I Wanted the Guest Thinking About What to Wear, Not Whether to Come

Farshad Negahdar on Running a Podcast Like a Business, Retiring a Professional Identity, and Leading a 53-Year-Old Company Through Its Hardest Year — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode PP11

Three things converged. A desire to build a network of executives who could solve each other’s business problems. A love for the podcast medium — powerful enough that headphones could pull him out of a remote construction camp and place him, as he describes it, sitting in the middle of a conversation happening somewhere else entirely. And a deep, long-running fascination with business itself. When those three met, Karkasb was the result.

In this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri — part of the special Persian Podcasting series — Farshad Negahdar, CEO of Vima, co-founder of the content house Koja, and co-host and producer of Karkasb, maps the full arc from an iPod loaded with downloaded English-language podcasts in a remote Iranian construction site, to a podcast that reached sixty thousand subscribers, to a period of burnout that led to a presentation to a board of directors, which led to an unexpected answer that changed everything.

An iPod in the Construction Camp

Farshad started his professional life in Iran’s construction industry in 2010 — a world of large-scale infrastructure projects, remote sites with poor internet connectivity, and a working culture he describes as genuinely exciting rather than merely demanding. He worked on Bagh-e Ketab Tehran, on Phase 12 of Assaluyeh — one of the country’s largest industrial projects — and gradually moved from project planning and control toward organizational development and process improvement.

At the sites, where connectivity was often non-existent and extended stays of a week or a month were routine, he carried a loaded iPod. Jocko Podcast. Stuff You Should Know. Radiolab. Download at home, listen anywhere. The combination of isolation and good audio created what he describes as a distinctive quality of attention: headphones go on, the physical space dissolves, and you’re sitting in the room where the conversation is actually happening.

“That effect,” he says, “has never left me. Even today, when I put on headphones, I’m completely cut off. I’m sitting in the middle of the conversation, next to whoever is behind the podcast.”

Three Foundations of One Podcast

By around 2017 or 2018, three things had been developing in parallel. First: a desire to build a community of Iranian managers and founders who could use their network to solve each other’s problems — not as a formal association exactly, but something like a business club, where an HR director at Digikala and an HR director at Snapp could connect and find each other’s missing resources. A mentor told him the idea wouldn’t work: there’s no thread strong enough to hold those beads together beyond one or two meetings, he said. Farshad set it aside without fully letting it go.

Second: his love for the podcast medium had expanded. He had discovered Persian-language podcasting — specifically Channel B — and describes the encounter as genuinely disorienting: how had he missed something this good? He started following Persian podcasts broadly and became increasingly drawn to the format’s potential for business content.

Third: his role in Vima as head of organizational development had given him visibility across every department simultaneously. He was reading processes in HR, marketing, finance, IT, project management, and working with senior managers across all of them — which meant he was absorbing, continuously, the texture and vocabulary of running a complex organization.

“Those three things together,” he says, “produced Karkasb.”

Treating a Hobby Like a Business From Day One

The contrast Farshad draws with how most Persian podcasters operate is consistent and precise. Most, he says, treat the work as a hobby: they do it because they love it, they don’t build process around it, they don’t pay their team, they don’t think about their stakeholders. He decided from the beginning to treat it like a business — which meant identifying who the stakeholders actually were.

He mapped four: the audience (who needed quality content worth their time), the guest (who needed a reason to show up and stay connected afterward), the team (who needed engagement, ownership, and genuine motivation), and eventually, sponsors. For each, a different design problem. For the audience: production quality and editorial consistency. For the team: actual salaries, from the first episode — not volunteer contributions. For the guest: something more unusual.

He made his first ever pitch to Vima’s board of directors to secure the company’s conference room as a recording space. It was, he notes with some humor, the first formal presentation of his professional life. The board said yes, with a simple condition: book in advance and don’t conflict with actual meetings.

The Invitation That Made the Guest Think About What to Wear

The hardest part of building a conversation-based podcast is cold outreach — approaching people who have no reason to know you exist and convincing them to spend two hours in a room with you. Farshad chose to do this the hardest possible way: physical invitations, designed for a show that hadn’t yet published a single episode.

