and traveled to her native home to help women with children receive micro-credits in order to get their life back in order. Tareen was inspired by the people she met, and felt that these were the individuals who needed to have a voice in the world and a place to share their experiences. Tareen also experienced the isolation of being a Muslim in America after 9/11, when only small extremist groups were representing the Middle East. After these experiences, Tareen felt it was finally time to create a place where anyone can tell the truth about the world around them. With this notion, Tareen started Allvoices, providing individuals from all over the world a platform for community discussion on any issue of interest and importance.
Prior to Allvoices, Tareen was a partner at Sevin Rosen Funds, with a focus on investment opportunities in communications infrastructure and next generation carriers. Prior to Sevin Rosen, Tareen was a product marketing director at Ascend Communications. There, she was instrumental in growing the DSL business and was also responsible for product positioning, competitive analysis and outbound marketing for the remote access business. Tareen also worked as the product manager for Ascend's SS7 gateway, and before Ascend, she worked at Lucent Technologies in sales and business development positions. Amra was responsible for selling Lucent VoIP and data solutions to carrier customers. Tareen began her career in telecom working as an engineer and a C programmer for Telstra Australia.
Tareen received her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from University of New South Wales, Australia and an MBA from Harvard. She is married and is a mother of two young boys.
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