Armenia’s Future: From Biotech Breakthroughs to Fintech Revolutions

And we're going to host here worldclass entrepreneurs and the topic is Armenia's future from biotech breakthroughs to fintech revolutions. And for this, as I just mentioned, we're going to host two worldclass entrepreneurs. The first one is George Caribbean, the founder of Dojo, and next is Dr. Garo Armen, chairman and CEO of Agenus, joined by Saris Garzan, who will be moderating the chat, who is the CEO of UAT. So ladies and gentlemen, let's give a warm round of applause to our guests for taking the stage now.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's a great honor for me to be moderating this fireside chat with honorary guests. We are going to talk about Armenia's future from biotech breakthroughs to fintech revolution. And my guests are dear Garo Armen, Dr. Garo Armen, Armenian American scientist, entrepreneur and philanthropist, chairman and CEO of Agenus and founder of COAF, which has invested over 100 million to transform rural Armenia. And George Caribbean, serial entrepreneur, founder of two unicorns, Dojo and Capital on Tap, from telecom to fintech.

So I got a call from a friend who said you've got to meet this guy. He's going to go to the airport. He's very special. I dropped everything. Got in a cab. We met just before his flight and it was, you know, Garo has a something very magical, warm, electric, intelligent about him that drew me in. And I tried to meet him again. Because I'm now at a place in my life where I rewrite my life every 3 years and say what do I want to do in the next 3 years. So my life is full of windows. There's a time when I motorcycled across Latin America. There's a time when I wrote a book on my dad's life. He passed away last year and it was his 90th birthday present. It's the kind of thing where if you don't do in that window the right thing, the window closes on you and there's a right time for everything. And for me, the right time is I'm thinking of the next window. I'm not there yet. But to look at philanthropists, the real heroes of this world, who use their talents to do some good in a way that benefits society. And I may be going a bit too far here, but as part of that I read Gulbenkian's book. I read The Gambler, which is Koran's book. I reached out to James Tufankan, met with him in New York. I met with Garo. I was trying to get a feel for who are these people, how do they think, what can I learn from them? It's hard. Building a business is hard. Parting with your money is even harder. And doing it while you're alive and productive in your life is the right thing to do. The lesson from the two books I mentioned was these were lions of men. At some point they were both the richest men in the world. Amazing strength. But then they got too old and they thought they were still the lions that they were. They didn't plan their death and that awaits us all. So there is another book I read by an Irishman, The Billionaire That Wasn't, which really influenced me. It's the story of Chuck Feeney. He wanted to bounce his last check. He didn't trust anyone. He said, 'All these McKinsey people, the lawyers tell me what to do with my money. Get him out of here.' And he did it himself. He did it anonymously. So look, this was when I met him, I thought, I got to hold on to this guy. He's special. Long story short,

Such a wonderful story. So, you've been working very hard. You look a little tired today, but that's phenomenal.

You can handle it.

It's very interesting but I want to bring this back to today's theme. Speaking of biotech and fintech, both are heavily regulated and you both were able to hack the system and build worldclass companies and scale internationally. I would like you to share how did you do that? What are the growth hacks and how familiar are to both industries? So how it is done in biotech and how it is done in fintech?

