Jasmine Moradi: No Longer Losing Her Colors in a System That Doesn’t See Them
Jasmine Moradi doesn’t begin her story with Tech, but with an escape. At four years old, her mother crosses the mountains of Iran with her two daughters to reach Sweden. Refugee. Displaced child. A visible and invisible minority at once. She then grows up in a country renowned for its equality and rationalism, but her intimate experience is more ambivalent. She speaks of a profound cultural shock between a warm, expansive, expressive Persian culture and a more codified, more reserved Nordic society, quieter in its mechanisms of exclusion.
She uses a metaphor that sums up her identity: “I was a Persian rainbow cat who came to Sweden and lost her colors.” In Sweden, she says, everything is white, gray, black. Inclusion doesn’t happen through outright rejection. It happens through non-invitation. The child who arrives at nine in the morning at a classmate’s house isn’t invited to lunch; she’s asked to wait in the bedroom. Nothing aggressive. But nothing welcoming. It’s these micro-experiences that shape one’s relationship with systems.
Her parents are highly educated but can’t find jobs matching their qualifications. She observes the injustice. She transforms it into a driving force. Her motto: “If you tell me no, I will find another way.” She decides to attend the country’s best schools. Communication, design (Berghs School of Communication), then Stockholm School of Economics. She wants no one to ever be able to refuse her based on doubt. Excellence becomes armor.
Yet, even after graduating from the most prestigious institutions, she still feels this disconnect. In the Swedish companies where she works, she’s often the only non-Swede among dozens of colleagues. When told “you are one of us,” she doesn’t hear it as a victory. She hears: you’re accepted because you’ve become like us, but she doesn’t want to become gray.
Creating Spaces When You’re Not Invited
She pivots to event management for fifteen years. She organizes, connects, brings people together. She describes this period as therapy. If Swedish society doesn’t spontaneously invite, she’ll create places of invitation. She develops large-scale events, negotiates partnerships, builds brands. This entrepreneurial phase gives her a concrete understanding of power dynamics, networks, and social recognition.
The decisive pivot comes when she writes a thesis on the power of music in retail. Spotify Business/Soundtrack Your Brand recruits her to lead global research on the emotional impact of in-store music. She then fully enters MusicTech and applied behavioral science. She conducts internationally featured studies, works on the relationship between sensory stimuli and purchasing behavior, and discovers a convergence that resembles her: science, technology, music, and strategy. She thinks she’s found her balance.
When Inclusive Discourse Doesn’t Survive the Strategic Slide
In a Swedish accelerator program, she discovers another mechanism: founding teams are formed mainly among men, capital flows through affinity, and strategic conformity is implicitly required. Then she joins a hypergrowth MusicTech startup, promising equity for artists and diversity in Tech. The dream is seductive and the resources considerable. The company grows from 50 to 800 employees in one year.
Two weeks after her arrival, a strategic presentation reveals the future leadership team: one woman among 30 men. She raises her hand and reminds them of the DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging) commitments displayed during recruitment. She opens what she calls a “Pandora’s box.” Four months later, she receives a message: she’s no longer part of the team. The internal signal is clear. Speaking has a cost.
She describes this period as her “Iranian revolution.” Isolation, anxiety, insomnia. The Swedish model she believed to be transparent reveals a tension between discourse and real power. DEIB committees exist as long as they don’t challenge governance.
Queens of Tech: Turning Individual Experience into Collective Demonstration
A leader once told her, to justify the absence of women: “I haven’t found them yet.” Her response won’t be an op-ed, but an empirical demonstration. She decides to interview 100 women in Tech, around the world. Same interview structure, same questions, same method. She’s looking for behavioral constants, not just anecdotes.
She discovers that cultural differences exist—particularly around motherhood in the United States or the United Kingdom—but that regarding funding and access to power, invariants dominate. Male networks function through co-optation. Men choose men. Female entrepreneurs must prove more, with less initial capital.
The testimony of Carolina Farberger, a former CEO who transitioned, acts as living proof. Before her transition, he could improvise. After, she must calibrate every word. Same experience, same competence, radically different perception.
Jasmine draws a simple and formidable metaphor from this: the system resembles IKEA furniture. Men receive the instructions and the pieces. Women receive the instructions, but not the pieces. They’re asked to keep learning, to wait, to prepare themselves. Meanwhile, others build.
Male Networks, Female Solitude
Her analysis goes further. She observes the power of male networks, their instinctive solidarity. She evokes a scene from Top Gun where men immediately mobilize to save one of their own. She sees in it a behavioral metaphor: a logic of corps, of loyalty, of “boys club” that unconsciously structures power and funding decisions.
The paradox is brutal. Challenging the system exposes you to exclusion. Staying silent perpetuates it. Yet many of the women she interviewed continue to move forward, to raise funds, to create. The “wow” isn’t a spectacular event, she says. It’s their persistence in a system that wasn’t built for them.
But this persistence has a cost. Three years of podcasting conducted alone. Finding guests, interviews, editing, distribution, analysis. Then moving to France, new position at a Travel Tech company, IVF journey, entrepreneurial support for her partner. Energy is no longer infinite.
Transform or Burn Out?
Today, Jasmine Moradi is at a crossroads. Turn her body of work into a book? Into academic research? Design an AI tool facilitating access to funding for women? Or focus her energy on her new role in Travel Tech in France?
Her guiding thread remains intact: understand systems to avoid dissolving into them. She’s not trying to become “one of them.” She’s trying to question implicit rules. Her journey goes beyond the question of gender. It interrogates the very design of our European tech ecosystems. Who decides? Who finances? Who is perceived as legitimate? What behavioral biases still structure our strategic choices?
When asked about her sources of inspiration, she doesn’t cite a single model but a collective movement: all the women trying to exist in a system that hasn’t integrated them into its initial architecture; her childhood imagination remains marked by Pippi Longstocking, a character created by Astrid Lindgren, a Scandinavian symbol of independence and non-conformity, who claims the right to be oneself without bending to dominant norms. Her favorite podcast is Diary of a CEO.
The little rainbow girl hasn’t disappeared. She’s learned to analyze the structures that neutralize colors. The question remains open: are the systems she observes ready to evolve, or will they continue to invite only on the condition of blending into gray?
