Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal, and I'm here today in another special edition of the A6 and Z podcast. We have two special guests, including one internationally dialing in from Iran, Mosin Malayari, who is a co-founder of a very prominent startup accelerator in Iran called Avetek. We're here also with Christopher Schroeder, who wrote a really

interesting book last year called Startup Rising and has been documenting and facilitating the

phenomenon that's happening right now in the Middle East and particularly in Iran, where there's a lot

of interesting startups and a rich ecosystem being built out. Mosa, it's great to be with you. How are you?

I'm doing great. Thanks.

It's a pleasure to be on the podcast. I don't think there are lots of Americans who think

startup accelerator, incubator, and Tehran in the same sentence. So could you just talk a little bit,

really just kind of a Cook's tour from your view of what's been happening over the last couple of years in Tehran as

startups are beginning to rise in such powerful ways there. There has been a huge change in the past couple of years in Iran,

in the startup scene, I should say. We started like two and a half years ago when we organized the first startup, we can't even

in Tehran. The reason we did that was that for doing some research, we came to know that

lots of startups are failing in Iran and there isn't much talk about it because most of them

they don't have a clue of how to build a startup.

So that's how we learned that we maybe need to do start a weekend events and start building

startup communities around it. We so much used the book of Bradfeld, which is called the sort

of communities.

We were reading it almost using it as a Bible on how to build one here in Tehron.

And suddenly it started to flame over the country.

So we started to see a lot of events happening in different cities.

For example, only the last 12 months, we did like 35 sort of weekend events in different cities, for example, only the last 12 month, we did like 35 startup weekend events in different cities.

And it's not just a startup weekend events.

It's like the whole events that encourage the community to get involved and to grow the community.

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