Female Disruptors: Yeva Hyusyan of Sololearn On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

Treat people with respect and empathy. Aim to better understand people and their behaviors to help make better decisions that are not based on what people say, but rather what potential they have.

As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Yeva Hyusyan.

Yeva Hyusyan is the co-founder and CEO of Sololearn, an Armenian-based coding and programming education and community platform founded in 2014. Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, Yeva worked for Microsoft and USAID. She currently lives with her spouse and three children.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

I was born and raised in the Soviet Union where it was near impossible to create your own business. However, my family is entrepreneurial to the core, so that didn’t stop my parents. My father opened the first computer training center in Armenia in the 1990s.

As a kid, I was always interested in math and wanted to own a business. Unfortunately, in post-Soviet times, science was still heavily controlled by the state and business was limited to small e-commerce businesses. So I chose economics as my profession because that was the closest I could get to linking my two passions together.

At my university in the post-Soviet era, electricity, jobs and food were scarce. This made learning very difficult, and finding a job was even harder. Luckily, I landed a job at a small agency. From there, I migrated to a U.S. development agency, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), that gave me exposure to every sector of the economy.

Because Armenia suffered greatly from the Soviet Union collapse, it went from being the largest research and development center of the Soviet Union, leading in inventions in engineering, astrophysics, and military research to half the population becoming poor overnight. However, there was one industry that continued to flourish: tech. In fact, Armenia’s tech sector grew by 20% year-over-year post-Soviet era.

When I figured this out, I knew I had to get involved. So I applied to Microsoft’s innovation center in Armenia in 2010 and got the job. This is where my second “better life” started. During my time there, we founded one of the first startup accelerators in Eastern Europe, where we built products with student teams ranging from mobile games to robots to agricultural solutions.

After leaving Microsoft, my colleague, Davit Kocharyan, and I founded Sololearn in 2014 with the intention to make our bootcamp program accessible to the world via mobile device. 7 years later, we have over 21 million users and over $30 million in venture capital (VC).

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?

Getting VC funding has been the most memorable experience for me. Once the money from friends and family ran out, we turned to angel investors. After that, we wanted to grow even more, so we decided to do a seed funding round. I had no experience and didn’t understand VC culture, which made things really difficult for me to succeed at first. Through our angel investments, we put up solid numbers that helped land additional VC meetings; however, no one was biting on the seed round.

After many failures, I pitched an education-focused VC and finally, I landed one — Learn Capital. Coincidentally, one of their employees wanted to learn the coding language Python and found our app on the app store. After going through our classes, he liked our program so much that the deal was signed with Learn Capital two months later.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I don’t know that it’s a funny mistake, but something that was a great learning experience for us. At one point, my partner and I truly believed that Sololearn was a community of coders that got together to talk about life and coding. That’s why we initially expected our company’s core value to revolve around socialization. Well, that mindset quickly changed when we realized that we are not a social platform and we will never be. Our mission was to educate people to code. So, we switched our core value to learning and allowed relationships to form around that.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

It is very easy to get stuck thinking you can’t do things, or you’re supposed to do something else just because you are a female. My parents raised me to see the world as a place where everything is possible, no matter who you are.

As I grew older, my husband pushed me to switch my career to tech. On top of that, he’s a great father, partner and friend. He tolerated all the stress, emotion and feelings — both positive and negative — I feel as a startup founder.

Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience what is currently holding back women from founding companies?

I think the statistics improve as we speak. More and more women make a choice to start and run their own company. Yet, to empower more women, I think we need more stories about successful women entrepreneurs succeeding. I believe being a woman makes you more stress-resistant, a better multitasker, and a different/new kind of a leader people want to work for. Sometimes I think I could never lead a startup if I didn’t have 3 kids — it makes you accept any failure and difficulty as part of the process, yet, you still enjoy it.

Being a female founder, you are sometimes expected to speak how men speak when it comes to business. And seeing many VCs are men, that can put women in a tough spot. So we’re forced to speak confidently and act like we know everything all the time, when in reality, no one really does. But VCs can sense your confidence and if you don’t have that, they’ll find someone else.

Can you help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government, to help overcome those obstacles?

1. Talk about female success stories more, with emphasis on what women do differently.
2. More research to understand the specifics and common features (if any) of women-led businesses.
3. Don’t separate women from everybody else. We are different but the quality and impact of our work is world-class. There should be no compromises on standards.

This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?

1. I think women have a knack for understanding people better and their motivations, drivers, and desires. This helps us create healthier businesses and happier employees.
2. Because women are disadvantaged when it comes to VC funding and starting a business, we are constantly open to and looking for a solution to problems. I think as a woman, I consider my options carefully before making a critical decision.
3. Women are hungrier. The doors have opened for us only recently, so we are trying much harder and are more desperate to succeed.

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?

1. I am not welcome in the STEM world because I am a woman. This statement would’ve been true 10 years ago, but now, that statement is far from the truth. Women founders are increasing because as a community, women are demanding — and deserve — a seat at every and any table.
2. It’s ok to fail. In reality, no, it’s not ok. It’s ok to make mistakes and learn from them as fast as possible. But failing is not ok as it makes you feel miserable, which is never productive. In fact, I believe that being able to predict a mistake is highly correlated with one’s success rate.
3. Founders sacrifice a lot. Yes, we do, but we enjoy it. It’s part of the game.

Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?

I think it’s in one’s genes. Some people just don’t like working for someone else and they will be unhappy no matter how good the job is. They want to change the world and won’t be happy until they’re leading a company and trying to accomplish that.

10: Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your opinion and experience, what are the “Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder?” (Please share a story or example for each.)

1. Don’t be afraid to talk about more than one way to do things.
2. Treat people with respect and empathy. Aim to better understand people and their behaviors to help make better decisions that are not based on what people say, but rather what potential they have.
3. Never underestimate yourself. The key is to always have confidence and believe in yourself, even if you don’t have a lot of experience doing something.
4. Be yourself — only then can you realize your full potential.
5. Create measurable straightforward goals for every person in the company. Make sure these goals work best if met as a team and not the individuals.

How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

Education opens doors and broadens choices in life and career. Unfortunately, education is not accessible to everyone, so I believe that our platform, especially being mobile and free, is giving education to any and everyone who wants it and can access it.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I want to see kids smiling. I want them to be healthy, happy, and have every opportunity for

self-realization in whatever space they choose. In today’s world, we have the ability to solve problems with less money and strive for the same starting point for every kid around the globe no matter what country they were born in. The next area on my radar is healthcare.

We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

I am the biggest introvert ever so my first thought here is “OMG what if they see this and respond. What am I going to say!” Reid Hoffman? — I am a big fan…

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.