#163 Rem Darbinyan: Inside The Armenia’s Tech Revolution & Rise of AI Startups

0:00it's a challenging thing because the AI growing so fast none of the universities can catch up there is a new product new language new direction until you're printing the books, making the curriculums on everything. It takes years because when you're going into the direction of artificial intelligence, if you don't have a strong math base, you're just going to be just a user basically. What the Armenian university is good at, have like special courses that quickly adopting to the new changes and giving this kind of knowledge and understanding that what's the machine learning, what's the AI. But what we want to do, we want to show that we can deliver the startups.

0:41The markets have a huger opportunities. That's why a lot of Russian startups, when they move to Armenia, they're surprised at how our visions of the product and the solutions are worldwide, not local. This is what our ultimate goal in Armenian IT, to show that a couple guys in their garage, they can build a cool startup that can raise millions of millions of venture investments, money. Hi, I'm Craig Smith, and this is Eye on AI. Recently, I visited Armenia, an incredible country with a very active tech sector. In this episode, I talked to Rem Darbinian, a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, seasoned advisor, author, and keynote speaker with an investment portfolio of over 40 startups.

1:32He's the founder and CEO of SmartClick, which builds deep tech innovations based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. He's also the founder and CEO of Viral Mango, a platform that connects influencers with brands. We talked about the tech sector and ai development in armenia as well as viral mango i hope you find the conversation as interesting as i did okay so ram tell me who you are and then we'll start talking okay ram darbinian born in armenia yerevan in this city a couple blocks from here where we are recording right now um and beginning at 90s uh when the like soviet union collapsed it was a hard time to live in armenia my family moved to russia oh yeah when i was kid i moved to there graduated middle school high school university wow yeah i started working and uh in 2008 moved to u.s Yes, and started working for the, like, basically started from beginning, from the zero, because you're changing the country without anything.

2:52And went into the different kind of jobs. And eventually started doing some kind of entrepreneurship, some kind of businesses. Made everything from the scratch, basically. um and but my ultimate goal was move back to armenia yeah because my heart was always with armenia and then a couple years ago uh after the covid i decided that i want to move back to armenia i took the family took the kids and moved back to armenia and started my company in armenia yeah my startup uh i started from armenia and it's like a short story yeah that's the current startup that uh we started another one like recently another like a direction yes but the one i'm talking about that we started like five years ago when i decided to move to armenia just started the company and then moved to armenia yeah and what i wanted to talk to you about is uh not only uh the startup and the startup ecosystem in armenia which is why i'm here but about uh the introduction of machine learning and how machine learning ai has grown uh and when we were talking the other day you said you had an ambition to to build a machine learning uh ecosystem yeah i'm a tech guy i first introduced to the pc was like in 1993 or something like 30 years ago I fall in love with the computers and learn everything by myself.

4:34Just back in there, there is not much internet, there is not much information. So I love discovering new things. Hi, I wanted to jump in and give a shout out to our sponsor, NetSuite by Oracle. I'm a journalist and getting a single source of truth is nearly impossible. if you're a business owner, having a single source of truth is critical to running your operations. If this is you, you should know these three numbers. 36 ,000, 25, 1. 36 ,000 because that's the number of businesses that have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, streamlining accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more.

5:2525 because NetSuite turns 25 this year. That's 25 years of helping businesses do more with less, close their books in days, not weeks, and drive down costs. One, because your business is one of a kind. So you get a customized solution for all of your KPIs in one efficient system with one source of truth. Manage risk, get reliable forecasts, and improve margins. Everything you need, all in one place. As I said, I'm not the most organized person in the world, and there's real power to having all of the information in one place to make better decisions. This is an unprecedented offer by NetSuite to make that possible.

