Hayk Asriyants: We want to put Armenia on the world’s startup map

Startup Armenia celebrates its 1st anniversary these days. It aims to develop entrepreneurship concepts and initiatives in Armenia and the world. 

Itel.am talked to the company’s founder and President Hayk Asriyants about the year of work and future projects.

- Startup Armenia is already 1 year old. What have you achieved by now?

- The company was established on April 25, 2015, a day symbolizing the first day of the new era of the Armenian nation.

The main priorities of our work are policymaking in the education, business and migration spheres, development and implementation of high-impact entrepreneurial programs, as well as promotion of entrepreneurship in Armenia and promotion of Armenia as a tech entrepreneurship hub worldwide.

As you know, we had rather extensive experience in implementation of entrepreneurship projects before the foundation of the company, and took significant steps to form entrepreneurship culture in Armenia and to properly represent Armenian entrepreneurship ecosystem on prestigious international platforms. It’s important for us to test our strength especially in development of concepts. I am proud to say that by cooperating with Business Support Office of European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and SME Cooperation Association, we participated in changing the tax field for guest-house business and concept development. Although we did it for the first time, everything went smoothly and inspired us to come forward with new initiatives.

We’re currently analyzing a number of cases from Europe and from around the world where coding and entrepreneurship have been integrated into public school curricula. Our goal is to develop our own programs for Armenian schools and to teach our children to be more entrepreneurial and how to code.

We’re also benchmarking the results of the tech startup tax benefit program, so that we can propose improvements, if needed.

Among our interests is also the improvement of business processes of enterprise registration, taxation, reporting, and other procedures which might be a burden for startups.

Taking into account that Armenia faces a very high level of unemployment, especially among the youth (unfortunately, Armenia has the highest youth unemployment rate in Europe), we believe that if we popularize entrepreneurship, develop and implement new projects, we can promote creation of jobs especially for the youth.

-You also aim to invest the so-called “startup visas” in Armenia. How do you imagine the process?

- We will begin working on that in the near future. The final goal is to simplify issuing working visas to foreigners who wish to relocate to Armenia and build their startup here, or work in other startups.

We want to put Armenia on the world’s startup map. We already have an impressive number of success stories coming out of Armenia, but we need to develop and “sell” our engineering and coding skills, our creativity, our networking potential, our vibrant nightlife, so that foreign entrepreneurs would consider Yerevan and Armenia among top destinations where they can build their startups. It’s worth to notice that one of our advantages is low living cost.

- How can Startup Armenia develop Armenian startup environment?

- Startup Armenia is a member of Startup Nations and Global Entrepreneurship Network, and these memberships allow us to introduce our ecosystem to key stakeholders, donors, investors, government officials in more than 170 countries.

Last spring, we represented Armenia in Milan in the framework of Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC).Yerevan qualified for the finals in GEC Cities Challenge between developing cities, making it to the top five.

We represented Armenia at Global Entrepreneurship Congress this March already in Medellin, Colombia.

Startup Armenia is going to present several initiatives in the near future, including organization of startup competitions and hackathons. They are very useful tools to keep the participants in shape and identify promising entrepreneurs. Such competitions also promote establishment of new connections between the participants of the ecosystem. Our long-term goal is to create competitions and projects of new formats, and eventually spread them to other countries.

Narine Daneghyan talked to Hayk Asriyants