Ali Eslami

You know, I was in Iran on my computer and through the internet, it felt really like I was flying around, right?

I could be in any conversation anywhere in the world,

I made friends with people from all across the world.

There was a guy I became friends with, Trevor.

He actually messaged me just last week out of the blue.

And him and I, we would make websites, we would find clients.

And I never met him.

I still haven't met him.

This is like more than 20 years on now.

And it felt like a superpower.

And writing software...

even back then, I could feel like it was a superpower because I didn't have to get permission from anyone.

You didn't need material resources.

Even as a child, basically, as long as your brain could work, you could do whatever you wanted.

And that's how everything kicked off.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think there was definitely a bit of luck involved.

So during those early years, I learned how to code fairly proficiently.

And by the time I came to go to university to study,

I loved technology and computer science enough to know I wanted to be in that field, but it felt like I wouldn't be learning much new things if I just went on to study computer science.

So I looked around and I thought to myself, okay, what could I study which is like computer science, but is beyond computer science?