6:13Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance, absolutely free at netsuite.com slash ionai. That's I-ON-A-I-E-Y-E-O-N-A-I, all run together. Go to netsuite.com slash ionai to get your own KPI checklist. Again, that's netsuite.com slash Ionai, E-Y-E-O-N-A-I. They support us, so let's support them. And probably eight, nine years ago, I discovered, oh, there's a cool thing called artificial intelligence that can help them automate some kind of things. uh i start like gathering information because there is no much information about ai back in days it was the tool for the big corporation not for the like even mid-level companies uh like something here something there like kind of reading some kind of old school books which is just more theoretical than the practical and uh at some point i came to the conclusion like this is something I want to learn.

7:34This is something I want to do. This is something that we're going to do in the future. This is something big. And I came to some kind of a list of the top countries that have artificial intelligence. And being Armenian, you always look your country in the list. And, of course, the top five countries, the U.S., China, Israel, Canada, this kind of countries and there is no armenia yeah i i got like disappointed at some point i'm like oh wait where is armenia and i decided that if i'm gonna do this if i'm gonna start a company that doing artificial intelligence i'm gonna do it in armenia that have a roots from armenia i came to armenia i start like looking who who knows what's the ai in armenia yeah and five six years ago there's only like a handful people knows what's the ai yeah and then uh i started gathering we started gathering together learning things like start teaching a new generation of the kids like that this is something cool this is the next level it was even before this all this chat gpd madness all this like becoming mainstream it was a hard code you write this is like what What year?

8:532018, 2019. And I established a company. We started doing AI. And my main ambition and goal was to show that we can deliver this to the world. You know, it's a technology we can build in Armenia and show the world that it's made in Armenia. and somehow replaced the understanding of AI that is not artificial intelligence, it can be the Armenian intelligence. Yes, and since then we growth. We have a lot of data scientists in Armenia. We have a lot of AI startups started in Armenia last several years. and I'm proud to see that Armenia right now is in 54th place in the global ranking of the AI index across all other countries.

9:52Well, that's quite a feat. I mean, AI is moving fast, but Armenia is moving fast too. I'm going to do a few episodes here, so I'll talk about this history elsewhere. But you moved to Russia, and Armenia, a lot of people don't realize, was kind of one of the tech centers for the Soviet Union. So there is a tradition of mathematics and technology engineering in Armenia. Of course, that generation is older, and that was long before AI. but has that given Armenia kind of a base on which to build? Of course, of course. If we look, take it back, when Armenia was part of the USSR, Soviet Union, all our great mathematicians or our scientists were part of the USSR.

10:56And then we don't specifically can say that, oh, this person was responsible to inventing this kind of thing because we have, for example, the Armenian person who invented one of the nuclear bombs for the USSR back in the days. But nobody is saying about that. It was like it was very secret. But I think the main, how it started, if we go back to the 1950s, after the World War II, the US started moving towards developing some kind of computers, the first first version of the computers and the ussr they were thinking that it's just a distraction from the moon program for going to to the space because of the cold war and they didn't like start going to that direction although they have spies they have like all that information that us developing the computers they missed that starting point and then several years later They're like, oh, we're missing something.

12:01They're really developing the computer that's going to help to automate the process of going to the space, doing all the calculations. And they start thinking, okay, how we can catch up. They collected all the smart people at that point they have. And then one of the smartest person at that time was Sergei Mergelian. He was one of the brightest Armenian minds in mathematics. he got his phd when he was i think that 20 years old it was like a very like a bright mind right and they said like okay we want to develop the it basically so not it but like a tech centers in different part of the ussr and they developed four centers moscow kiev sank petersburg and in yerevan the fourth one in yera so like it was four development centers and this sergey mergelian become the one of the founders of this the armenian i.t infrastructure and one of the first ussr computers was built in yerevan armenia if you're going back to the like the historical and it's become like the foundation of having like mathematics school of armenia and right now uh That place, the place when the first, the USSR computer was built, now a lot of IT companies renting offices, our office located them.

