Leonid Kirakosyan, a partner at McKinsey & Company, joins us to discuss the importance of digital transformation and making Armenia a more attractive destination for strategic investment. We also spoke about how Armenia’s tech industry can have a larger impact on the economy and what it will take to turn the country into a globally competitive innovation hub, including addressing the talent needs of the ecosystem.
Despite leading the region in many progressive metrics, the past few years have reinforced how peace isn’t something Armenia can take for granted: it must cultivate optimal conditions for innovation because of external threats, and that will take conscious architecting.
Liana Karapetyan, an associate at SmartGateVC and the director of Hero House Angels, joins us this week to discuss angel investing opportunities in Armenian start-ups. The Hero House Angels program allows individual investors from around the world to be connected with the Armenian start-up ecosystem and make investments. We also discussed Armenia’s ecosystem's trajectory as the number of start-ups in the country grows.
HyeTech, a gathering of Armenian professionals who share technical, business and entrepreneurship expertise, is a case study in the value that networking organizations create for both their members and the ecosystem they operate in.
The first guest of the newly launched Creative Tech podcast series, "EVN Disrupt" is Ashot Arzumanyan, a partner at SmartGateVC, a venture capital fund focusing on early stage start-ups. We discussed the Armenian start-up ecosystem, how it has evolved over the last four years and what we can expect from the Armenian tech sector in the near future. 0:00 Introduction/ 0:52 Founding of SmartGate VC/ 3:50 Tim Draper's investment in SmartGate/ 8:28 Evolution of Armenia's start-up ecosystem/ 15:55 Rise of product companies in Armenia/ 19:04 Recent investments in Armenian start-ups/ 29:26 Hero House LA, Diasporan start-ups/ 35:19 Challenges/ 37:58 Future of SmartGate and the ecosystem
EVN Report’s mission is to empower Armenia, inspire the diaspora and inform the world through sound, credible and fact-based reporting and commentary. Our goal is to increase public trust in the media. EVN Report is the media arm of EVN News Foundation registered in the Republic of Armenia in 2017.
