By River Brandon

Pedraum Pardehpoosh, 33, lives in Palo Alto, California and has been married for ten years to his high-school sweetheart, Ariane. They have two children, four-year-old Luc, and one-year-old Sophie.

Give me a little background about yourself.

My father was born in Ashkabad, the capitol of Turkmenistan, which at the time was part of Russia but is an independent republic now. His family moved to Iran when my father was three. It was on the border between Turkmenistan and Iran that the family last name was changed from Ismaylov to Pardehpoosh. The latter means "one who draws veils" if you're poetic and "curtain wearer" to everyone else.

My parents met in Iran and were married there too. They moved to California in the '60s to pursue the American dream; my dad was working for an American company that sent him over here. They settled in the Bay Area.

I was born in 1971 at the UCSF medical center. My parents were living in Alameda at the time (a former Navy town whose most recent claim to fame is serving as home for the filming of the last two Matrix sequels). We moved to Walnut Creek (a suburb of a suburb) when I was three years old. We moved to Ghana, in west Africa, for two years where I was referred to as "ivory cocoa." What can I say, I tan easily. We came back to Walnut Creek and I finished Las Lomas High School in 1989.

I went to the University of California at Davis for my undergraduate work. I entered with a major in genetics, but soon changed it to human/child development, as I wanted to be a pediatrician. The medical schools didn't want that as much. I applied to about 20 medical schools and didn't get into a single one. At the same time I was managing a computer lab on campus and was responsible for putting one of the first databases online. Mind you, in those days, one had to carry Mosaic around on a floppy disk, because none of the computers were loaded with a Web browser. It was during this time that I became infected with the innovation bug.

I married my childhood crush, Ariane Bertrand, and we moved to Boston to attend graduate school at Boston University. I was at the School of Public Health and I got my master's degree in statistical computing—it's not as bad as it sounds.

You lived in Ghana during your youth. How did that affect your perspective on the world, and on what you decided to pursue in school, as well as professionally?

It sounds cliché but I didn't see color when I was a kid. My friends in Ghana were black—I learned this later on and from pictures of the time. The experience helped me internalize the concept of skin color as pigmentation, not much more. It makes the inequity between the races that much more difficult to swallow knowing that the truth is we're more alike than we are different from one another. I wouldn't say that my Africa experience affected my educational or professional choices. I chalk those up more to entropy than to anything else.

You work at Apple Computer—what do you do there?

I work in the engineering organization for the worldwide online Apple store and I manage an emerging area called Community. Without being too specific—it's Apple, after all—I can say that I'm interested in ways our users can help others make better buying decisions, and how those decisions can lead to ultimately more happiness with the online Apple store experience. One example you can see on the site right now, which falls under the rubric of Community, is the Ratings and Reviews for third-party products. There are lots of other cool projects that I look forward to talking about more soon.