13:28It's becoming like an IT hub. Yes, and then it's still continuing that tradition that a lot of technologies are building in that place and continuing to growth over the world, basically. Yeah. And among the universities, I mean, what I've been told is the startup culture or the private sector is much stronger in AI than the universities. But is that right? Or which universities have the strongest machine learning programs? And is there a community of young machine learning engineers that's growing, that's going to be able to propel this further? uh there is a actually it's a challenging thing because the ai growing so fast none of the universities can catch up with the technology changing you know right because uh you know there is a new product new language new direction machine learning deep learning something until it's becoming like a popular until you printing the books making the curriculums on everything it takes years yeah and this changing very fast and then what the universities in armenia doing good they're giving a good foundation of mathematics which is like a core thing for the ai yeah because when you're going into the direction of artificial intelligence if you don't have a strong math base you're just going to be just a user basically using other you know, algorithms and technology or something.

15:18What the Armenian university is good at, they're giving the good foundation of math. So we have that. And then, of course, most, probably all of the universities right now, they have like special courses that quickly adopting to the new changes and giving this kind of knowledge and understanding that what's the machine learning what's the AI I believe all of the universities right now have some kind of a small part over there that teaching the AI as the base you know so you have at least the general understanding what's the AI how it works where to look what's the direction that's going you know yeah and so the first startup you said you wanted to start an AI company when that sounds extremely ambitious what what were you doing what was the product or service so we're developing the computer vision technologies we came to the conclusion that we don't want to build a product we want to build a technologies as part of our like a mission and vision what we want to do so we start building computer vision technologies and offering other companies from overseas to use this kind of technologies and we're always saying like this technology is built in Armenia what we want to see we want to see that other companies located in other countries using our technologies to get bigger get into the success and we can probably say that in the foundation of these companies was our technologies that helped them to achieve that basically and when you say computer vision uh what what kind of computer kind of we have like at the moment we have like several dozen different kind of technologies build it from the scratch everything we made it uh in-house basically uh helping companies starting from detecting like a license plate numbers logo detection different kind of small and but very useful technologies that dozens of dozens companies using overseas and getting into the their target goals basically yeah another thing that i've heard armenia was was very much an outsource industry i mean you were you know like an oem provider for companies overseas they would come here to to hire people to build their products and then with the outbreak of the war in ukraine a lot of companies relocated to russia uh i think from russia from russia i'm sorry yeah relocated from russia and and that influx of capital uh drove uh the armenian currency uh very high and made the outsource uh services uncompetitive they were now too expensive that's what i've heard and so a lot of people switched to building products as opposed to operating as outsourced.

18:41Actually, switching to building the product started much earlier than the war in Ukraine. Probably, I'll say, eight to nine years ago. A lot of, yes, we used to be doing a lot of outsourcing. We're developing the technologies, we're developing the products that are getting success into the market, but we are under the radar. We don't see, nobody sees our success. And then at some point we see that, okay, we can develop this cool kind of products. Why we don't start building this kind of startups in Armenia? And probably from, I'll say 2014, 15, the first Armenian, like a big startup start popping up.

19:29Earlier that the Pixart, one of the biggest made in Armenia, basically startup, already unicorn, established in Armenia. And since then, a lot of startups, like a lot of companies start moving from outsourced to the product prior, even before the war. There were still a lot of like outsourced companies because it brings money. but the last six six years there's like a lot of Armenian startups start appearing in the market because uh it is more profitable it is more interesting when you're building your own product other than just developing without understanding some kind of small part of it of course when the war started a lot of people from ukraine from russia from other countries moved to Armenia because we are very tech-friendly and overall friendly, but we have like a huge IT community at that point.

20:34And when the startups and the companies start moving to Armenia, they see that we have this capacity, we have this knowledge, we can help them, we have the infrastructure, we have everything. And they love it. and they start relocating their offices to Armenia. But to be honest, we are not ready to that. We have some kind of a limitation capacity. That's why it's drove somehow like currency value changed. And of course, it's become less profitable to be at the outsource company. But as a startup, it's okay to be there. You know, you're still struggling because as a startup, you're earning money overseas in US or currency or European euros.

