I am not a lawyer or diplomat or expert on trade, but I can make some general observations from an American/Western perspective:
First, the sanctions on Iran are such that any partnership with an Iranian person for business reasons is effectively impossible in the West, without the resources of a multi-million or billion-dollar company to circumvent them. The author says "I am not looking for anyone to bypass sanctions" but that is very obviously exactly what they are asking for.
Second, circumventing sanctions is illegal, and people regularly go to prison or are given massive monetary fines for this. OP, I don't question your motives, but you need to understand that people have literally gone to prison and lost their whole livelihoods for doing exactly what you are asking.
Therefore, posting this on a Western platform (Github) and advertising it on a Western message board (HN) is unlikely to help. I don't think the author's intentions are poor; I think they may simply not understand the intensity of the legal regime that makes working with them impossible.
There is also the matter of Westerners' general opinions on Iran, which - general attitudes of multiculturalism and tolerance nonwithstanding - is typically quite negative. The sanctions didn't come from nowhere.
I would recommend the author look into partnerships with persons from countries that are more sympathetic to their situation. The ones with strong tech industries would be Russia, China, and India. Vietnam is another example of a country with some tech industry which also has mostly positive relationships with Western countries, these days. I realize this is not as attractive as the West, but there are good people even in places whose governments I may as a Westerner may not particularly like, and English is a lingua franca the world over. I'd strongly recommend those places as a starting point.
Thank you for this thoughtful response. You're raising legitimate concerns I may not fully understand.
Let me clarify my understanding (and please correct me if I'm wrong):
My assumption was that a structure like this would be legal:
- Partner in US/UK registers their own company
- Opens Stripe under their company name
- Hires me as a remote contractor (like any distributed team)
- I hold equity as a foreign shareholder (which I thought was legal for non-US persons)
Is your point that even this structure violates sanctions because I'm Iranian? Or that the risk/complexity makes it impractical for anyone without massive legal resources?
I genuinely don't want anyone to break the law. If what I'm proposing is illegal even in the structure above, I need to understand that.
Re: Russia/China/India - that's solid advice I hadn't seriously considered. Russia and China have their own complexities, but India makes a lot of sense. Do you know if Indian tech companies face similar restrictions when working with Iranians, or is it more open?
I appreciate you taking the time to explain this clearly rather than just dismissing it. If the Western partnership path is genuinely impossible (not just hard), I need to know that.
> My assumption was that a structure like this would be legal: - Partner in US/UK registers their own company - Opens Stripe under their company name - Hires me as a remote contractor (like any distributed team) - I hold equity as a foreign shareholder (which I thought was legal for non-US persons)
> Is your point that even this structure violates sanctions because I'm Iranian?
Yes.
> Or that the risk/complexity makes it impractical for anyone without massive legal resources?
Companies on the scale of Toyota or Huawei try to circumvent these sanctions. They are regularly found out and caught and prosecuted:
> Do you know if Indian tech companies face similar restrictions when working with Iranians, or is it more open?
Sorry, I'm not Indian and have no knowledge of Indian laws. I would strongly advise you seek legal counsel from a person familiar with them, preferably a barrister/solicitor (in Indian terms).
> If the Western partnership path is genuinely impossible (not just hard), I need to know that.
For all intents and purposes, for you, it is. I'm sorry, genuinely, that our countries are in this position with regards to each other. It isn't your fault, but it is how it is.
Editing to add: the ONLY exception I can think of to this would be if you flee Iran, plead for and are granted asylum in the United States or a third country with better relationships to it. This is extraordinarily hard, and possibly a violation of Iranian law for me to even suggest to you.
UPDATE: I'm pulling back from seeking Western partnerships.
Multiple commenters have explained that even the "contractor + equity" structure violates sanctions and is illegal. I genuinely didn't understand this - I thought it was a gray area. It's not.
I'm not asking anyone to break the law or take legal risk. That was naive on my part.
Based on helpful suggestions in this thread, I'm now focusing on:
- India (no sanctions, large tech industry)
- UAE/Dubai (open to Iranian nationals)
- Turkey (regional tech hub)
- Singapore (need to research legality)
If you're from one of these countries and interested in partnership, feel free to reach out: EchenDeligani@gmail.com
To everyone who took the time to explain sanctions compliance: thank you. This thread educated me on things I clearly didn't understand.
The technology still works. The market still exists. I just need to find it in the right geography.
> Editing to add: the ONLY exception I can think of to this would be if you flee Iran, plead for and are granted asylum in the United States or a third country with better relationships to it. This is extraordinarily hard, and possibly a violation of Iranian law for me to even suggest to you.
Couldnt they just immigrate normally? I dont know how this all works, but there is a reasonably large size group of Iranian expats in my country (canada), many of them with jobs in the tech sector. I think they are just normal immigrants and not asylum seekers. I imagine its hard (especially with the current gov taking an anti-immigration tone), but probably a lot easier than getting asylum in usa.
Canada is a different matter and certainly, if the OP immigrated to Canada and was living there as an Iranian national with legal Canadian residency, the situation would be different.
> Partner in US/UK registers their own company - Opens Stripe under their company name - Hires me as a remote contractor (like any distributed team) - I hold equity as a foreign shareholder (which I thought was legal for non-US persons)
This structure clearly violates sanctions, yes.
The person opening the Stripe account in this case would be breaking the law and would be taking on the legal consequences of violating those sanctions.