When a designer asked what he wanted the invitation to do, his answer was specific: I want the guest to stop asking themselves whether to come, and start asking themselves what to wear. The invitation had to cross a psychological threshold. It had to make attendance feel like the obvious next step.

He walked through the three modes of outreach: warm contact (someone you already know well, directly invited), warm-to-warm (you find a mutual connection and ask them to bridge), and cold (you send something to a company’s PR department and hope). All three happened. Over twenty of Karkasb’s early invitations went out through the PR route — cold, to executives at companies they had no connection to. A significant portion said yes.

“We couldn’t say: we have a hundred thousand listeners. We had nothing yet. So we had to make the artifact itself convincing.”

Sixty Thousand Subscribers, and the Role of Luck

Karkasb grew substantially beyond what Farshad had imagined. He had set a ceiling in his own mind at seven or eight thousand listeners — already more than he could reasonably expect. By the time of this recording, the subscriber count was approaching sixty thousand.

He is notably reluctant to attribute this primarily to his own strategy. COVID helped: the period of lockdown drove podcast listening broadly, and Karkasb benefited alongside many other shows that were already producing consistent content. The early guests — already influential in Iranian business circles — brought their own networks. Influencer marketing was used creatively and cheaply, with several prominent creators accepting reduced rates or favorable terms because they found the project interesting. A spinoff podcast called Rooz Yek, produced in partnership with Pivast monthly magazine, added audience from a different channel.

“A significant portion of this,” he says plainly, “is luck. COVID helped us. Castbox helped the whole category. These were accelerators, not things I designed.”

The Burnout That Produced a Business Plan

After several seasons and a promotion to deputy for business development at Vima — where he was simultaneously managing marketing, HR, organizational development, IT, and public relations — Farshad hit a wall. He describes it precisely: physically and psychologically exhausted, unable to feel progress, genuinely in need of change.

He went to Vima’s board and asked to stop coming in entirely. The board said: you can’t leave that cleanly, given your current responsibilities. Come in two days a week and we’ll figure out the rest.

During that partial withdrawal — which coincided with Arash Barahmand leaving the editorship of Pivast monthly and new social space opening up between them — he began meeting Barahmand informally. They ate lunch together, went to random places, talked without agenda. At every turn, Barahmand called it by the same name: hashtag retirement. They were, he said, both hashtag-retired. The phrase took on a life, and eventually became the premise of a second podcast.

Hashtag Retirement — And the First Hashtag Retiree

Hashtag Baznesheshtegi (Hashtag Retirement) is built around people who are redefining their professional identity — not permanently exiting the workforce, but transitioning between fundamentally different versions of what they do and who they are. The concept came directly from lived experience.

Farshad had, by this point, become the first hashtag retiree himself. The person who had been deputy for business development, embedded across every Vima department, was about to become CEO — which required retiring a previous professional self in order to inhabit a substantially different role. He had worked through that transition, in part, by preparing a strategic plan for Vima’s future with help from his longtime friend Dara Nafisi, and presenting it to the board. The board’s response was not what he expected: if you can execute this, come be CEO.

“That period,” he says, “was practice. I rehearsed the redefinition of a professional identity first in my own life, and then talked about it on Hashtag Retirement.”

Leading a 53-Year-Old Company Through Its Hardest Year

Vima, as Farshad describes it, is a construction company with an unusually specific core business: building and supplying camps and site facilities for large industrial projects. When a major refinery, petrochemical plant, or aluminum factory is being built, Vima arrives first — constructing the prefabricated city where the project’s workers will live and work throughout the build. It’s a highly specialized niche within the construction industry, one with a 53-year institutional history and a portfolio of what Farshad calls “children” — product lines that were developed internally over decades.

He is careful to say that this year, by his own assessment, is the hardest the company has seen in fifteen years. He doesn’t elaborate on specifics, but the weight of the responsibility is audible throughout the conversation. When Hossein notes that a CEO managing this scale of operation and a decades-long institutional history would logically have stepped back from podcast involvement entirely, Farshad’s response is both practical and personal: the podcast network is precisely the asset that makes Vima’s media presence possible, at a level of relationship depth that traditional advertising couldn’t buy.