21:24But you pay salaries in Armenia, which is a conversion affects you highly. But of course, still we are moving towards having the product country, not outsourced country anymore. I think the direction is set. We're already going to that direction. And we see a lot of big, big startups appearing in the market last several years. Yeah. On the outsource, there is still some outsource here. Yes. And so, you know, I've spent much of my life in China. and, you know, China and India are, China less so because there's a concern about IP protection, but India certainly is a massive outsource market where people go to find engineers to build things.

22:23If companies, for companies wanting to do that in Armenia, how do you navigate that? I was surprised to learn that because in the United States, I've never heard. I've heard of Poland. I've heard of India as markets to build things. Again, we're a small country. Even if we want to, we can't be very visible in the market. Because if we become divisible and we get a lot of orders, we can't fulfill that. That's why a lot of outsourced companies, although they're earning money, they're delivering some kind of value to the U.S. or other countries, startups or companies, we have some kind of a limitation on capacity what we can deliver.

23:16and at some point it maybe even doesn't make sense to show that we can be outsourced country otherwise we're going to be overwhelmed with the orders and then we can fulfill the quality going to go down but what we want to do we want to show that we can deliver the startups and the products this is what our ultimate goal in Armenian IT to show that a couple guys in their garage they can build a cool startup that can raise millions of millions of venture investment money and become the unicorn at some point. It started in Armenia, but of course you need to go to the US or other big markets. This is another cool thing.

24:05Because when you are like a Poland or Indian startup, when you're starting to building the startup, you always look at the internal market. your local market to build the startups. Our local market is small. And that's why we almost always think about the bigger markets. The markets have a huger opportunities. That's why a lot of Russian startups, when they move to Armenia, they're surprised that we, how we are like, how our visions of the product and the solutions are worldwide, not local. Right. Because the Russian startups, they're always building startup for the local market. It's a huge market, Russia.

24:50And they never think about how we can go to the U.S. market or overseas market. They don't have the knowledge. We have that knowledge. And we have another cool thing, opportunity, something that we can call. Well, since Armenia many years goes through the different challenges, problems, issues, a lot of Armenians left their home country to the different countries. And we consider ourselves as a network nation. We spread it all over the world. We have like generations of Armenians living overseas. uh they um survived from the genocide in 1915 they went to the european countries u.s and then it's repeated several times recently we see this kind of uh issue as well and we have armenians all over the world and they they live they're integrated on their different countries lives becoming popular becoming like achieving some kind of positions and since when you left your home you always feel connected with your home and anytime armenian startup need to reach kind of some kind of companies there's always some kind of person in that big corporation that is armenian that can help you to open the door yeah this is uh some kind of like our uh secret sauce basically I would say that help us to reach some kind of people, some kind of opportunity, gives our startup some kind of small opportunity to show ourselves to just get in the front of the door, basically.

26:45And then the rest, of course, it's how you solving the problems, of course. but this is the thing that the Armenian community is trying to achieve show that we can be the product company not the outsourced country yeah uh and and in terms of i met you at uh silicon mountain uh a conference here uh is is that uh is the tech industry pushing that uh that label Silicon Mountains or was that just the name of the conference? Just the name of the conference, I think. But what we're trying to show that we can have basically the similar thing in Armenia. We can become like some kind of ultimate hub of the startups in this region.

27:42We have the knowledge, we have the capacity, we have the opportunity. That's why we want to become like some kind of the center of the region to become the hub of the startup development. Yeah, and then there are people or companies in the West are starting to acquire Armenian startups. At Silicon Mountain, the conference, there was a CEO of Adobe who was here to officiate at the opening of a building because they had bought a company here. Do you know the name of the company? The company called Workfront they acquired several years ago. We see several acquisitions like that. When you're becoming bigger and then becoming visible in the international market, big corporations looking to you and then after they acquiring you basically uh they don't want to close it because just taking the your the clients or just intellectual property they see the opportunity to grow and continue developing this product in armenia that's why uh we see several other companies looking not only acquisition of the armenia startups but also opening their offices in Armenia and doing some kind of research and development part of their, some kind of a small part of the product in Armenia.

