| One thing I've always been curious about is why the opportunity created by this sort of thing doesn't seem to be taken advantage of. To take Iran as an example: when US sanctions prevent Boeing or Airbus from selling to them, I can understand why Embraer doesn't step in and offer to supply planes, because they are afraid of secondary sanctions affecting their business with the rest of the world. But tech isn't like aircraft production — building a GitHub, Okta or Auth0 clone is a chunk of work but hardly infeasible — hell, most companies routinely built a partial Auth0 clone in-house until not that long ago. Many still do. So why don't we see alternatives pop up that don't block Iran? It's a niche, but you get the whole niche to yourself, and Iran is not a small market. From a legal perspective you would set up somewhere like UAE where they have a good climate for business but regularly do business with Iran, so that part shouldn't be an issue. Network effects are a factor, but when you're blocked from the popular platform, you have a bigger incentive than usual to consider the less-popular one. |
Working in/with Iran has other difficulties in addition to sanctions. Iranian government has total control over what services from outside Iran are accessible to Iranians. They also use this control elaborately, in some fields whitelisting services rather than blacklisting them. So if you want to work with Iran from outside, you are always at the mercy of the government to block you.
If working from inside, you are under pressure to share people's private information with the government en masse. You have no way to resist that. The courts are puppets, price of resistance can be anywhere from takeover of your business, to prison, to death.
Oh and from outside, you have the problem of exchange rate: due to 40+years of 40+% inflation, what you earn from there cannot even cover your costs outside the country, unless you do the entire business from another country with similar economy.