She has also been a board member of the Vancouver Economic Commission, and the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs. Separate from her role at BroadbandTV, Rafati is also a board member for a number of organizations including Bjarke Ingels Group, an architecture firm, as well as Vice Chair of the board at Invest in Canada. In October of 2020, Shahrzad also led BBTV through its initial public offering on the TSX, which was one of the Top 10 Tech TSX listings of all time and the largest on the TSX with a sole female founder and CEO at the helm. Rafati founded BroadbandTV in 2005 and has led it since then, garnering a 2013 $36 million investment from RTL Group which was at the time in Canada the largest financial placement in an Internet media company in six years. Shahrzad also received her Honorary Doctorate from University Canada West in 2020.
Rafati also studied French at Université Paris Sorbonne (Paris IV), and is a graduate of the Young Global Leaders Oxford Module: Transformational Leadership at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. In 2005, she completed her BSc in computer science at the University of British Columbia, becoming a member of the Golden Key International Honors Society. Rafati was born 1979 in Tehran, Iran and immigrated to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada as a teenager.
In 2019 she was also appointed as the Vice Chair of Invest in Canada, a federal agency that aims to create jobs in Canada by facilitating foreign business investment by highlighting Canada's diverse and skilled talent pool, economic growth across multiple industries, and geographic advantage as a hub for global trade. She was later appointed as Canada's representative for G20 EMPOWER, a private sector alliance with the goal of advancing women's representation at leadership levels in the private sector. In September 2018, it was announced that Shahrzad was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to represent Canada on the Business Women Leaders task force, which was formed to advise global leaders on issues of women's economic empowerment as part of the G20 Summit. In October of 2020, Rafati also led BBTV to its initial public offering on the Toronto Stock Exchange, which was one of the Top 10 Tech TSX listings of all time and the largest on the TSX with a sole female founder and CEO at the helm. Shahrzad has built BroadbandTV as a quadruple bottom line business and measures success across employee, community, environmental, and financial KPIs, citing a workforce of over 40% female identifying employees and managers with a 0% gender pay gap. Shahrzad is credited with pioneering both the technology and business model that made peace between big entertainment entities like the NBA and their fans who were uploading premium content to video sites like YouTube. Shahrzad Rafati (born in Iran citizen and resident of Canada) is the founder and CEO of BroadbandTV Corp, a digital media and technology company that drives monetization for content creators. ( August 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please help improve it by removing promotional content and inappropriate external links, and by adding encyclopedic content written from a neutral point of view. This article contains content that is written like an advertisement.