April 2020

Dear friends and family,

I hope you and yours are staying safe and healthy. How digital life treats you? I’m adopting it! I. mean this is what we are supposed to be good at as human beings, right? Adopting. 

With the COVID-19 situation and our baby boy being born in -2 weeks, I rarely leave home. So I’ve been rewarded with more family time and 40% more working capacity. Yes! I find online work more efficient (not that satisfying for an extrovert like me), but still, I got leaner and meaner in what I do!

• Maslow ‘s Hierarchy of Needs, in Reverse with Khosrow Ronagh (watch)
• How to Measure Your Life? with Majid Kianpour (watch)
• Our True Talent with Majid Erfanian (watch)
• Our Need for Friendship with Dr. Jafar Mahallati (watch)

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, at our think tank —the Oppmakr Institute, by far, we have spent more than 200 hours of meetings with the CEOs and founders of businesses. The reason for those meetings was to see if we could set up their war room for the COVID-19 situation. The following two articles on my LinkedIn are inspired by our findings of those meetings: At the beginning of this month, everyone was asking how to cope with the existing COVID situation so I did contribute to this to this issue of the Blue Butterfly’s report with the same topic. I even appeared on TV with a more “popular” version of my findings.

In this 15 minutes interview, Reza Ghiabi explains how Iranian businesses can survive the COVID-19 situation. Live on national TV, Ghiabi explored the technical and strategic action list for startups and SMEs.

At the SeeTo Productions, we’ve never been busier. My partners Gelareh Kiazand and Katayoon Arsanjani, are creating fantastic content for VICE and Frontline. Mostly about what is happening in Iran. PinTransfer also is doing great. The number of requests we receive from Iranians who want to access the International bank system doubled. We’ve made it so easy for them to move money internationally.

And finally, at eSafar, like other online travel agencies, we have been hit hard by the market changes. Yet, how we are responding to it is very different. We see this period as an opportunity to focus on delivering more value to the customers, making it easy for them to travel. If you need to fly out of Iran as soon as the gates are open, don’t forget to turn on our “Goosh be Zang” service. We’ll let you know as soon as a flight opened up. One of the things that the COVID situation has reminded me is how limited our control is when it comes to the world around us. We don’t have control over anything that matters, but it seems we have an excellent way to trick ourselves into believing that we have.

We are witnessing a delicate time in human history. This time will be remembered in the future. So let’s focus on the things that really matter and be more pragmatic and optimistic. 

My best as always,
Reza


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