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> My assumption was that a structure like this would be legal: - Partner in US/UK registers their own company - Opens Stripe under their company name - Hires me as a remote contractor (like any distributed team) - I hold equity as a foreign shareholder (which I thought was legal for non-US persons)

That structure is explicitly illegal because you are an Iranian national. It does not matter whether you are a contractor: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/560.419

US business entities may not ever do business with Iran for any reason: https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2012/10/iran-...

> Is your point that even this structure violates sanctions because I'm Iranian?

Yes.

> Or that the risk/complexity makes it impractical for anyone without massive legal resources?

Companies on the scale of Toyota or Huawei try to circumvent these sanctions. They are regularly found out and caught and prosecuted:

> Do you know if Indian tech companies face similar restrictions when working with Iranians, or is it more open?

Sorry, I'm not Indian and have no knowledge of Indian laws. I would strongly advise you seek legal counsel from a person familiar with them, preferably a barrister/solicitor (in Indian terms).

> If the Western partnership path is genuinely impossible (not just hard), I need to know that.

For all intents and purposes, for you, it is. I'm sorry, genuinely, that our countries are in this position with regards to each other. It isn't your fault, but it is how it is.

Editing to add: the ONLY exception I can think of to this would be if you flee Iran, plead for and are granted asylum in the United States or a third country with better relationships to it. This is extraordinarily hard, and possibly a violation of Iranian law for me to even suggest to you.

> Editing to add: the ONLY exception I can think of to this would be if you flee Iran, plead for and are granted asylum in the United States or a third country with better relationships to it. This is extraordinarily hard, and possibly a violation of Iranian law for me to even suggest to you.

Couldnt they just immigrate normally? I dont know how this all works, but there is a reasonably large size group of Iranian expats in my country (canada), many of them with jobs in the tech sector. I think they are just normal immigrants and not asylum seekers. I imagine its hard (especially with the current gov taking an anti-immigration tone), but probably a lot easier than getting asylum in usa.

The United States has effectively halted immigration from Iran: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/06/rest...

Canada is a different matter and certainly, if the OP immigrated to Canada and was living there as an Iranian national with legal Canadian residency, the situation would be different.

They’d need an Iranian exit visa first, if I’m not mistaken.

I've never heard of Iranian exit visas being particularly difficult to get.

IANAL, but my understanding is that the asylum seeking status is required to avoid sanctions laws?

UPDATE: I'm pulling back from seeking Western partnerships.

Multiple commenters have explained that even the "contractor + equity" structure violates sanctions and is illegal. I genuinely didn't understand this - I thought it was a gray area. It's not.

I'm not asking anyone to break the law or take legal risk. That was naive on my part.

Based on helpful suggestions in this thread, I'm now focusing on: - India (no sanctions, large tech industry) - UAE/Dubai (open to Iranian nationals) - Turkey (regional tech hub) - Singapore (need to research legality)

If you're from one of these countries and interested in partnership, feel free to reach out: EchenDeligani@gmail.com

To everyone who took the time to explain sanctions compliance: thank you. This thread educated me on things I clearly didn't understand.

The technology still works. The market still exists. I just need to find it in the right geography.

Best of luck, the product seems pretty cool.

thank you very much, I appreciate it

You seem like a good person, wishing you all the best!

thank you very much

> Partner in US/UK registers their own company - Opens Stripe under their company name - Hires me as a remote contractor (like any distributed team) - I hold equity as a foreign shareholder (which I thought was legal for non-US persons)

This structure clearly violates sanctions, yes.

The person opening the Stripe account in this case would be breaking the law and would be taking on the legal consequences of violating those sanctions.

Having another person act as a proxy for a business in a sanctioned country is unquestionably illegal, regardless of how you structure it. Equity agreements, remote contractor, handshake agreements, crypto payments, doesn't matter. Any arrangement like this is designed to avoid sanctions and violating sanctions is a big deal.

Most of commenters in this thread are overcomplicating things and have no experience with gray area industries. What you need is Turkey, the UAE and Dubai. The payment stack however can be Chinese/middle eastern/eastern European. This is a fairly standard play for people of your background, from there you can bootstrap and then ultimately leverage yourself into a new citizenship (most commonly Canadian and Australian, or other places with easier citizenship by investment routes).

You are asking technologists in an English speaking forum targeting the American centric world. You should be enquiring with friends in the nearby Islamic countries. None of the problems you have encountered are new or have no solutions for. As a suggestion, look up the payment providers used by Pornhub (they are blacklisted by Visa and Mastercard) and that is a good starting point for you. Also look at where a lot of crypto platforms incorporate. There is a whole world outside of the Delaware Corp + Stripe Atlas game, but you certainly won't learn that from silicon valley forums.

I strongly suggest you don't let desperation drive you into a poor deal or enter yourself into a disadvantageous partnership. Take some time off to clear your head, and talk to people. Don't let the whole "product led growth" US centric sales strategy cloud your business decisions. In the rest of the world, B2B is not limited to MasterCard/Visa and most of the notion/stripe style credit card driven SaaS don't necessarily exist in the same way. For your type of product, you should be charging more too.

Also most importantly, make sure your bank account is in the middle east and avoid dealing with USD under any circumstance. If you have a foreign bank account in a less friendly jurisdiction, an overzealous compliance department can easily shut down your entire business.

Turkey is not the biggest fan of Iran: https://www.worldecr.com/news/turkey-freezes-assets-of-irani...

but relations are certainly warmer than with e. g. the US.

Iran is not beloved by much of the Arabic-speaking world for cultural reasons, shared religion nonwithstanding.

Don't confuse the greater geopolitics with business when it comes to the middle east. They are perfectly happy to work with small business people like OP.

turkey and iran are about to become unlikely friends though, as israel starts to push to the west that turkey and iran are the same ultra-evil.

they already have some alignment on being anti-kurd

Can confirm there are reasonable numbers of Persian engineers with Australian residency.

I am not a lawyer, but my understanding of sanctions is that the entire point is to prevent exactly these partnerships from forming, as well as their much larger cousins. Western governments want to pressure your government to change its behavior because of the damage to people like you.

How will you get paid from a western US/UK bank if you want to receive the money in Iran?

Thats the issue: Most banks do not allow transactions to some countries, and if at all, under very timeconsuming checks&KYC stuff etc

I think, due to the seriousness and potential consequences of even inadvertently violating international sanctions, you are going to want to (somehow, I have no idea how) obtain legal advice on this subject from an attorney, not from random HN commenters.

I don't think - though I am not sure - that it is illegal for an American attorney to advise an Iranian national on what American laws are. There is an Iranian-American Bar Association at https://iaba.us/ which might be able to help.