Having another person act as a proxy for a business in a sanctioned country is unquestionably illegal, regardless of how you structure it. Equity agreements, remote contractor, handshake agreements, crypto payments, doesn't matter. Any arrangement like this is designed to avoid sanctions and violating sanctions is a big deal.
Most of commenters in this thread are overcomplicating things and have no experience with gray area industries. What you need is Turkey, the UAE and Dubai. The payment stack however can be Chinese/middle eastern/eastern European. This is a fairly standard play for people of your background, from there you can bootstrap and then ultimately leverage yourself into a new citizenship (most commonly Canadian and Australian, or other places with easier citizenship by investment routes).
You are asking technologists in an English speaking forum targeting the American centric world. You should be enquiring with friends in the nearby Islamic countries. None of the problems you have encountered are new or have no solutions for. As a suggestion, look up the payment providers used by Pornhub (they are blacklisted by Visa and Mastercard) and that is a good starting point for you. Also look at where a lot of crypto platforms incorporate. There is a whole world outside of the Delaware Corp + Stripe Atlas game, but you certainly won't learn that from silicon valley forums.
I strongly suggest you don't let desperation drive you into a poor deal or enter yourself into a disadvantageous partnership. Take some time off to clear your head, and talk to people. Don't let the whole "product led growth" US centric sales strategy cloud your business decisions. In the rest of the world, B2B is not limited to MasterCard/Visa and most of the notion/stripe style credit card driven SaaS don't necessarily exist in the same way. For your type of product, you should be charging more too.
Also most importantly, make sure your bank account is in the middle east and avoid dealing with USD under any circumstance. If you have a foreign bank account in a less friendly jurisdiction, an overzealous compliance department can easily shut down your entire business.
Don't confuse the greater geopolitics with business when it comes to the middle east. They are perfectly happy to work with small business people like OP.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding of sanctions is that the entire point is to prevent exactly these partnerships from forming, as well as their much larger cousins. Western governments want to pressure your government to change its behavior because of the damage to people like you.
I think, due to the seriousness and potential consequences of even inadvertently violating international sanctions, you are going to want to (somehow, I have no idea how) obtain legal advice on this subject from an attorney, not from random HN commenters.
I don't think - though I am not sure - that it is illegal for an American attorney to advise an Iranian national on what American laws are. There is an Iranian-American Bar Association at https://iaba.us/ which might be able to help.
Legality set aside (I agree on your points on the repercussions), "the West" isn't that unified when it comes to middle east and other areas where the US meddled a lot. In particular, EU countries can have a way more nuanced view on it and be quite pissed at US' positions.
Which can make the author's perception of it more complex. They'll find people who are genuinely sympathetic, but still absolutely refusing to cross the bridge.
If you are a rich crypto founder you can literally admit[0] to funneling money to Islamic State[1] and get yourself a pardon for it though[2].
[0] "Binance failed to file a SAR on transactions related to an individual designated by OFAC for support of a terrorist group. The individual was allowed to
keep an account for several years in withdrawal-only status after designation and withdraw their balance" https://www.fincen.gov/system/files/enforcement_action/2023-...
[1] "The violations include failure to implement programs to prevent and report suspicious transactions with terrorists — including Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) " https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1925
>The ones with strong tech industries would be Russia, China, and India
As a side note, I wouldn't put it past a company of any of these countries to effectively resell the software to US companies, effectively bypassing the sanctions in a similar partnership fashion.
On another note, how do you distinguish between a well meaning iranian asking you to do something illegal for money, and an iranian that is just trying to scam you. I'm not saying that this is the case, but the very intense regime would force anyone participating in this to forego the legal mechanisms that would make doing business somewhat safe to begin with. How do you bring a dispute to court if it arises? You would have to confess to a federal crime?
Sorry man, I wish you luck, but nothing we can do here.
When I was interested in the semantic web I found that there was demand for it in the whole EMEA area: not just in the EU which funds it but also on a grassroots level in the Middle East and Africa where there are people using many different languages and better communications means more and better commerce.
I was talking with people in Iraq about a project and found it wasn't necessarily sanctioned but I was supposed to go through channels and I couldn't find anyone at State to respond to my questions.
First, the sanctions on Iran are such that any partnership with an Iranian person for business reasons is effectively impossible in the West, without the resources of a multi-million or billion-dollar company to circumvent them. The author says "I am not looking for anyone to bypass sanctions" but that is very obviously exactly what they are asking for.
Second, circumventing sanctions is illegal, and people regularly go to prison or are given massive monetary fines for this. OP, I don't question your motives, but you need to understand that people have literally gone to prison and lost their whole livelihoods for doing exactly what you are asking.
Therefore, posting this on a Western platform (Github) and advertising it on a Western message board (HN) is unlikely to help. I don't think the author's intentions are poor; I think they may simply not understand the intensity of the legal regime that makes working with them impossible.
There is also the matter of Westerners' general opinions on Iran, which - general attitudes of multiculturalism and tolerance nonwithstanding - is typically quite negative. The sanctions didn't come from nowhere.
I would recommend the author look into partnerships with persons from countries that are more sympathetic to their situation. The ones with strong tech industries would be Russia, China, and India. Vietnam is another example of a country with some tech industry which also has mostly positive relationships with Western countries, these days. I realize this is not as attractive as the West, but there are good people even in places whose governments I may as a Westerner may not particularly like, and English is a lingua franca the world over. I'd strongly recommend those places as a starting point.