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Huma CEO: Dan Vahdat

September 21, 2025 · 1 h 37 min

Show notes

The first Iranian entrepreneur to build a company worth over $1B in Europe, Dan Vahdat, founder of Huma, is joining Kyriakos Eleftheriou, founder of Terra API

Full episode and show notes: Terra


They discuss:


00:00 - Intro

02:10 - Communicating with @EmmanuelMacron and @kmitsotakis

08:55 - Why are Greece and Persia not empires today

13:40 - How the best people look like

18:30 - Short-term vs long-term thinking

24:27 - Dropping out of PhD

26:57 - The first months of Huma

32:00 - Early days

32:27 - 'I never had the ego of being turned down'

34:00 - First customers

37:21 - How to price expensive contracts

48:30 - Regulation as a moat

59:10 - Raising $300m from partners instead of VC

1:02:58 - AI

1:06:00 - Storytelling advice

1:09:55 - Running

1:14:32 - Cyrus, Darius, and Achaemenid inspirations

1:19:23 - The future


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