Community Letter 04.2022

Dear friends and family,

We are getting to the end of Ramadhan. This month was full of Iftar gatherings and provided the opportunity to meet everyone and enforce meaningful relationships for me. These "networking" events got me to rethink the meaning of professional networking events.

While everyone says it is essential to meet and greet people for your career, I think the usual chit-chat is not nearly enough to make real social capital. Instead, what social capital means meaningful friendship.

We all knew how to make friends when we were kids: We used to introduce the real us to the other kid and curiously asked interesting questions (not just to entertain the other party but also to understand her truly). The bigger we get, the more we forget all those skills. We are constantly replacing them with the "networking skills" we find over the internet. That's what I have been practicing during the Iftar events: making meaningful relationships through curiosity without strategizing about how that relationship serves me!

MAX Holding 's and Post Bank 's Iftars were amazing. I learned many things from great entrepreneurs, investors, businessmen, and women. The more I talked to the experts, the more I found out how important it is for large-sized startups in Iran to partner with industry-leading organizations and cooperate with the local authorities to provide insight for their regulatory justifications. In both events, we invited top-notch people from both sides.

Big news! The largest startup festival in Iran, INOTEX 2022 is around the corner. Get ready for the Stage to see more than 100 talks, panels, and debates. If you come by, I will be there curating the Sateg from 10 to 13th of May.

We also organized an amazing TEDxTehranLive last week. It was a delight to see all the TEDx'ers and watch excellent TED2022 talks with them.

In Worthy Ideas, we published our second book. Following his insightful TEDxTehran talk , Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, an Iranian scholar of Islamic studies and a former diplomat, wrote The Astronomical Costs of Unfriedship.

The Russia-Ukraine war showed us that what we think is impossible in the 21 century is, unfortunately, still possible. This book strongly argues that it's not late to discuss friendship. Get a hard copy of the book here .

On another note, parts of my conversation with Ali Mohammad Zadeh (ICT ethnographer) have been published in his book: 8 years of Information Technology and Communications in Iran. How about taking a few minutes, reading the interview, and letting me know your thoughts in the comment section?

Thank you so much for reading. You can always reach out to me to explore potential collaboration possibilities.

My best,

Reza