Kaveh Ranjbar
Kaveh Ranjbar is an internet infrastructure expert, former ICANN Board Director, and co-founder of Whisper Security. He thinks freely, builds companies, and leads people.
- born in tehran/iran in a middle class liberal family. my mother was a nurse and my father was a documentary filmmaker. they met in rome. during their studies.
- i got my first computer at 7 and learned how the world connects through networks by 11.
- i helped build the first networks in iran—connecting people online since 1994.
- left iran since 2001 lived in dubai/oxford/london/amsterdam/rotterdam and now scotland.
- studied pure mathematics and continued with computer science (formal methods in software engineering). masters from university of oxford.
- co-founded the largest business isp in iran and helped 10s of other isps in the country and region to start. founded two successful startups in iran while studying in the uk.
- i worked for 15 years to keep the global internet running for people everywhere. at ripe ncc, i ran one of the internet's 13 root servers, the world's largest internet measurement network, and the largest internet data system. i transformed how people find information online through whois, served on the icann board of directors for 6 years, chaired the ietf trust for 3 years, and led ietf operations for 2 years. i built communities and met people across 110+ countries around the world.
- love my home country iran but because i strongly believe in free internet and have acted forcefully on it. last time i had a chance to visit was in 2016. not a fan of a jail cell otherwise i would have visited more often. i am fully against the dictatorship and government there and within my expertise will do anything possible to make people of iran and anywhere else more free.
- love understanding the world through philosophy, math, biology and dynamics of emergence.
- i understand the world as a network of connected beliefs and ideas—a system where everything links to everything else. i think of it as a graph of infinite tuples shaped like:
< jtb ⊂ ℝ, type ⊂ ℕ> <--> predicate <--> < jtb ⊂ ℝ, type ⊂ ℕ>
(in short, the world can be understood as infinite justified true beliefs, from a set of countable types (dimensions), which connect to another set of infinite beliefs within a set of countable dimensions. at scale, rules emerge and common understanding inevitably gets shaped between all people and systems because dimensions create natural limits on what can affect what.)
- i know there are a lot of things i don't understand
- and i know there are some things i know i understand
- and i know there are a lot of things i "think" i understand
- but my real interest is in the things that i don't know but i understand
- i do a lot of self reflection to know those
- ultimate control is lack of control
- if i can observe and understand, i have full control
- if i try to exert power, i am trying to control. trying to control means i don't understand, which is totally fine but not what i like. i like to spend that energy to figure out what i don't understand and understand them
- most people are stuck in a control loop, if i can i like to show them there is another possibility as well.
- things emerge in all networks and trying to control them, at best, delays the inevitable shape
- i do respect natural order of things, there is the most real feedback in how things have agreed to work
- if i don't like that order, my first step is to understand why that order has shaped in that community
- and then i will try to find other communities which share patterns i like and try to connect the network i don't like to the one that i desire. if i was right in my disliking, i will end up with a sustainable community that i like!
- existence mean a desire to continuation
- longevity, sustainability, reproduction are any thing's strategy to "keep existing"
- environment is of course emergent and nothing can predict how it changes, because knowing how it changes, changes how it emerges.
- to "keep existing", everything picks a strategy. everything can affect a finite number of resources at any given time, so everything bets. smarter or more powerful can not not have a meaning in a universal context.
- running organisations should be based on giving trust and eliminating mistrust
- the most important tool of a leader is listening—not to metrics, but to people: from team members to customers to critics
- being able to set up a sustainable loop, where input from all possible sources come in, gets translated to actions that all stakeholders can subscribe to, or at least not object to, means being able to set up the best organisation in the world.
- people matter and understanding people is the heart of being a good human. nobody is stupid, nobody is irrelevant. of course sometimes you have to stop listening to certain voices, but that is the hardest decision and it means limiting potential (which is a valid strategy sometimes)
- change is inevitable, source of change, is always external
- even if the source is fully known and understandable, the resulting change is still "random" to any observer as their reaction to change, even when countable, as a collective can result in uncountable outcomes
- the goal is to guess the best strategy, and to guess the best strategy, organisms or organisations should efficiently use their resources to rely as much as possible to external forces, but arrange internal organs to be as resilient as possible
- the downsides are worth it
- simple, small, fast to change is the way to go
- right breakdown of responsibilities, while relying on the least number of different "types" of external forces is always the best bet.
- this means as a whole the organism relies on as much as different types of external forces, but per unit, it has special units which rely on least amount of possible external forces
- internally, minimising the types always wins. organs should translated all chaos they understand from outside to one or bare minimum number of types necessary to operate
- systems work best when they are open to new information but careful with what they create—be as liberal as you can imagine in what you receive, be as conservative as possible in what you send, and
if
you do not understand what you have received, always ignore it, except when it is really necessary to
complain
- everything said above, and everything omitted above are encompassed in this "robustness principle"—the way networks and systems stay healthy
- this is why diversity matters, why listening to people matters, why separation of responsibilities matter, and why there is a natural limit for everything in this world when translating information from one space to another
- there is only abundance, everything is abundant
- if something is limited, it is because it's being looked at from the wrong "type" space
- limits are rooted in the observer
- i live in scotland.
- i build whisper security—a system that helps people understand and protect the global internet infrastructure. i work every day to bring clarity to information about the world's networks, side-by-side with my co-founder and lifelong friend, soroush.
- we have built the technology, assembled a world-class team of people, and are now creating the future of internet security.
- you can email me: kaveh@kaveh.org