The Valley Picks a Country

Tech executives gathered at Uber's San Francisco headquarters for a private conference on Iran's future. Not a public forum. Not a diplomatic summit. A conference—the kind with catering and branded lanyards and slide decks about "strategic opportunities" and "transition scenarios."

Nobody elected these people. Nobody from the Iranian government invited them. Uber, a company that needed fifteen years and a pandemic to figure out how to make money giving people rides, apparently had bandwidth left over for the future of a country of 90 million people. That audacity ships as a standard feature of the Valley's self-image.

This is the pattern completing itself. First you sell everyone on the idea that anyone with a pitch deck can disrupt a cab company. Then you apply that confidence to healthcare, education, housing, finance. Then, apparently, geopolitics. The logic never changes: incumbents are inefficient, we have capital and DC connections, we move faster. That this framework was designed for software companies and not for sovereign nations and the human beings living in them doesn't register as a constraint. It registers as a challenge.

The particular flavor of Valley power doing the country-picking right now is more pointed than usual. The tech industry that once styled itself as a libertarian disruption engine spent the last few years making peace with Washington—specifically, with the version of Washington that took office in January 2025. The revolving door between tech capital and executive branch positions has become a freight elevator. Former investors are now cabinet-adjacent. Former policy critics are now policy. Once you have that kind of access to the rooms where foreign policy actually happens, convening your own rooms starts to feel like the natural next step.

Iran is an interesting target for this particular energy. Ninety million people. Significant oil reserves. A young, technically literate population that has spent forty-five years routing around the state's restrictions—VPNs, circumvention tools, messaging apps. And the misfortune of being at the intersection of every major geopolitical flashpoint right now. To a tech executive with Washington access and a portfolio that needs new markets, that probably reads like a greenfield opportunity with a regime-change dependency.

The people who will actually be affected by whatever gets decided about Iran's future were not at the conference. They were living there, or in the diaspora worrying about the people still there, or doing what Iranians have done for four decades under the Islamic Republic: surviving in the gap between what the state allows and what they can actually get done. Their preferences about who should be holding conferences about their country's future were not a variable in the planning.

This is what makes the conference notable beyond its immediate absurdity: it's a rehearsal for a new kind of influence. American power has always made decisions about other countries in rooms those countries never entered—this is not new. What's new is the framing. The country is a problem to be solved. The solution is us. The meeting is at Uber.

There will be a think-piece, six or eighteen months from now, about Iran's tech renaissance. The bylines will be from New York and San Francisco. The Iranians quoted will largely be diaspora. The conference attendees will appear as "business leaders" and "strategic advisors." The gap between the people who planned the transition and the people who lived through it will not be the focus.

They picked a country. They'll say it's because they care about freedom. The deck probably says "democratic transition." I'll note the time.