kaveh ranjbar

i am a free thinker, lean founder and an agile leader.

a little about me:

• born in tehran/iran in a middle class liberal family. my mother was a nurse and my father was a documentary filmmaker. they met in rome. during their studies.
• got my first computer when i was 7, and my first modem when i was 11.
• pioneered setting up bbses in iran since 1994 and on the internet since 1994
• left iran since 2001 lived in dubai/oxford/london/amsterdam and now rotterdam.
• studied pure mathematics and continued with computer science (formal methods in software engineering). masters from university of oxford.
• co-founded the largest business isp in iran and helped 10s of other isps in the country and region to start. founded two successful startups in iran while studying in the uk.
• out of 15 years at ripe ncc, for 12 years, i was in charge of running one of the internet's 13 root servers, largest active internet measurement network in the world and largest internet data collection/provision service. revolutionised whois, served at icann board of directors for 6 years, served as ietf trust chair for 3 years and served at ietf organisation leadership for 2 years. created and nurtured multiple communities and travelled to 110+ countries
• love my home country iran but because i strongly believe in free internet and have acted forcefully on it. last time i had a chance to visit was in 2016. not a fan of a jail cell otherwise i would have visited more often. i am fully against the dictatorship and government there and within my expertise will do anything possible to make people of iran and anywhere else more free.
• love understanding the world through philosophy, math, biology and dynamics of emergence.
• i understand the whole world as a graph, specifically as a graph of infinite tuples shaped like:
  
  < jtb ⊂ ℝ, type ⊂ ℕ> <--> predicate <--> < jtb ⊂ ℝ, type ⊂ ℕ>
  (in short, the universe can be defined by infinite justified true beliefs, from a set of countable types (dimensions), which are referring to another set of infinite jtbs, within a set of countable dimensions. at scale this, rules emerge and common understandings inevitably get shaped between all nodes because dimension unwantedly create limits on what can have effect on what.)

some things i believe:

• i know there are a lot of things i don’t understand
  • and i know there are some things i know i understand
  • and i know there are a lot of things i “think” i understand
  • but my real interest is in the things that i don’t know but i understand
  • i do a lot of self reflection to know those
• ultimate control is lack of control
  • if i can observe and understand, i have full control
  • if i try to exert power, i am trying to control. trying to control means i don’t understand, which is totally fine but not what i like. i like to spend that energy to figure out what i don’t understand and understand them
  • most people are stuck in a control loop, if i can i like to show them there is another possibility as well.
• things emerge in all networks and trying to control them, at best, delays the inevitable shape
  • i do respect natural order of things, there is the most real feedback in how things have agreed to work
  • if i don’t like that order, my first step is to understand why that order has shaped in that cluster
  • and then i will try to find other clusters which share patterns i like and try to connect the cluster i don’t like to the one that i desire. if i was right in my disliking, i will end up with a sustainable cluster that i like!
• existence mean a desire to continuation
  • longevity, sustainability, reproduction are any thing’s strategy to “keep existing”
  • environment is of course emergent and nothing can predict how it changes, because knowing how it changes, changes how it emerges.
  • to “keep existing”, everything picks a strategy. everything can affect a finite number of resources at any given time, so everything bets. smarter or more powerful can not not have a meaning in a universal context.
• running organisations should be based on giving trust and eliminating mistrust
  • the most important asset of a leader is sensors, and they are not metrics, they are any stakeholder, from staff to customers to haters
  • being able to set up a sustainable loop, where input from all possible sources come in, gets translated to actions that all stakeholders can subscribe to, or at least not object to, means being able to set up the best organisation in the world.
  • people matter and understanding people is the crown of being a good human. nobody is stupid, nobody is irrelevant. of course sometime some sensors have to be filtered, but that is the hardest decision and it means killing potential (which is a desired strategy sometimes)
• change is inevitable, source of change, is always external
  • even if the source is fully known and understandable, the resulting change is still “random” to any observer as their reaction to change, even when countable, as a collective can result in uncountable outcomes
  • the goal is to guess the best strategy, and to guess the best strategy, organisms or organisations should efficiently use their resources to rely as much as possible to external forces, but arrange internal organs to be as resilient as possible
  • the downsides are worth it
• simple, small, fast to change is the way to go
  • right breakdown of responsibilities, while relying on the least number of different “types” of external forces is always the best bet.
  • this means as a whole the organism relies on as much as different types of external forces, but per unit, it has special units which rely on least amount of possible external forces
  • internally, minimising the types always wins. organs should translated all chaos they understand from outside to one or bare minimum number of types necessary to operate
• be as liberal as you can imagine in what you receive, be as conservative as possible in what you send and if you do not understand what you have received, always ignore it, except when it is really necessary to complain
  • everything said above, and everything omitted above are encompassed in aforementioned “robustness principle”
  • that is why diversity matters, that is why more sensors matter, that’s why separation of responsibilities matter and that’s why there is a hard limit for everything in this universe to translate things from one “type” space to another
• there is only abundance, everything is abundant
  • if something is limited, it is because it's being looked at from the wrong “type” space
  • limits are rooted in the observer

right now:

• i live with love of my life, samaneh in rotterdam. on top of that i have the honour of taking care of two dogs, bashoo and her step-sister balout and of course, a cat (or a the lion king as he would reassure me), petit!
• i have deeply invested all of my attention, time and financial resources on knowledge interpretation.
• have founded a startup focusing on building the largest internet infrastructure and content knowledge graph and invested in another which supports collective group decision-making.
• have working mvps for both, open to co-founders with related interests at the moment for go-to-market phase
• these days i work closely with soroush
• you can email me: kaveh@kaveh.org