29:22We see recently the NVIDIA opened the office in Armenia as well, and several other companies looking into the opening offices in Armenia. Right, yeah. And one of the things on this idea of switching from outsource to product that requires you marketing a product from Armenia in the United States or in Europe or wherever, whichever market. I mean, I guess Russia is an easier market because it's closer. But how do you overcome that? And talk a little bit about the second startup that I saw. There was another conference, which was the primary reason I came, Digitech 2023. that featured a lot of Armenian startups and yours was there.

30:16Can you tell us about that and how do you reach the Western market? I mean, that to me sounds like a big hurdle. So again, a lot of experience came from doing outsourcing stuff back in the days. We have a lot of specialists that used to do the marketing for the U.S. companies. so they work for the u.s companies doing the advertising and social media marketing for the u.s and we gather like a specialist in armenia that have a lot of experience but of course we're looking for the new things always keeping touch and what's what's changing in the market and uh being in armenia it's uh again we are very flexible we we are not a big corporation we are implementing all the changes very quick learning very fast this is like our one of the advantages that's why if there's something need to be promoted in the us from armenia there's no borders now if the several years ago you need to go to the in-person meetings after the covet it became like all obsolete now it you can do everything through the zoom and And that's why it's not as hard as it seems if you put enough effort, enough time to learn the new thing that's appearing in the market.

31:44Regarding our second startup we're doing, this is, again, this is marketing solution. A couple of years ago, I see a huge opportunity that the markets moved from the regular advertising into the influencer marketing. and the influencers start taking some money from the big corporations like Google and Facebook. Back in the days, all the money from their social impacts on the influencers was earning by Facebook or Google. Now, the influencers are taking that money back from the big corporation. They start earning money doing that influencer marketing. And then we jump into this field and start helping the influencers and the brands connecting together, helping them from the brand sides to see which influencers is perfectly matching with them.

32:42And our knowledge of artificial intelligence helps us a lot because there's a lot of data need to be analyzed. Right. A lot of data need to be match-made together. and on the other hand we start helping the influencers to be more visible for the brand so basically if you are a good influencer if you have a good influence even if you are a small nano influencer up to five ten thousand fifteen thousand followers you still can earn a lot of money but you need to be visible so if you are a good quality creator we help them to get in the front of the brands connecting together so they can start working and earning money without a middleman basically yeah and the the machine learning that that's analyzing all this data what what kinds of i imagine you're looking for patterns that match between the the brand and the and the influencer what kind of systems do you use for that it's a very complicated system i'll be honest, it seems very easy from outside, but inside there's a lot of data going on because it's not just a brand and an influencer.

33:57There are like hundreds of million influencers in the world and then there's a lot of brands. It's all about understanding what brands need. And the most important part, it's not the finding the perfect influencer, also finding who is following this influencer. So we're analyzing basically each follower of this influencer to maximize the matchmaking with this brand's needs for example if it's the coca-cola and uh coca-cola looking for the influencer it's not only just finding the perfect influencer also finding the people who loves coca-cola that follows these influencers so they need to be like a certain percentage of the followers so that when the influencer tell them something share his or her experience they can be some kind of attached to this content you know they like it some kind of yeah this is the hard part there's a lot of data going on this insane amount and then we can do this probably now it's computing technologies are much faster four or years ago i can't even imagine doing this kind of stuff because it will take it will cost a lot of a lot of money now it's much much cheaper basically yeah and and you're you're getting the data from we're getting data from the users from the social media they're connecting their accounts to our system we officially collect all their data and then so this is this is like just gathering the data it's not all about the data it's just how you can process it yeah but how do you reach the influencers is it through marketing and then they sign up to the platform or or are you contacting influencers one by one we have different ways we mainly like receiving the inbounding so they searching they finding our product they're looking for this kind of solution we're getting a lot of google and inbounding traffic directly coming to our page and looking for this kind of solutions and after they sign up we're getting all their data after the consent and then start working with this data and the interesting part they start using it they loving it they start sharing about the product that oh this is a cool thing and then and that brings more and more people so it's like some kind of viral loop working for us so more people using more people are coming and in and so on so yeah it's growing very fast right now what's the name of the viral mango viral mango yeah it's like we would try to make some kind of like um unique name that you can remember yeah yeah and then on the brand side i would imagine the brands are a lot of people are trying to sell the brands on platforms like this so how do you how do you attract the brand uh we don't work on attracting brands because uh we just show what we have what influencers we are working and then it gives them confidence because uh for the brands it's a big challenge as well to find the right influencer so in this part of our program like we're trying to help more influencers and when the brand's looking for the influencers, they see who we are working with and they're happy to find them through us, basically.

