Hirad Fazeli

How I got here

I was born in Tehran in 1994 and started out with my hands in the physical layer — installing ADSL lines in people's homes in 2015. That is an unglamorous way to learn networking and an extremely effective one: you find out quickly that a diagram and a wall socket are different things.

From there I moved up the stack. Call-centre support, then network operations centres at AfraRasa and Parsonline, monitoring and troubleshooting large-scale fixed infrastructure across multiple cities, managing AAA servers, running change management on systems that thousands of people needed to just work. Somewhere in the middle of that I recorded 350 minutes of Wireshark training and a hands-on CCNA course, because explaining a thing is how I find out whether I actually understand it.

In 2021 I left Iran for Georgia. Relocating mid-career means starting again, and for a couple of years the work was whatever was in front of me — a rebranding project, translation, then almost three years as a live game presenter at Evolution in Tbilisi, on camera, in English, where a mistake is visible to everyone instantly. I do not list that to pad a CV. Working under that kind of real-time scrutiny changes how you handle pressure.

Underneath it I kept studying. I finished an MBA in 2020, a front-end course in 2022, and in 2024 passed AZ-104 to become a Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator. Somewhere in there the business half stopped being theory. I had spent a decade keeping other people's things running and wanted to run something of my own.

That something is ZEEberton. Since May 2026 I have run a map-first social network for pet owners single-handed — the product direction, what ships and when, the store listings, the pricing, and the conversations with vets and groomers who might put a pin on the map. I run it from Yerevan.

The through-line, if there is one: I like systems that have to stay up, and I would rather understand a thing end to end than own a comfortable slice of it.