Musings from the 2010s
Yesterday I had the chance to attend News Impact Summit at the London School of Economics. The theme this year was Trolls, Corruption, Falsehood: Reporting ‘Truth’ in the Digital Age. It was really a wonderful event, and after attending (too!) many tech events & meetups, it’s also refreshing to attend a slightly different event and to talk about how technology can affect politics or public policy.
Here is a summary of some of the talks I found very interesting.
I watched this great TEDx video a couple of days ago. I’ve always enjoyed James Altucher’s blog but never saw him speak until now. He had such an interesting point during the talk about what he calls “failure pornography”.
Mohsen is a startup enthusiast. He loves community and entrepreneurship. Find out more about his initiatives and what he thinks about the Iran ecosystem.
Before coming to Iran, we weren’t sure of what to expect apart from what we had read online and in the Lonely Planet. Here we have a look at what happens behind closed doors.
Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, millions of Iranians have migrated to other parts of the Middle East, to the US, Europe, and other areas of the world. With the new government in place, people are hopeful and many Iranians feel they want to give back to the new generation — either by mentoring or funding them.
Every year, 5,000 engineers graduate from university, out of which 1000-1500 are of world-class standards. And yet, we were told that there are currently 400,000 unemployed engineers in Iran and underemployment is a rampant problem. Using this “lost generation” of engineers could be a great way for the country to innovate. The rate of entrepreneurship is low in Iran, but a few things can be done in order to solve this problem.
During our trip to Iran, we met the founders of Shafajoo.com, a local startup based in Tehran. Shafajoo means “health/cure finder” in Persian and their goal is to improve healthcare access across Iran.
At the end of October, we attended Startup Weekend Shiraz. Startup Weekend is a global grassroots movement of active and empowered entrepreneurs who are learning the basics of founding startups and launching successful ventures. It is the largest community of passionate entrepreneurs with over 400 past events in 100 countries around the world in 2011.