I'm currently a senior software engineer at Tesla. I never started my career as a coder. I'm "a business guy who codes". See here for why I'd do such a thing.Outside of the day job, I'm focussed on my life's work, building a Timeless media publishing company, currently consisting of podcasts @ rationalvc.com (founded in 2019). The podcast pivoted in 2023 and has since reached the Top 25 charts on several occasions. We also publish essays that are read by thousands of subscribers, and will be publishing books in due course. We're just getting started.Sometimes I invest as a General Partner @ rational.fund. The fund has co-invested alongside Founders Fund, Jim O'Shaughnessy, YC, a16z, Sam Altman et al.I've previously operated my own indie startups (some failed, two sold), worked in VC-backed startups (such as Hofy, later acquired by Deel), and advised several others. 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 😱 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 post-revolution 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 (cold-calling or door-to-door sales), which I then did 40-hours per week while studying a full-time degree at university. I always say "born in Iran, made in England."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:
📝 Becoming a Micro Angel Investor
📝 Financial Minimalism In Life, Investing, And Startups
📝 Tech Markets Are Irrational: What To Focus On
📝 My Personal Story - The Black Swan

Podcast & Essays - rationalvc.com
Investments - rational.fundTwitter
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"Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day."—Charlie Munger.

“Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.”

“The new oil is ideas. It’s all digital. All the new fortunes are being created in ideas space. In fact, if you’re starting out today as a young, ambitious person, you don’t learn real estate; you don’t learn coal and oil mining; you don’t 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, we’re moving away from conquering physical resources and moving much more into trading of ideas.”—Naval Ravikant.