EPISODE 3: Garo Armen, CEO of Agenus and chairman of the Children of Armenia Fund

Thank you very much, Madison. Good to be here. So, first, would you be able to tell me a little bit about yourself and a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are today?

Well, I was born in Istanbul, Turkey. And at that time, I'm sure that it's gotten better because I haven't been there since the day I left. That was 55 years ago. It was a challenging place for a young Armenian to be living in and growing up. So because of those challenges, I took a journey to the US and it was the best journey of course for me because it opened up my vision of things and my life changed in a very short period of time. I went to college and then to grad school in the US and worked at Brookhaven National Laboratories, which is a major research center primarily funded by the government and run by a consortium of East Coast Ivy League universities. And then after that, I took a journey to the world of finance even though I wasn't really equipped or trained in finance. As I tell people, all you need is seventh grade algebra in order to be able to master the field of finance. And shortly thereafter, I went back to my research roots by having taken an interest in biotechnology, immunology, and of course, cancer. Cancer is a major problem. It's a humiliating disease. My mother had died of cancer at the age of 47. And then fast forwarding that, I did a few corporate restructurings. And then in 2001, I took my first trip to Armenia. And that first trip was a fantastic eye opener because Armenia had just come out of the post-Soviet transition. But the resources had dried up because the Soviet subsidies basically had been completely withdrawn. And when I saw the plight of the village children, I made a commitment that I would come back and help them to the extent possible. And that extent possible turned into six to eight trips to Armenia every year and formation of Children of Armenia Fund. And the rest is, we can discuss fast forwarding it today.

It's Madison. It was an organic process. How the idea started was I was guided by a priest in Boston to go to a particular village on my first trip to rural Armenia. And when I took that trip and basically saw that these villages had a very high proportion of young people but no jobs, no real income, and no real hope for them to really look forward to a future that could explore their capabilities and potential. So we started with one village and we were not a professional aid organization. In fact, on my trip back from that village on the first trip, I met with some of the big players in Armenia, USAID, UNDP, and the World Bank, and I outlined to them that there was a major need that we would try to tackle to address them. And so their first question to me, all of them, was, 'Have I done this before?' And I said, 'No, I had never done it before.' But just because you haven't done something before doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done. After all, Steve Jobs wasn't born with the iPhone. He invented it, even though iPhone didn't exist before. So with that, we decided that we would tackle this challenge. And as we tackled the challenge, Madison, it became an organically engineered process. Meaning you go there and you see that their school is in dilapidated condition. So you do something about the school. But then once initial renovations and safety measures are put into place, you realize that it's been about 15 years since the Soviet Union collapsed. And during those 15 years, Armenian educational standards had really diminished. And so even though the Armenian nation and people have taken pride in their educational standards, during those very challenging 15 years, education fell apart. So after we fixed the school, it became clear that we had to teach them how to teach. We had to teach them how to run a facility. And then we realized that children had major health problems, and of course you cannot have children go to school and learn when they are encountering major health issues. So we had to get into the area of health care, providing them with health care, preventive care as well as healthcare intervention. And then after a short period, we also realized that families had all kinds of challenges, psychosocial challenges, and typically things that Armenian families would be embarrassed to talk about. And so as they trusted us because they knew our intentions were good, we weren't there to make a profit. In fact, we were there to expend resources. And as that trust built, it became an evolutionary process for COAF to really address needs of a village in a holistic manner. And of course, beyond that, foremost is economic development because that's critical to the well-being of a region, people, families, and so on. So we started engaging in economic development programs. So that was a very well-defined sort of formula that worked in one village, and of course as the formula worked in one village, neighboring villages came to us and said, 'What about us?' And so we felt compelled to expand the program to other villages, and by the time we were done, we had touched about 50 plus villages. Armenia has about a thousand villages throughout the country. So as we sort of looked at the future and calculated what it would take to get to a thousand villages, we realized that we had to change the program a bit. And that prompted us to come up with what we call COAF Smart Campuses. These are COAF Smart Centers. These are after-school educational programs as well as adult education programs in villages. And so that expanded into one region of Armenia. And now we're in the process of expanding COAF Smart programs to approximately four separate regions of Armenia. And so it's a big program. To date, we have spent nearly $100 million. And our annual budget is about $10 million, which I think puts COAF at the top ranking of any organization, including foreign aid services, dedicated to spending this kind of money and resource in rural Armenia.

That's right. I mean, you hit it right there when you say impact. Well, you know, it sort of snowballs in a good way because what happens is that when you're making these profound changes village by village or region by region, people actually realize that there is potential. Now, of course, everybody's fixated on economic potential, and that's a wonderful thing. But what we're seeing is that entrepreneurship in these villages is coming to life and it's happening organically, which is wonderful to see. From time to time they'll come to us and ask for guidance, and of course we've got programs to provide that guidance, but a lot of it is natural. And a lot of it is such that now, for example, in the Lori region of Armenia where we have a Smart Center, a major campus, it's about 60 acres and it's got multiple modules: the educational Smart Center, we've got athletic facilities, we've got a conference center, and we've got farming activities that teach local communities how to farm efficiently. And we also collaborate with agencies including the USAID, for example. The US embassy has given us a grant year after year to teach English, and we have the largest English teaching program in rural Armenia. And the results have been phenomenal because English is an international language these days. We call it de facto Esperanto. Young people have not heard of Esperanto, but it was an initiative over 100 years ago to provide a common language globally. And of course it never came to fruition. And in fact, one of the considerations at the time for a very short period of time was for Armenian to be Esperanto because it's such a complete language both in terms of sounds, alphabetical sounds, as well as in descriptive words. But of course, so few people spoke Armenian, it became very impractical. But more than 100 years later, English is Esperanto de facto. It's an international language. I've gone to China a number of times. The Chinese in northern China speak a different language than the Chinese in southern China. And so when they meet together in a business context or other purposes, they speak in English because both sides understand English, they don't understand each other's dialects. So learning English is critically important. And of course, governance measures and civic activities, civil rights activities, all of these things have been programs that have been initiated by the US government, and we're very pleased that we've been a part of implementation. And that has had a major impact on our communities and our next generation. The next generation is the future, and it's important for us to empower them.

