About

I’m Pedrum Shokouhi. I’m obsessed with how companies get built, funded, and run. So I write about them, take apart their strategy like an investor, and build my own. This is where I share what I’m learning.

Read the essays
Background
Worked in strategy and business development, built companies, then finished an MBA.
Writing
15 essays
Investing
Public companies, valued from their filings
Contact
Write to meLinkedIn (opens in a new tab)

The essays, as plates

  11. 2/3

Two rooms sit behind the essays. The World holds what I study when I am not writing. The Lab holds forty-seven machines you can run.

Before this

Companies I started.

Each one has its own site, with a prototype you can try.

All three, in depth (opens in a new tab)
  1. Bought out by partner investors Megalo (opens in a new tab) Fractional ownership of short-term rental homes in Florida, from under $5,000. I raised the capital and bought the homes, then shipped the app on iOS and Android. The partner investors bought the whole platform in a deal I negotiated. They run their own properties on it.
  2. Paid pilot, then stopped Nora AI (opens in a new tab) AI prospecting for wealth managers. Version 1 found prospects from public signals and wrote the first email to each. Built as Apex with two engineers. A wealth management firm paid for a pilot that ran several months. Advisors used it. The banks they work under would not permit it over risk and liability, so I wound it down.
  3. Launched, then pivoted NestDrop (opens in a new tab) Same-day licensed daycare, booked in under 60 seconds with the child’s profile sent ahead. 122 parent and daycare interviews in New York and Montreal. It launched and could not scale. The market was over-regulated, and I saw no way to dominate it, so I pivoted to a larger opportunity.
Software

Apps I built.

Rekeep and Final Table are on the App Store. The code is on GitHub, except Between, which is in App Review.

All of it on GitHub (opens in a new tab)

  1. Between

    iPhone and iPad

    Private messenger. Messages are end-to-end encrypted with MLS, the IETF standard, and the relay only forwards sealed envelopes. No phone number needed.

    Rust and OpenMLS, Swift, SwiftUI, Cloudflare Workers

    In App Review

  2. Rekeep

    Mac, iPhone and iPad

    Free clipboard manager. It searches 50,000 clips in under 130 ms, and clips never leave the device.

    Swift, SwiftUI

    App Store page for Rekeep (opens in a new tab)Code for Rekeep, on GitHub (opens in a new tab)

  3. Final Table

    iOS

    Strategy puzzle game with 100 card scenarios. It scores each decision out of 1,000, and its Monte Carlo results are bit-identical on every device.

    Swift, SwiftData

    App Store page for Final Table (opens in a new tab)Code for Final Table, on GitHub (opens in a new tab)

  4. Vantage

    Web, self-hosted

    Personal command center that merges 15 live feeds into one morning briefing. Every number is labelled with where it came from.

    Python and SQLite, or Cloudflare Workers and D1

    Code for Vantage, on GitHub (opens in a new tab)

  5. Machines

    Web

    This site’s Lab: 47 interactive simulations and a WebGL renderer written from scratch.

    HTML, CSS, JavaScript, WebGL

    Open the LabCode for Machines, on GitHub (opens in a new tab)

Command-line tools

Each is Python with no dependencies.