This is an English translation of a post I originally wrote in Persian: read the original.
This afternoon I was talking with a friend about the people in the Tabriz startup ecosystem. The conversation reached a point where I suddenly turned and said, “sometimes it gets really hard to tolerate certain approaches and certain people.” Now that a few hours have passed since my friend left and I have calmed down a bit, I feel that what I said came out of how tired I have been lately.
The reality is that in the Tabriz ecosystem, and in every city in Iran really, there are people who genuinely care about making their city a better place to start a startup, but the approach they take is not necessarily the same as the way I think. One of the beliefs I used to hold was that we should try to keep everyone together and tolerate one another. Now that I go a little deeper into it, I see that we need, and I mean need, to have different approaches. This is not an optional matter. Which is to say, I have to shift my stance from “I must tolerate this person” to “this person’s presence is needed.”
Let me open this up with a concrete example. For several years the Tabriz open software talks were held every week. We usually hold one meeting a year where the members come together and we discuss the changes we should make to the talks in the coming year. In the last such meeting, a year ago, all sorts of ideas were raised for improving the talks; many of them were opposed and were never used in the new year. I think what we could have done, instead of killing those new ideas in that meeting, was to set up a new gathering built around them. What would be wrong with having two meetups in the city about technical and software topics, each with a different approach? I think it would even have raised the quality of both, and in the end it would have been to the benefit of the whole ecosystem.
You might say: Arash, wouldn’t that split the groups apart? I don’t think so. With this meetup, for instance, I think it makes no difference to the audience which one they attend. What matters is that they get something out of what is presented and do some networking at the end. I think offering parallel options with different approaches but the same goal can be very useful for everyone in that ecosystem.
But all of this comes with one condition: that we not forget that tolerating isn’t enough. We have to internalise how much we need different people to be part of our city’s startup ecosystem.