An Interview with my Buddy Hassan Khajeh-Hosseini, Co-Founder of AbarCloud

This post is part of a series of interviews that we are conducting with product leaders across various industries. In this interview series, product leaders share advice with their fellow product managers. We hope this series will shed light on trends and challenges in the profession, and be helpful to new and experienced product managers alike.

The following interview is with Hassan Khajeh-Hosseini, a former product manager and two-time entrepreneur who recently relocated from California to Tehran to launch AbarCloud, the first Iranian public cloud provider. Sanctions against Iran have prevented American cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, from infiltrating the Iranian market, so Hassan seized upon a unique opportunity to make a massive impact on the Iranian tech scene.

Hassan walked us through the validation process for AbarCloud and shared some of the challenges he’s encountered, both personally and professionally, while trying to achieve product/market fit in a developing market. According to Hassan, a few of the keys to success are universal: you need to understand your customers, understand your market, and understand your product.

Also in this episode:

• Deciding between a PM role at Google and launching an independent project
• What entrepreneurship and product management have in common
• Advice for those looking to expand into the Iranian market