Why Persian Podcasting Becomes an Industry When It Creates Real Value for Business

One of the episode’s most direct passages concerns what Farshad sees as the actual threshold between Persian podcasting as a passion project and Persian podcasting as an industry. His answer is specific: when businesses can point to concrete, measurable returns on their podcast involvement — not just brand association, not just goodwill, but actual business outcomes — the economics will follow.

He draws a sharp distinction between sponsorship and partnership. Sponsorship, as currently practiced in most Persian podcasting, is transactional: a brand pays for a mention or a slot, and the relationship ends there. Partnership is structural: a company sees the podcast as a genuine extension of their business development or networking capacity, becomes embedded in it, and benefits from outcomes that are traceable. Vima’s own relationship with Karkasb was always meant to be the second model, not the first.

“The sponsor is not a cow you just milk,” he says. “You have obligations toward them — to make the relationship produce something real. When Vima gave us the conference room and the camera, I felt obligated to make something that justified that.”

Stepping Back From the Microphone

By the time of this recording, Farshad has made a decision that’s been building for some time: he is stepping back from his hosting role on Karkasb. Two recent seasons have featured Maideh as co-host, and her presence has demonstrably improved the content. He cites the specific value of gender dynamic in conversation-based interviews: a female host draws different answers, creates different emotional registers, and connects with a different subset of the guest’s experience. He attributes no small amount of the show’s recent quality to her involvement.

His own future role will be as producer rather than host. The network he has built — with over eighty of Karkasb’s guests, with whom he maintains genuine personal relationships, meeting for meals, discussing business problems — will continue to run through him. The guest selection and outreach remain his domain. What changes is who is behind the microphone.

The reason, he says, is that he wants to build something specifically in the construction and infrastructure space — a more specialized show, tightly connected to his own industry, where the expertise he’s accumulated over fifteen years in industrial construction can contribute something that general business conversation cannot. That project is in pre-production at the time of the recording.

Koja — The Content House That Grew From Two Podcasts

Koja (Where), the content production company Farshad co-founded, emerged from the convergence of Karkasb and Hashtag Baznesheshtegi into a shared infrastructure. Rather than two separate projects managed independently, the logic of running a team, maintaining quality standards, building relationships with sponsors and media partners, and producing consistent content applied equally to both — and eventually to other projects that joined the umbrella.

He describes Koja as serving a support function: a place where the production, editorial, and business-development expertise that individual shows need can be shared rather than duplicated. It is not, he emphasizes, a content agency in the traditional sense — it doesn’t simply produce content for clients. It is a house where projects that share values and quality standards coexist and support each other.

Siavash Safarianpour, and What Watching a Professional Looks Like

One of the episode’s most admiring passages is Farshad’s account of what he observed when Siavash Safarianpour joined as a co-host on Karkasb. He doesn’t use many words to say it, but the substance is precise: whatever Safarianpour’s emotional or physical state on a given recording day, the moment he puts on headphones and presses record, everything changes. A different presence emerges. The quality of the conversation rises perceptibly. The episode is simply better.

“He’s an artist,” Farshad says. “It doesn’t matter how tired he is or what’s going on. When he sits behind the mic, the quality goes up several levels. You can see it in his work with very fine detail.”

The Cozy Corner — Cutting Off and Going In

Asked where his own cozy corner is, Farshad’s answer circles back to where the episode began: headphones, and the specific quality of disconnection they produce. Not a place, not a time of day — but a mode of attention. When the headphones go on, the surrounding world becomes irrelevant, and he is wholly inside whatever conversation he’s listening to or whatever problem he’s thinking through. That state — which has been part of his life since an iPod in a remote construction site — is the condition he associates most closely with his best thinking and most genuine rest.

A Dedication

Farshad dedicates the conversation to Mahdis, his wife. He is brief and specific: without her support across the years when Karkasb was being built — and especially during the period of transition when he stepped back from Vima, when the outcome was genuinely uncertain — none of this would have been possible to sustain. He says she understood what he was doing before he had fully articulated it himself, and that understanding made the difference.