37:41Again, it's more inbounding. We're helping the influencers and as soon as the brand sees that what we have, what the influencer we are working with, they are happy to join us to find them and because they know that once they work with us, they'll see like a better quality influencers, better matchmaking, and et cetera. Right. And your revenue, do you essentially take a cut of whatever revenue? I mean, where is the revenue coming from? Or is it a subscription model that you're selling to brands? We're part of our product. We have subscription base for just finding if they want to help us to then get connected.

38:25and then we're becoming some kind of a middleman between them, we take some kind of commission as well because there's a lot of fraud going on. A lot of influencers see that the brand's asking them to do some kind of task and they don't get paid at the end. Or the same way, the opposite way, brands pay up front and then the influencer disappears. So we're becoming like some kind of middleman that we can collect the payment and then be the person who judges, you know, who've done what part and then either we return the money if the deal is not done yet or they pay the influencer as soon as they complete all the tasks.

39:10Right. With a lot of these platforms, I mean, I'm supposed to be talking about AI, but it's interesting. a lot of these platforms uh you know once you make the connection upwork is an example you know once you make the connection you kind of make a private deal and go off platform so upworks no longer getting is that a problem uh no because um it's not like a brands wanna everyday work with the same person. They need to fresh blood every week, every month, basically. That's why it's a continuing thing. Brand need to test it and work with several hundreds influencers at once and help them to understand who gives the best ROI on their dollar amount spent.

40:07after they find their perfect influencer. Of course, this influencer might become the brand ambassador for these brands. Of course, they're doing some kind of direct deal. But before that, they do a lot of testing. They work together with the different influencers. Basically, if we take an analogy with the LinkedIn, LinkedIn. People were updating their LinkedIn once in like two or three years when they're changing the job. With our solution, they need to keep updated every week and they're doing collaborations every week basically because the same influencer might work with the different brands every week or twice or three times a week and the brands as well.

40:52So it's always ongoing work basically yeah and to build the solution how many engineers did you require actually we started very lean I'm a huge fan of the lean startup idea how you need to like validate so basically we started with only one engineer couple the customer success specialist well validated each step of it before moving forward and before proceeding and developing f like even the first line of the code so basically we got the clients even before we have even the part of our program we have just the screenshots That's basically when we started. So, yeah, it's another thing we are trying to implement in Armenia to go to lean to basically fail fast, check it out, everything, and see if it works, and then start building.

42:01Because we need a quick turnaround. We need to take it to the market much quicker than just building the MVP, the showing to the market. it's a little bit time changes basically now you can do it in a different way much efficient way yeah uh and and i would imagine you're continuing to deepen the tech stack or or build new features so are you still just a couple of engineers or or you was still couple engineers were doing uh by By the way, I was discussing this with our CTO recently, and he started using one of the new AI technologies, and his efficiency went up to like 30%, 40 % using some kind of AI tool.

