Fortune Archives: Iran’s heartbreakingly brief startup spring

Vivienne Walt’s 2016 examination of Iran’s “startup spring” reads like a dispatch from another Tehran. It was a city, then, where founders in sunny lofts built pitch decks with ideas like “Trello meets Slack on steroids,” rather than sheltering from U.S. and Israeli missiles.

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A window had opened the previous year following Iran’s nuclear deal with the U.S., Europe, and the United Nations, which partially lifted the economy-crippling international sanctions on the nation, and reconnected it to the global economy. “If someone wants to invest in Iran, this is the right time to do it,”  Saïd Rahmani, CEO of Sarava, Iran’s first technology investment company, told Walt.

Walt described sipping “iced lattés in Tehran’s hip Sam Cafe, with the sounds of Frank Sinatra playing in the background.” She reported that “executives from Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere have jammed Tehran’s hotels, which report being booked solid for weeks.” Foreign investors dropped into accelerators to hear pitches from techy young Iranians who had grown up isolated but fluent in VPNs, Apple products, and Silicon Valley culture. Local stand-ins for Western platforms—Digikala for Amazon, Café Bazaar for Google Play, Aparat for YouTube—had turned sanctions into a kind of DIY advantage.

But even in that optimistic moment, the fragility of Iran’s tech scene was evident. U.S. primary voters in 2016 were already hearing promises to “rip up” the nuclear deal, and foreign investors were frank about the risks of a sector scrambling to make up for lost time and still facing major obstacles.

Then, in 2018, the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear deal and reimposed sweeping sanctions, cutting Iran off again from global finance and scaring off the investors Walt wrote about two years earlier. Within the country, dissatisfaction with the strict religious leadership and ever-expanding security state grew, culminating in a brutal crackdown on protests and dissent and the deaths of thousands earlier this year.

​Today, amid the U.S. and Israeli bombardment of Iran, a Tehran that once dared to imagine itself as a Silicon Valley-in-the-making has become once again a city under siege. Rereading Walt’s Fortune feature, it’s impossible not to grieve the future that those hopeful young founders never got to build.

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