Salar Riar is currently a senior at the Academy of Engineering and Technology. Salar has been interested in entrepreneurship from a young age and began his entrepreneurial journey at the age of 12 when he was accepted into the Young Entrepreneurs Academy (YEA!). Through the guidance and support of YEA!, Salar developed his first business startup, Pet Ping. Pet Ping is a GPS enabled tracker to locate pets and monitor their health through analytic assessments. As the youngest student in his class, Salar was the grand prize winner and Saunders Scholarship recipient for Loudoun County's Chamber of Commerce investor panel. As the representative of his county, Salar competed at the national Saunders Scholars competition and was awarded as the top 100 young entrepreneurs in the United States.

 

After the Saunders Scholars, Salar developed Loudoun's Young Entrepreneurs Forum (LYEF) in collaboration with the Chamber of Commerce to continue providing the youth of his community the guidance and assistance to reach the resources they need to move their startups and businesses to the next step. Salar has been invited to present at a number of conferences such as the 1 Million Cups by the Kauffman Foundation, OPEN Washington DC, as well as the Small Business Awards. Salar has been invited to present at the Loudoun School Business Partnership Executive Council and the Business Economic Development Center in order to continue funding for youth entrepreneurship.

 

Through his program YEI (The Young Entrepreneurs Institute), Salar teaches impoverished students internationally about the fundamentals of entrepreneurship in collaboration with a non-profit organization. Salar is an alumni of MIT's LaunchX program for young entrepreneurs; where he worked with fellow young entrepreneurs internationally to develop a business startup through the guidance and mentorship of MIT entrepreneurs and professors. Salar was also accepted into Harvard's Constitutional Law Summer School and Georgetown's Summer Program for law.

 

Salar is always looking for ways he can create a positive impact on the world and give back to the community that gave him so much. In 2020, Salar co-founded a new startup, Create for a Cause.  The first Create for a Cause event, centered around racial equity, was launched in February 2020.