Built with Bounce
Updated: Sep 7
Go to an Iranian dinner party in America and count how long it takes before someone gives you unsolicited advice about your career, your investments, and your posture. My record is four minutes. It's delivered at volume, in two languages, by someone who's known you since dessert.
It's also usually correct.
Underneath it runs a constant baseline of jokes — nothing too grim to be funny. Exile is funny. Inflation is funny. The uncle who lost everything and is now a dean of engineering has the best material at the table, and he knows it. People mistake this for deflection. It's the opposite: a person who can find the joke in a catastrophe has already decided the catastrophe doesn't get to run the evening.
That instinct wasn't an accident of temperament. It was built.
Where the bounce comes from
In 1953, Iran had a democratically elected prime minister and a plausible shot at becoming a pioneering democracy in the Middle East. The CIA and MI6 removed him — a role the CIA finally acknowledged in declassified 2013 documents. Twenty-six years later came the 1979 revolution, and it's a serious argument, not a fringe one, that the first event made the second possible.
What matters isn't the geopolitics. It's the lesson every Iranian family absorbed at speed: a country can invert in eighteen months. The currency, the law, what's safe to say at dinner — one crown can become a veil. People leading the military on Tuesday were teaching Farsi in Los Angeles by spring. Once you know that, you can't un-know it. It reorganizes what you think is worth investing in.
The portable skillset
If governments are temporary and your credential might be void in the next jurisdiction, you stop investing in things that sit still. You invest in what you can carry in your hands, and you hedge by being generous, because we're all we have.
So: languages, fluently. Money — how it actually moves. Social fluency — how to read a room, find the person who decides things, and become useful by Thursday. How to land somewhere with nothing and be inside the culture within a year.
It's the world's least glamorous skill stack, and it works everywhere — Berlin, Tokyo, Caracas, wherever's next. You don't get to know where the next promised land is. So you become the kind of person who can build one on arrival.
And the poetry
The least practical-sounding item on that list travels best. Iranians don't treat poetry as a school subject — Hafez, dead six hundred years, is still consulted like a friend with better judgment than you. Rumi, Saadi, Khayyam: quoted at dinner tables, produced from memory by taxi drivers. A thousand years of writing about loss and exile — a manual, written well in advance, by people who'd already been through it.
My grandfathers taught me fifty or so adages, copied by hand every summer. They rhyme. They're built for exactly one situation: your country is now run by clerics, take what you can carry, go somewhere you don't speak the language, and decide — correctly — where your money and your life will be safe. You can't carry a house across a border. You can carry all of that in your head.
The receipts
The skill stack works, and the roll call is faintly ridiculous for a group that is less than 0.25% of the country.
Tech. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar, born to Iranian parents. Oracle's database — the thing a startling share of the world's records still sit on — was largely written by Bob Miner, its co-founder and chief engineer, born to an Iranian Assyrian family from a village in West Azerbaijan. Uber is run by Dara Khosrowshahi, who left Tehran as a nine-year-old in 1978. Dropbox was co-founded by Arash Ferdowsi. YouTube was run for years by Salar Kamangar. Among Google's first business hires was Omid Kordestani, who went on to be executive chairman of Twitter. Saeed Amidi turned his family's Palo Alto office building — where Logitech, Google and PayPal got their start — into Plug and Play, which for years has been the most active and pioneering startup accelerator in the world. Sasan Goodarzi, CEO of TurboTax. Ali Rowghani, Partner at Y Combinator and last but not least Artemis Patrick, the CEO of Sephora North America - that’s right, Girls!
Science. Maryam Mirzakhani, at Stanford, became the first woman in history to win the Fields Medal, the Nobel Price of Mathematics Award. Anousheh Ansari became the first Iranian in space — self-funded, in 2006 — and now runs the XPRIZE Foundation. Lotfi Zadeh invented fuzzy logic at Berkeley, which is quietly inside a great deal of the machinery you touched today. Firouz Naderi ran Mars exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Finance and real estate. Hamid Moghadam — my mother's cousin — left Tehran as a boy, went to MIT, and built what became Prologis, the largest logistics real estate company on earth: roughly $196 billion in assets across 1.2 billion square feet in 19 countries. Statistically speaking, your packages move through his warehouses. I will make this list someday too, Hamid Joon.
Arts. Shirin Neshat. Shohreh Aghdashloo, Oscar-nominated, also one of our family’s dearest gems. Marjane Satrapi, who turned a childhood under the revolution into Persepolis. Ramin Djawadi, who wrote the music you associate with dragons. Jasmin Larian Hekmat, CEO of Cult Gaia, is a big point on the board.
The underlying numbers are duller, but they explain the roll call. 79% of Iranian adults in the U.S. have at least some college; 35% hold an advanced degree. Among Iranian immigrants specifically, 62% work in management, business, science or the arts.
Two generations. One revolution. No familiar context to fall back on. That isn't luck and it certainly isn't genes. It's a strategy and skill stack — plus the standing assumption that you will probably need to use it.
About America
My family's ascent happened here in a single generation, not three. I've looked for the counterexample and haven't found one. America isn't perfectly consistent about who it lets in — Iranians know that on a personal level, and the door deserves scrutiny — but the door was never the interesting part. What's interesting is what happens after. Nobody here is confused by the idea that you might arrive with an accent and end up owning the building. In much of the world, you can be admitted for forty years and remain, permanently, a guest.
