From a QBasic Drawing
to Building Systems at Scale
For Mojtaba Ebadi, the fascination with technology started much earlier. He was around ten years old when he wrote his first program in good old QBasic. What stayed with him was not the programming lesson itself. It was what happened next. A few lines of code produced a drawing on the screen. It was a small thing, but it revealed something enormous: An idea could become a functioning system through code.
Mojtaba was already the kind of child who liked building things, assembling electronics kits, and taking apart whatever he was allowed to take apart. Programming was the same instinct without the physical limitations.
He could build almost anything he could imagine. So he kept building. Programs. Circuits. Electronics. Experiments. That instinct became the foundation of his technical career. By the time he entered university to study software engineering, the decision had effectively been made years earlier.
University changed something else. It taught him how to approach problems that did not have clean answers. Mojtaba became involved in programming competitions, where he met Maziar Gomrokchi and a group of engineers and researchers who would remain close collaborators.
In 2008, their team competed in the international Trading Agent Competition at the University of Michigan. He started working with Maziar then. They won first place in the world. They had competed against teams from institutions with far greater resources and recognition. The experience reinforced something Mojtaba would carry throughout his career: Great engineering is ultimately about solving real problems better than anyone else.
In 2011, he moved to Canada to continue his education and build software professionally. He joined a small software company and began translating academic technical ability into the realities of production engineering: maintaining systems, shipping software, working with customers, and making decisions where there was rarely a perfect technical answer.
Meanwhile, he and Maziar continued exploring AI and machine learning. They experimented constantly. They built things, tested ideas, discarded most of them, and learned from every iteration.
Then a friend from his university years, Martin Basiri, approached him about joining an early-stage startup called ApplyBoard. It was a difficult decision. Mojtaba had been building things of his own. Joining an early startup meant putting those ambitions aside. But the problem ApplyBoard was trying to solve was personal. As someone who had experienced international education himself, he knew how confusing, fragmented, and inefficient the process could be.
So he joined. When he arrived, the engineering team consisted of only four people. During the first weeks, he even shared an Airbnb with Martin. What happened next became one of the defining chapters of his career.
ApplyBoard grew from a small startup into a global unicorn. Engineering grew to more than 100 people. The company eventually grew beyond 1,500 employees. Mojtaba began as a software engineer and eventually became a senior engineering manager.
But the most important lesson was not about growth or titles. He discovered that, as organizations become more complex, the limiting factor is often no longer technology. It is how effectively people are organized to build technology.
His work at ApplyBoard focused on making international education dramatically easier to navigate. Students could discover programs and apply without navigating a maze of disconnected systems. Recruitment partners could spend less time on paperwork and administrative work. Educational institutions could process applications and make admissions decisions through systems built around their own workflows.
What began as a small internal idea eventually evolved into an entire product line and, ultimately, its own company. Millions of students would eventually move through systems Mojtaba helped build.
That is the achievement he values most. Not the size of the company. Not the number of engineers. The impact of the systems.
Today, he brings that same engineering philosophy to Elementera: Build something difficult. Make it useful. And make it work at scale.