42:54What's that? Copilot or something? Yeah, copilot. Yes, of course. Yes. That helps to write part of the code. So basically, we got advantage of using AI technologies. And instead of hiring, we pay like a very small fee, like$20,$30 a month or something like that. And having a paid version of the co-pilot that just increases our capacity of the development, basically. And this is one of the things I keep asking a lot of different conferences, different when I'm like doing the panel discussions. they keep asking oh what's going to happen with the job market with these ai tools and what i'm saying i'm continuing saying it's not a little just a ai gonna took over some kind of jobs it's a lot of time there's a lot of people who using the ai will take the job from the people who are not using ai yet this is the this is interesting thing of course there's going be market disruption a lot of jobs can be obsolete in a couple years but this is part of the evolution we've seen many times through the industrial revolution different kind of play time of the development of the changes the innovations but right now i see that people need to understand how the ai works how the technologies are works and how they can leverage this because there's like a very good saying that God made everyone equal and then the Samuel court make them equal you know like just like when you're using this revolver now you're equal to everyone else who have this kind of technology same with AI we are now technically equal to each other yeah that's remarkable and how quickly it's spread.

44:52I've got to ask, since we're just a couple of weeks away or off of the tension with Azerbaijan, I understand there's now some diplomatic moves that are easing tensions, But that hit the international news. And a lot of people in the West who aren't thinking about Armenia suddenly thought about Armenia as a place with a security issue. Do you think that's going to have an impact at all on the development of the tech ecosystem here? of course it's affecting the developing the ecosystem because we're all humans and we live in this country and every day when you see that shooting happens some kind of you know like genocide happened what we see like last month that more than 100 000 armenians moved from their homes back to the part of the armenia they relocated forcibly it's affecting our development process our vision our you know like instead of working on the product delivering the products you think about like your friends family neighbors other Armenians that impacted through this.

46:28We can't just, you know, we're not robots. We are human beings. And of course, it's affecting overall the ecosystem at first. Second, of course, it's a security thing. For example, if the developers, founders or startups, they feel safe living in Armenia and developing from here, some of them they might think okay it's not safe anymore i might move from other and then do my job or develop startup from other country this is another thing that impacting the overall the ecosystem and the third part probably is that being armenian startups we receive venture investments or any other investments from overseas so of course when it's not stable in the region nobody want to put money into that basket and that's affecting as well and and overall you know you always on the edge basically yeah and it's it it it can't be just invisible you know it's affecting a lot yeah yeah um okay well i'm up to an hour and i don't know if uh if the the next guy i've got three interviews oh that's a lot you can uh but is there anything that you that you want to say that we didn't cover i don't know we we covered a lot of it's very very that's i like it i love it yeah how it goes you know like we covered a lot of things and overall you know um the we have a problem that the armenia basically is invisible for other countries i don't want to see armenia in the news about the war in the them kind of like attentions any kind of things what my vision is to see armenia in a good way you know we develop some kind of cool technology we solve that kind of huge problem for the world that's why i want to see armenia in the news you know like to becoming um number one in things in the news not in the bad way in a good part of the news section you know and but unfortunately uh we don't see that much often yeah but we need to continue work and then i hope we're gonna succeed that soon and then have the peace in the region because we see the other problems recently with another neighbors yeah we'll see how it goes yeah okay okay well this is great hi i wanted to jump in and give a shout out to our sponsor net suite by oracle i'm a journalist and getting a single source of truth is nearly impossible if you're a business owner having a single source of truth is critical to running your operations.

49:36If this is you, you should know these three numbers. 36 ,000, 25, 1. 36 ,000 because that's the number of businesses that have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, streamlining accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more. 25 because NetSuite turns 25 this year. That's 25 years of helping businesses do more with less, close their books in days, not weeks, and drive down costs. One, because your business is one of a kind. So you get a customized solution for all of your KPIs in one efficient system with one source of truth. Manage risk, get reliable forecasts, and improve margins.

50:28Everything you need, all in one place. As I said, I'm not the most organized person in the world, and there's real power to having all of the information in one place to make better decisions. This is an unprecedented offer by NetSuite to make that possible. Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance, absolutely free at netsuite.com slash I on AI. That's I on AI, E-Y-E-O-N-A-I, all run together. Go to netsuite.com slash I on AI to get your own KPI checklist. Again, that's netsuite.com slash Ionai, E-Y-E-O-N-A-I. They support us, so let's support them.