Yes, of course. In fact, on Tuesday of this week, every year COAF has a fantastic event in New York called the COAF Gala. Now, of course, it is a fundraiser, and year after year, we've raised anywhere between 7 and $10 million at this fundraiser, and it is an entertainment evening as well. A lot of fundraisers are boring events, but in our case, people come there, stay there for extended periods of time until 12, 1:00 in the morning because they're having fun. And I was reviewing a video, and we make this event both entertaining in terms of famous singers and other entertainers that come in, and also we have a bunch of videos that we show about the recent impact of COAF. And so I reviewed the video that is being prepared for this year's gala, and you asked a question, I've been doing this for a long time for the last 23 years, and when I watched this video, I started tearing because it was such a moving depiction of the individual people's stories that you cannot help but get emotional about it. It was very touching to see, for example, a lady from a village describing how her life was saved by COAF because COAF offered facilities to treat her cancer. Another man who was given an opportunity to build a furniture business and now he's one of the largest producers of furniture in Armenia, and he started with nothing, only because we gave him the opportunity to do it. And that of course speaks to having trust. Trust is one of the most important elements here. You have to give the people opportunity. You have to trust them. You have to respect them, and through trust, love, and respect, wonderful things happen. And that's what happened in the COAF villages, and that's one of the reasons that we have been successful and we have the collaboration of our communities and our young children who are engaged in not just helping themselves but engaged in active programs to help their communities. And that's a very special quality that we have imparted on our children and our communities.

Yes. In fact, what's happening is that when we came up with this Smart Center programs, imagine this is a center that could accommodate upwards of several thousand children coming through it every week. And it has 20 plus programs that encompass dancing, martial arts, gymnastics, cultural programs, arts, and of course math and sciences, robotics, AI, language programs, and so on. And what we have done is really, for example, in the Lori region of Armenia, we have brought about people to the Smart Center, children of course, but also some adults from neighboring upwards of 40 different villages. And this kind of commute provided by us. We have 20 special brand new minibuses that shuttle children every day from their hometowns to the Smart Center. And of course, when you do that and bring these communities together, it starts a communication and dialogue about all kinds of things. It takes a capability that may have been confined to a single village to that capability being communicated to scores of surrounding villages. And that opens up their horizon because now they're not alone, and their thoughts and ideas and capabilities and methodologies become validated in the eyes of others with their participation. And of course, our COAF team members are there running these facilities and programs day in and day out. So there's this collaborative effort between different village communities and COAF expertise that comes into play that creates this wonderful ecosystem. And through that, people realize that they're not alone and they have collective capabilities to do all kinds of neat things and productive things for themselves, for their communities, and for their country.

The biggest obstacle is the standard line that it's not possible. And of course something is not possible until you do it and demonstrate that it is possible. And so I think biases that are pervasive amongst people globally that if there is no precedence for something, that the default position is that it should not be tackled. And what we've proven to certainly within Armenia, but now the communities outside of Armenia that are getting engaged in what we do, what we're proving is that what was thought to be impossible indeed can be possible with hard work, with dedication, with trust, love, and a belief system that will make it work. And so other than that, it's the general challenges. Every time you do something, there are all kinds of challenges, local challenges, countrywide challenges that get in the way of you taking the initial steps. For example, like anywhere else, there are selfish interests that play a role anytime you involve a vendor. But through again an organic evolutionary process, we have developed a following with our external service providers and vendors that limit the group to those that are highly ethical in the way they work and they believe in the mission. So it's very important that the people that you collaborate with, whether they're agencies, international agencies or local vendors, have to be selected such that they need to believe in the mission, and through that belief wonderful things are born, and that's what we've demonstrated.

Well, it's a very good question. And if you are driven by some of the key principles of hard work, dedication, believing in what you do, trusting what you do, and also collaborating and being open to advice. Take advice from people, but decisions are made not by a committee. Successful decisions are made by listening to groups of people, getting their input, but at the end of the day, a successful decision needs to be made by an individual. And so when you gather all the information to make the decision that's going to guide your career or your value system going forward, then you need to trust it. But to get to that point of trust will require a lot of homework, a lot of information gathering, a lot of research. But once you get there, trust yourself. And of course along the way you will make some mistakes. But sometimes making mistakes is a very beneficial thing as long as you don't make a career out of making mistakes, because you will learn a great deal through these mistakes.

That kind of spiral you're talking about, Madison, sets in when you fear. So my advice to people is to have no fear, because if you fear and you go down that spiral that you're talking about, then it becomes a spiraling vicious circle and the outcome would be negative. So you have to basically rise from every failure by having a confidence in yourself and having no fear.