What the bounce is actually for
People see the hustle and assume it's fear — a culture bracing for impact. It isn't, or not only. If the lesson were simply everything can be taken, the rational response would be to hoard and trust no one. That's conspicuously not what Iranians do. What Iranians do is throw a party.
The other half of the lesson is this: if the future isn't guaranteed, joy can't be deferred into it. Later is speculative. That's why the food is excessive and nobody's allowed to leave before 1 a.m. It isn't denial. It's arithmetic. The operating question was never how do I stay safe — it's what can we do to enjoy this, right now.
And then there's the dancing
The first time I watched a room of grieving women turn into a dance floor, I thought a mistake had been made. Then the music came on, and an auntie who'd needed two people to hold her upright an hour earlier lifted her wrists. Nobody stopped her. Nobody asked what was wrong, either. She was handed a beat instead of a question — on certain days, the kindest thing you can hand someone.
The cover photo for this post is my cousins and I at Hippie Hill — a Golden Gate Park tradition for decades. My mom has been bringing us to rise here since I was a kid. Dancing with strangers, in silence. Makes me feel alive.
Persian dance lives in three places. The wrists are the grammar — a hand turns out like a question, folds back like an answer. The eyes are the meaning — a gaze that holds you a beat too long, and you're expected to have received it. And the shoulders do the work: small, quick, insistent shakes. We say we carry things on our shoulders. This is the one place you can put a thing down by shaking it loose from the exact spot you'd been holding it.
This isn't a coping mechanism people reach for lacking better tools — it's one of the oldest, most sophisticated regulation systems our species has. A whole group breathing and swaying on the same beat is about as direct a route to a settled nervous system as a person gets. We've never been a people who grieve quietly. We grieve in rhythm, because a feeling isn't a thought — it lives behind the sternum, not in your vocabulary. A feeling you refuse to move becomes a feeling that settles. And things that settle get heavier, not lighter.
The whole thesis
Bounce was never the absence of grief. It's the refusal to let grief become your final position. You feel it fully, out loud, in company — and then you move it through, because nothing about being alive is stationary.
So: learn the language, read the room, keep the skills portable and the friends numerous. Assume the map gets redrawn at least once in your lifetime, and refuse to spend that lifetime waiting to find out how. And when it gets heavy — which it will, and that's not pessimism, that's Tuesday — don't hold it.
Stand up. Put on the song. Feel it in your shoulders. Lift your wrists.
Sources
1) The CIA's own internal history of Operation TPAJAX, released under FOIA and published by the National Security Archive in August 2013, was the agency's first formal acknowledgment of its role. See CIA admits organising 1953 Iran coup, Al Jazeera, 20 August 2013, and In declassified document, CIA acknowledges role in 1953 Iran coup, CNN, 19 August 2013. That the 1953 coup helped make the 1979 revolution possible is a widely held historical argument, not a settled fact.
2) Pierre Omidyar; Bob Miner, Oracle co-founder and chief engineer, whose parents emigrated from Ada, West Azerbaijan, in the 1920s; Dara Khosrowshahi, whose family left Iran in 1978; Arash Ferdowsi; Salar Kamangar; Omid Kordestani. Maryam Mirzakhani, Fields Medal, 2014; Anousheh Ansari, XPRIZE Foundation; Lotfi Zadeh; Firouz Naderi. Hamid Moghadam, born Tehran 1956, co-founder of AMB Property, merged with ProLogis in 2011; Prologis scale figures from the company and The Real Deal. Shirin Neshat; Shohreh Aghdashloo, nominated for Best Supporting Actress for House of Sand and Fog (2003); Marjane Satrapi; Ramin Djawadi. This list is illustrative, not a ranking — and several of these figures were born outside Iran to Iranian families rather than emigrating themselves.
3) 7 facts about Iranians in the U.S., Pew Research Center, 5 March 2026, drawing on 2024 American Community Survey data. Iranians sit at or near the top of U.S. immigrant groups on advanced-degree attainment, alongside Indian and Taiwanese Americans. The frequently repeated claim that Iranians are the most educated group in America traces to a 2004 analysis of 2000 census data and no longer holds cleanly.
4) Immigrants from Iran in the United States, Migration Policy Institute, using 2019 American Community Survey data. These figures cover foreign-born Iranians specifically, which is why they differ from the Pew numbers above.
5) On collective mourning dance, social cohesion and anxiety: "Dance for the dead: The role of top-down beliefs for social cohesion and anxiety management in naturally occurring collective rituals", PLOS ONE (2023). I've deliberately avoided the vocabulary of polyvagal theory here, which circulates widely in wellness writing and is more contested than it sounds.
6) The phrase is Bessel van der Kolk's, from The Body Keeps the Score (2014) — hugely influential, and worth noting that parts of its trauma-neuroscience framing remain debated among clinicians.
7) On the zār: "Understanding the Zār: An African-Iranian healing dance ritual", Anthropology of the Middle East, vol. 13, no. 1 (2018). On the Kurdish chamari: Kurdshop.
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