I'm currently a senior software engineer at Tesla.On the side, I podcast & write @ rationalvc.com, and invest as a General Partner @ rational.fund.My fund has co-invested alongside Founders Fund, Jim O'Shaughnessy, YC, a16z, Sam Altman et al. The podcast has reached the top 25 charts on several occasions, and the essays have 3,000+ subscribers.I've previously operated my own indie startups (some failed, 2 sold) or worked in VC-backed startups (and advised several). Prior to that I had no skin in the game and was part of a founding team for Silicon Valley Bank in London after university đą where I managed a $200MM portfolio in my early 20s and wore several hats as we expanded like the Achaemenid empire (I left in 2019, years before the collapse). Having a business/sales background before becoming technical has allowed me to combine the two skill sets.Early life: I was born in Iran (Shiraz, the heart of the old Persian empire) under unfavourable circumstances, and moved to the UK as a refugee aged five. I attended some of the worst-rated schools in the entirety of England. In high school I ran small businesses and held jobs (door-to-door sales or cold-calling), which I then did 40-hours per week while studying a full-time degree at university.Interests: reading (preferably Lindy), podcasting, writing, polymathy, learning new skills, indie hacking, asymmetric bets, lifestyle design, sovereignty, mentoring ambitious immigrants, barbell training, martial arts, flâneuring the oldest inhabited cities, architecture, hiking, meditating, and Achaemenid history.
My most popular/viral essays:
đ Becoming a Micro Angel Investor
đ Financial Minimalism In Life, Investing, And Startups
đ Tech Markets Are Irrational: What To Focus On
Podcast & Essays - rationalvc.com
Investments - rational.fund
GitHubTwitter
LinkedIn
Subscribe
"Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day."âCharlie Munger.
— Cyrus Yari (@CyrusYari) April 8, 2023
Your career is not a ladder, it's a game. Those who treat it like ladder will make linear progress at best and let their fear hold them back. Those who treat it like a game will collect the resources, find the people, and build the skills that compound â and have fun doing it!
— Kevin Yien (@kevinyien) August 25, 2020
some personal news: ~6 months ago i joined tesla as a senior software engineer. as the quoted tweet below says, am doing a bit of everything, & not a trad swe role, rather "full-stack operator" building a lot of 0-to-1 really cool internal stuff i can't really talk about.
— Cyrus Yari (@CyrusYari) January 18, 2024
i'm⌠https://t.co/V2YwAo9X1a
âLearn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.ââNaval Ravikant.
âThe new oil is ideas. Itâs all digital. All the new fortunes are being created in ideas space. In fact, if youâre starting out today as a young, ambitious person, you donât learn real estate; you donât learn coal and oil mining; you donât go into the extraction of physical resources to create wealth. You go into ideas space. You go into programming, books, movies, blogs and podcasts and building robots, which are mostly intellectual property underneath. Even as a human civilisation, weâre moving away from conquering physical resources and moving much more into trading of ideas.ââNaval Ravikant.
