Portrait of Mahdis Rezaei

I build things.

Products, teams, and a life that took five countries to assemble.

The journey

Five countries, one through-line

Five countries. One person who keeps doing the same thing in each of them: taking something ambiguous and hard and turning it into something real that people can trust. This is the long way around to that sentence.

  1. 01

    Esfarāyen, Iran

    1987 to 2006

    Born in a small town in northeast Iran, into a family of builders. My parents had little formal schooling, and my mother never learned to read, yet they started business after business from nothing. I grew up at the kitchen table while they sketched the next one, and I understood early that the map I'd been handed was smaller than the one I wanted.

    the threadLearning to bet on an idea before anyone hands you permission.
  2. 02

    New Delhi, India

    2006 to 2012

    I left at eighteen with three months of English and a dictionary, and came back with a bachelor's and a master's in computer science. I learned the language the way I'd later learn products: not from the textbook, but by listening for how people actually talk and what they're really asking for underneath it.

    the threadFluency is listening, not vocabulary.
  3. 03

    Rome, Italy

    2012 to 2014

    An MBA on a full scholarship. I already knew how to build the thing; I went to Rome to learn the half they don't teach engineers: how a product earns its market, and why the best idea still loses if no one can find the people it's for.

    the threadThe engineer learning to think like the business.
  4. 04

    London, UK

    2014

    Six months as a marketing intern, and my first real taste of the working world, in a city that runs on a hundred languages at once. It settled a question I'd been circling for years: I didn't want to study products from the outside. I wanted to build them.

    the threadStudying products turned into needing to build them.
  5. 05

    New York, USA

    2014 to 2019

    I arrived with two degrees and almost no experience, and built a career the only way I know how: one hard thing at a time. A fifteen-person startup where everyone did everything. A company through the chaos of its IPO year. Then platforms for international tax, where a wrong answer is expensive. New York is where I found product management and made it mine.

    the threadAmbiguity stopped being the scary part and became the job.
  6. 06

    Los Angeles, USA

    2019 to now

    I moved west for family and the ocean, and did the work that finally pointed straight at what I care about. Subscription products at Amazon for Ring. Then Meta, where I crossed fully into product, and into AI and agentic systems that help decide what's safe at the scale of billions of people. Ambiguous, high-stakes, the kind where a confident wrong answer is worse than none. Exactly my kind of problem.

    On the side, I built Yadegar. I'd journaled for twenty years in three languages, and when I read it all back I didn't find a list of events; I found a handful of things that kept being true. So I built the tool I wished I'd had, and shipped it, web and iOS, on my own.

    the threadThe whole line coming into focus.

Read it back and it's one person the whole time. That's the job. It's also the story.