From Ahwaz to Lahti, the long way round

Four countries before I turned seventeen

I was born in Ahwaz, in the south of Iran, in 1980. That was the year the war with Iraq started, and it lasted eight years. In 1990 my family left for Bucharest, and I finished elementary school in Romania.

Romania is where I met a computer. I wrote my first programs in BASIC and learned MS-DOS well enough to make it do what I wanted. In 1994 we moved again, to the United States, and I finished middle school there. That is where I found the internet and started building web pages. I was fourteen and completely taken by it.

We returned to Iran in 1996. I was sixteen, and I came back with skills and experiences my classmates had no reason to have. School had nothing left to teach me that I wanted. So I left, and went to work. I have been self-taught since, and I still think the academic world needs to rethink and evolve.

Nine years in Dubai, two in Tbilisi

In 2004 I moved to Dubai and stayed nine years. Most of that time I was a software project manager, and the work kept me moving: Austria, Finland, India, Qatar, Lebanon, Iraq. I first set foot in Finland in December 2008.

In 2012 I left Dubai for Tbilisi and built a software studio there from nothing: engineers, designers, app developers. Two years later it had delivered more than fifty bespoke projects. Building a team from scratch in a country you have just arrived in teaches you quickly which parts of management are universal and which parts are local.

What I spend my energy on

The biggest difference is where the energy goes. In Iran, a huge part of being an entrepreneur is working around obstacles: war, sanctions, a currency that loses value fast, informal networks, opaque rules. You become resourceful very quickly, but a lot of that resourcefulness goes into just keeping things running.

In Finland, the system actually works. You register your company in a day, you have a real bank account, payments clear, taxes are predictable. That same energy can go straight into the actual work: building something, serving clients. This shift alone changes how you think about your time, and even about ambition.

Trust is built slowly

The main thing that stands out for me is that trust here is built slowly, through what you do, not what you claim. In many places I've lived, you have to advocate hard for yourself, push, talk yourself up. Here, that works against you. Quiet competence carries more weight than confidence.

The mechanics are easier: setting up legally, banking, working across borders, getting paid. No fixers, no one you need to know. The harder side is human. Networks form slowly. Selling yourself loudly doesn't land, and sometimes it actively hurts you. If you come from a culture where you have to constantly assert your value, you have to unlearn that, and that's not a small thing.

Why it suits me

For me personally, it suits how I want to work. I care a lot about doing things well: about craft, about being patient, about letting the work speak. In some cultures that approach is almost invisible; you have to be loud to be seen. Here it works. Clients come back because of what I delivered, not because I performed well in a meeting. There's a kind of dignity in that.

If I had to compress all of it into one thing: in Iran, you survive through relationships and improvisation. In Finland, you build through structure and patience. You're treated as a citizen (by the tax office, by the banks, by other businesses), not as someone who has to prove they deserve to be in the room. Finland also forces you to clarify what you actually offer, because no one will overlook a vague pitch out of politeness. It makes you sharper, even if the pace is slower.