I have a confession to make.
When we first started receiving applications from Iranian companies through the Startup Visa program,
I was hesitant. Not because of anything specific I knew. Because of everything I assumed. You hear stories. People say that founders from Iran sometimes pay their way in without a real company behind them. Without knowing better, I let that narrative sit in the back of my mind longer than I should have.
It took several conversations with actual Iranian founders to realize what I was doing. I was judging people I had never met based on where they came from. Furthermore, the moment I recognized that, I recognized something else: I had been on the other side of that judgment my entire life.
I grew up in Cali, Colombia, in the 1980s and 1990s. If you know anything about that era, you know what Cali meant to the world. Not the culture, the people, the food, or the music. What people knew was the cartel. Cali was always fighting with Medellin for notoriety, and while Medellin got more international attention, I would sometimes joke that Cali was the other one. The one people forgot to be afraid of.
What was not funny was the reality of travelling with a Colombian passport. The looks. The questions. The jokes that were not really jokes. Half my family is Peruvian and we traveled frequently between Colombia and Peru. Even with neighbours, you could feel it. The assumption followed every Colombian into every room: drug dealer until proven otherwise.
I was not a drug dealer. My family was not involved in any of that. However, that did not matter to the assumptions.
I carried that experience with me when I finally sat down with Iranian founders and actually listened. What I heard was the same story in a different language. Smart, resilient professionals building real companies in an incredibly difficult environment, carrying a country’s reputation on their backs through no choice of their own. Judged not for what they had built but for where they had been born.
Aziz is the Co-Founder and CPO of Aspedan Advanced Solutions,
a company building AI-powered pricing infrastructure for e-commerce merchants, starting with Shopify and expanding across the broader internet economy. He has over 18 years of experience in software engineering and entrepreneurship. Additionally, he has worked with enterprises and startups across multiple markets, bringing a depth of technical and strategic thinking that is immediately apparent in every conversation.
He is also one of the kindest, most patient, and most carefully spoken people I have worked with in ten years of running this community.
Aziz came to us through the Startup Visa program, and his journey has not been straightforward. The visa process itself has been a source of significant stress, as it has been for many Iranian founders waiting in a system that moves slowly while their companies need to move fast.
On top of the regulatory uncertainty, there has been war. Bombing. Periods with no internet and no communication with family members and staff still in Iran. Events that no business plan accounts for and no accelerator program prepares you for.
And through all of that, Aziz has shown up. Every opportunity we have brought to him, from pitch competitions to events to the Global Startups Conference where he presented at CBC Studios, he has taken. Toronto Tech Week, programs in Armenia, research published on AI strategy and trade intelligence, Aspedan continued moving forward through all of it.
He holds the personal and the professional at the same time, the fear and the ambition, because he understands that his business has to keep moving even when everything around it is standing still. That is not stubbornness. Instead, it is a kind of discipline that very few people ever have to develop.
Aziz is not an exception. He is a representative.
The Iranian founders in our community are, collectively, some of the most technically sophisticated, strategically thoughtful, and professionally resilient people we have worked with. They arrive with deep educational backgrounds, strong engineering foundations, and a relationship with adversity that has made them better problem solvers than most comfortable environments ever could.
They also arrive knowing that the world has an opinion about where they come from. And yet, they show up anyway.
That takes a particular kind of courage. The kind that does not make headlines but makes companies.
My hesitation about Iranian founders four years ago was wrong. Not complicated, not nuanced. Simply wrong. And I am grateful that the people who came through our doors gave me the opportunity to learn that before it cost us something meaningful.
The Global Startups community is built on the belief that where you come from should not determine where you can go. That is easy to say and harder to live. Moreover, Aziz and the Iranian diaspora in our network have taught me what living that belief actually looks like.
As we turn 10 this September, I celebrate Aziz, Aspedan Advanced Solutions, and every founder in our community who has had to fight for the right to belong in a room where they should have been welcomed from the start.
That fight should not exist. But the people who keep showing up despite it are some of the most remarkable I have ever met.
Are you a founder building something in Canada? This September, Global Startups is celebrating 10 years with a week of expert-led masterclasses designed to help companies at every stage grow faster and smarter. Seats are limited and vetted. See the full lineup and register at luma.com/globalstartups
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