I was at a conference recently and there were three top PE firms on a panel like this and they said the same three words over and over again and it landed like it was a no-shit moment. And it was 'software is dead' and it was in the middle of sentences but it came up again and again. These are the people investing in the future, by the way, some of the big titans of PE. So the way I've thought of innovation is first of all, there are different things you need to be at different stages of your growth. And sometimes it's schizophrenic because you got to be both in order to be able to constantly innovate. And there's been crisis time and time again. The first one was the dotcom meltdown in 2000. Almost 10 years later, you had the financial crisis and then almost 10 years later you had COVID. And 'software is dead' which is AI, by the way, AI and AI enablement. It's real. It's a wave that's going to wipe out entire industries, but it's also the most incredible opportunity, especially, and I walk around, I see the youth of Armenia. I've only been here three times in 20 years, spread seven years apart, and I'm ashamed to say that. This guy's brought me here, and Alex brought me here. And I'm grateful for it. But seeing the youth in the hallways here is just amazing. That's coming and they're part of that wave. So we're going to frog leap. It's like mobile phones frog leaping in a country where the phone system is terrible, which I think is what you did, Alex. So look, in terms of innovation, when you're small, it's all about finding product market fit and you're fighting like crazy and even unit economics can wait if you can show a path to it. So the third thing which is the most important thing as a founder is you got to tell a good story. And this is I really respect Alex for saying it was opportunist not strategy. He can say that now. When he was building his first business it was all strategy, I guarantee you. But it takes courage to say that. So small you're looking for product market fit. You become a, and you've got 18 months usually and you've got to convince someone this thing is sticky. And then you're a scale up. You need more rockets. You need more sources of thrust. So you've got to go international. You've got to sell more products. You've got to reach new markets. And then finally, the holy grail is escape velocity. It's when in rocket speak, it's when a rocket has enough inertia to break through the gravitational pull of the earth and continue going. And for business it's you've got a hole which is you're losing businesses that are either dying or leaving you. And the bigger your base, the bigger that hole. You're trying to sign up new customers harder and harder to fill that hole. And it costs money to do that. So if you get the flywheel going where you're throwing off enough cash to generate 20 plus percent growth and it's a flywheel that works on itself. And if you slow down, it's really hard to pick it back up because you need new funding to do that. So the trajectory is really important. If you lose that trajectory, you're meaningless. And so innovation is different things at different times. And in that last phase, the most difficult thing I had to do was we brought Egon Zender in and said, we've got our top 10 management, including ourselves, because two founders are the worst. They don't grow into that. Tell us who's going to get us there. And it was amazing. Seven of the 10 we had to part with. We made them millionaires but we gave them a golden handshake. Goodbye. Thank you. You got us there. Two of them got layered. And then we brought in two incredible people who've been through the journey already. So innovation is a constant battle.

Thank you. The next question is that when the business is growing really fast, how important are the values to keep the company on track and how it is connected to the ethos of the leader?

Yeah, values are non-negotiable for me. It took me some years to learn that. And what really tests everybody says, 'Yeah, we values are important.' Until you're faced with a situation, and I'll give you one. You've got a top salesperson. They're bringing in, you've got 10 salespeople. This one person brings in 90% of your sales and they've done something really bad. They've cheated on an expense report or done something. What do you do? That's where your own values are tested. An engineer that treats people badly but takes credit for it and is hitting the numbers and the schedules and the costs, but what you don't know is nobody likes this person. The 360s are really bad. They don't have the values. What do you do with that person? It's real easy for us. It's taken me years to learn this: the minute you know you have a C player, someone who looks like they're generating results but they don't have the values, you part with them. Not only you part with them, you part with anyone around you in your entourage. Life is too short. There are so many good people in this world. Surround yourself with people who are better than you, and you'll go places. And then when you do that, look what happens. I'm here. I meet Alex. The first question I asked him is, has he cut any corners? He said, 'No, no, he's solid.' That was it. That's all I needed. So values are everything. My reputation is the most valuable thing that I have. And I imagine it's for you, Garo, I imagine it's for Alex and Hayk. It's everything. And when it's not there, don't waste time. The reason you don't waste time is you cannot teach people values. They learn values when they were 8 or 10 from their grandmothers and their parents and their teachers. You can't. It's easier to teach someone who has the values but doesn't have the skills the skills than to try to teach somebody values.

Well, can we conclude that the ethos of the leader is defining the ethos of the company?

There's a great saying in Italian: if the head of the fish is bad, the whole fish is bad. So the answer is yes.

Thank you. So this one is more on a personal note. Has being an Armenian influenced in any way your entrepreneurial path, be it positive or challenging way?

