Iran

“He just went to Iran, ah, after he wrote the book, and he just came back, and it turns out in Tehran, there's a thriving, sort of, underground, high tech startup scene. And there's all these entrepreneurs that want to start all these online businesses”

“So you pay three dollars a month and you have a pretty good access to three G, which I'm always using, you know, it's incredible.”

“There were over 31 government-backed incubators and accelerators with some pretty interesting technology”

“Now pretty much all the universities have that, but by those years, I mean, just one of the universities had the entrepreneurship field for studying for people.”

“It amazes me how across the region and in Iran, maybe even more so, I find more women entrepreneurs than I find in Silicon Valley.”

“So by that time, I promised to myself, I'm not going to get into another business model that involves logistics,”

“Well, I mean, to be honest I can already see, like, we are going to be at a super competitive market, like, that the whole idea, like, I remember from Berlin time, when I was living there are still cafes that we were, like, sitting there, and we just said, don…”

“We started as two people, and now we are basically having more than one million customers, and we are operating in seven cities, and we have grown to 60 people.”

“IPhones are illegal, and there are over six million iPhones there.”

“I mean, and certainly half of the engineering graduates every year are women.”

“Digicolor is basically the biggest online retail in Iran. It's like Amazon of Iran.”

“The mobile penetration of in Iran is more than a 120%. It means that everybody has more than one phone. There are people who have more than one phone.”

“There are, for example, a platform of local display ads network, which is serving more than sixty million banners every day.”

“Every month there is one million smartphones being added to the network of the country.”

“We haven't tried to copy Techstars or Y Combinator company to here, which we believe that doesn't work in, in such markets.”

“The biggest challenge that the entrepreneurs in Iran are faced with is the word belief. I think that's the biggest challenge that they're believing. Nobody is believing them. I mean, the government, sometimes they don't believe in them. The investors, they don…”

“The top websites are now exploring 20% cash on delivery and 80% online payments.”

“For example, only the last 12 months, we did like 35 start-up weekend events in different cities.”

“You guys graduate something like six or 700,000 engineers across the spectrum of engineering every year.”

“There are twenty million plus now subscribers to three G and four G out of a country of eighty million.”

“There is a well-known company, Rocket Internet, which has already started operating in the country. A German company, which is basically cloning the successful models in emerging market, where the ecosystem is not really bright that local entrepreneurs be able…”

“We have started to see some of those successful diaspras started to coming back to the country. Those who have been working in top tech, you know, engineering companies and top startup companies, they now realize that maybe this emerging market is the right th…”

“By the time that the Google play service was opened up in the country, although there was, there hasn't been a lot of advertising around it, which I don't think Google needs, but cafe buzzer has already created some domination in the market. So they are still …”

“Now there is a platform where fifteen million, more than fifteen million users are already using it. And five million people are using it every day, like daily users.”

“Language is absolutely a barrier, but I don't find it as the biggest barrier. I think the biggest barriers is the local challenges that building is a business has in this market from understanding the dynamics of the market, the perspective of the customer, ho…”

“Everyone I've met there of all ages have access to VPN. Every mobile phone I looked at had access to all the same things that we have access to.”

“Iran has an incredibly highly educated population. Of course, it has been cut off in all sorts of ways, and there's also a huge, very successful Iranian diaspora, which I suspect will I know in Silicon Valley they've been dying to contribute back, so Iran is v…”

“When I was in Iran a month ago, all the young people wanted to show me on their smart devices, not only how they were all on our social networks, which allows them to see each other as well as to see other parts of the world, all of them had access to Coursera…”

“I've seen evidence that the malware that the United States is alleged to have used against Iran it looks like, if you look at the code base, it looks like Much of that code was used by the Iranians against the Saudis in attack, in an attack against Saudi Aramc…”

“It turns out there is a small but thriving tech startup ecosystem seen on the ground in Tehran. Very excited, fired up, actually, interestingly, heavily female tech entrepreneurs, starting companies, tech companies in Iran that are doing everything, e-commerce…”

“Russia, China Iran, North Korea, they are building up their electronic warfare capabilities. They are jamming GPS. They are jamming communications, which are traditional assets that we've become so reliant on, our predator drones, our, you know, our smaller ve…”

“The existential threat is not a degree of temperature change in 2100. The existential threat was Iran getting a nuclear weapon, ah, and losing the AI arms race to China. Those are the two top order bits in terms of priorities.”