So hi everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal and I'm here today with a very special edition of the A6NZ Podcast International. We have two special guests. One of our guests is Nazanin Daneshvir, who runs a web-based startup in Iran called Takfifan. And our other guest is Christopher Schroeder, who wrote a really interesting book

last year called Startup Rising. And he can describe more about his background and she'll describe more

about her background as they talk to each other about what it's like to do startups internationally,

and particularly in Iran. You know, the book Startup Rising is a departure for me because I've

been an internet entrepreneur.

I've run three companies.

I'm a venture capitalist now, mostly American-based, but I've been spending a fair amount of time in emerging growth markets and fundamentally seeing how ubiquitous access to technology is just changing societies everywhere, bottom-up.

And startup rising is about the Arab world of all things.

And I can tell you, most

Americans watching CNN or on Vox or whatever they're using, do not see a hopeful version

of the Middle East. And I think that most Americans think of Iran, they still think Argo. And the fact

is, in many respects, what I've seen in Iran has just been an amazing group of talented young people

with outstanding engineering capability and outstanding access to technology.

We just never hear about it.

We never see it at all.

So the people that are mainly outside of Iran, they really have this feeling, okay, because of all

these sanctions being pushed,

like the Iranian generation, they are really far behind of what's going on in the world,

but the reality is different, and the young generations are like constantly looking at the

West, they're constantly looking at what's happening in America and Europe,

they are trying to adapt themselves.

I'm the founder of Tafmufan.com, which is the biggest and the most popular group buying website of Iran.

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