So look, I grew up in Ethiopia as a diaspora Armenian. The Ethiopians were very kind to the Armenians. And it started with the emperor. He was walking through Jerusalem. He sees 40 orphans playing in an orchestra. He adopts them and he gets permission to adopt them. People all over the diaspora heard about this and moved to Ethiopia. At one point the community was 3,000 Armenians, a fantastic community. People got along. It didn't matter. The wealthy, the not so wealthy, it was just one people. And what happened, when you're living in a country like that and Armenians are the only foreigners, including Africans, who are allowed to have the Ethiopian passport. That's pretty amazing. This is happening during the rest of Africa is being colonized by Europe, ravaged, and here you have an African leader because of the Christian heritage opens his arms to Armenians. So I grew up feeling like a guest in this country where often reminded by my parents that we are ambassadors of what is Armenia in this country. We have to, and if you looked around, there were no, basically we all had shared values. It was pretty amazing, a small community that was strong like that. So what happened later was, I can tell it in a quick story. We've gone through hell. Communists came and point I'm trying to make is we lost everything. All the Armenians lost everything because they had local nationality and this has made us tougher. So wherever we go, we're ambassadors, we're hyphenated, we're Ethiopian Armenians, American Armenians, and we have to be good ambassadors. And we've had to deal with bad stuff. And I don't want to take anything away from Armenians in Armenia who've been through a lot as well. Different, but a lot. So I think hardship makes you stronger. No question.

Having this experience of building world-class companies, what would be your advice to young entrepreneurs how to utilize biotech, fintech, and can we utilize for the better of Armenia?

Yeah, I can't add anything to that. I always live to fight another day. And if I had to answer in one single, well, before that, I've asked a lot of entrepreneurs this question. If you knew how hard it was going to be, would you have started? And the answer is always no. But they always follow it with, but I'm so glad I started and I didn't know how hard it was going to be. So you're going to hit, first of all, jump. That's the short answer. Jump. Do it. Second is don't give up. As Garo said, always live to fight another day.

So, if I may, to summarize, jump on it, lead with your values, and never give up.

So, we are short in time. I would like to open the floor for the audience to ask questions. Thank you for the inspirational thoughts. Any questions?

Hi, thank you for this talk and the inspiration. I came a little late so I don't know if you covered this but I know that benevolence and giving back is important to you. And so I want to ask if you take the same qualities into nonprofit endeavors as you do into business. Do you treat it the same? Do you have the same practices? And what is the percentage the balance as the years go on of you giving your time to one versus the other? Thank you.

I may give you an answer you may not like. I'm not as tough as this guy. My balance is family work or philanthropy work. And it's 100% one or the other. And that's why I'm trying to understand better what it takes. And the 100% is really important to me. In my business, we have what we call extreme killers. They say you go to France, you hire a killer and that's what they do. They own it. They live and breathe it and they make it happen. It could be an HR thing that we've changed. There's a killer that makes it happen. The change management. So I would take that approach to philanthropy. And I really like The Billionaire That Wasn't. It made me think a lot. It's at some point phase out of the business and go phase in completely. Do it yourself. Surround yourself with people like Garo. It doesn't all have to be you. You can cross invest or not. But I see it as a full-time 100%. And this is why you're not going to like it. It's entrepreneurs who are going to save this world, not the politicians, not the, and very biased. I'm going to probably get some bad emails, but it's the entrepreneurs because they know how hard they worked for that money and they will make it work beyond their lives.

And she won't have a part in the business either. That's also bad. It's a big accomplishment. A very big accomplishment.

Thank you. We are actually running out of time but because we gave the mic already. Richard, please.

Sorry on that answer. The reason our dinner took four hours, you know why now.

Hi, my name is Richard. I am a CEO of EGS. EGS is an Armenian IT company. I guess no doubt you two are very good leaders and you've achieved a lot. And what Garo said, the road is ups and downs. I wonder if you could share each one of you could share one setback, one failure, one disaster and what did that do to you and how did you recover from that? And another example of a good success, a big success and how did you digest that? How did you what did you do with that? If you could share these two.

Can I do a real quick one?

End points. Let's see.

So that we can finish up right here. First one, setback. I'm 12 years old. The phone rings. It's my dad. He says I'm in prison. I don't know for how long. I've done nothing wrong. You're now head of the family. I can tell you one thing went through my head. I don't want to be head of the family. I'm 12. Setback. First dividend check. Man, that was good. I told my wife we would not have kids until the companies were stable. And that dividend check was sweet.

That's very touching.

You did it for me. I gave this to him. He's too polite. Let's give a big round of applause to our distinguished speakers. Thank you. Thank you so much.