This is a Tale of Two Irans | Andreessen Horowitz

This is a Tale of Two Irans

Christopher Schroeder

Posted<br>June 30, 2015

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Editor&rsquo;s Note: This is the first installment in a special series on tech startups in Iran, part of a larger theme around global tech and how software — including mobile — is eating the world … and creating new opportunities within it. This post is from guest contributor Christopher Schroeder (a tech entrepreneur, investor, and executive in Washington, D.C., and the author of Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East) sharing his observations and insights on the ground from recent trips to Iran.

There wasn&rsquo;t much exceptional about my recent lunch out with a couple dozen young, aspiring entrepreneurs. It was a typical, crowded, buzzing, Nandos-like joint — good food cheap, easy to pull tables together so we could talk. These were men and women debating the latest technologies, describing their recent ideas, regularly interchanging their physical engagement with checking their SnapChat, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook apps.

I asked one woman how she best prepares for the rigor of building a company. &ldquo;By doing!&rdquo; she smirks at me. She pauses, and adds, &ldquo;Oh, and I read all the top Silicon Valley blogs and take a few classes from Stanford, Wharton and other colleges around the world for free on Coursera.&rdquo; Several at the lunch put down their forks and show me their smart phones, each open on Wifi to courses like &ldquo;Introduction to Marketing, &ldquo;International Leadership and Organizational Behavior&rdquo; and &ldquo;Better Leader, Richer Life.&rdquo;

One young man describes to me his startup. It is a bit like AirBnB for an adventure traveler though more low-tech, more, say, a tech-enabled travel agency. The new generation, he explains, doesn&rsquo;t just want to &ldquo;see&rdquo; a place, they want to understand how people live, think and engage. He has found countless families recently near the area&rsquo;s beautiful mountain/hiking areas who are happy to open their homes, feed young people, take them to unique cultural sites and gatherings for music and art.

&ldquo;Where are you taking the next cohort of travelers?&rdquo; I asked.

&ldquo;The Kurdish area — it is one of the most beautiful and most interesting parts of our country.&rdquo;

And that was the one exceptional, or at least unexpected, thing about my lunch: just last month I was sitting with young...