Top Takeaways from the HIVE Ventures 2019 Tech Summit
It’s not every day a startup founder based in Yerevan gets to spend 1:1 time with some of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest tech leaders, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs. Even if one is based in San Francisco, these individuals are in high demand and often hard to pin down for an introductory meeting.
That’s why, each year, HIVE Ventures, a venture fund focused on investing in Armenian entrepreneurs, brings these types of people to Yerevan. To date, HIVE has brought 150 tech leaders from companies like Amazon, Uber, Google, Facebook, Robinhood, ServiceTitan, Slack, Pinterest and VCs like Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Y Combinator, Base10VC, and more. The speakers span a variety of functions including founders, product managers, sales leaders, and engineers.
The objective of the event is to share knowledge for Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing companies and to build relationships. These speakers spend time with founders based in Armenia to talk through their challenges, open doors through introductions and brainstorm on what it takes to build a successful startup when being located away from Silicon Valley.
This year, we had a record turnout with more than 400 people on the waitlist. In case you missed it, here are the key takeaways from the HIVE Ventures 2019 Tech Summit:
Success Beyond Silicon Valley
As an early stage startup investor we want to see that the product you have is defendable, meaning it is not just and execution play but also complex technology underneath. Ideally we want to see a great founder with the talented team in place building something that will take others really long time to build therefore making our investment defendable, — Market Chrzova, Investor @ Credo Ventures
You have to make sure you can run the marathon in different markets. It will be very hard to scale if your market is too localized. — Natalia Solodukhova, CEO @ Buzzoola
The AHA! Moment and getting into product-market fit
You are not going to get all the insights that you need for defining the product-market fit just by looking at analytical numbers and breakdown charts; you have to constantly talk to your users. - Omosola Odetunde, Startup Advisor
Obsess over sales, not the product! The two biggest tools we use at Shopmonkey to connect with our customers and go to the feedback loops to validate our product-market fit are intercom.io for live chat and Canny.io with allow our users to post ideas and upvote them. — Ashot Iskandarian, Founder & CEO @ ShopMonkey
You have to be obsessed with responding to your customers to understand their needs, — Charles Mourani, Founder & CEO @ Cherry
It Takes Two to Tango: Engineering and Product
Tools don’t matter, people do! By providing everyone the same access to data employees realize that they are on the same level and everyone is important, — Vache Shirikian, Senior Software Engineer @ Netflix
Work on the process, — Rohini Pandhi, Product @ Square
Demos are the most important thing during the development process! We try to get a bunch of people in the company to come together at the end of each 2-week session to see what engineers and product managers in different teams present and see what value they delivered during that time, — Zachary Smith, VP @ Chime
5 Things to Get Right for Your Startup to Have a Chance to Succeed — from Ara Mahdessian
Create a product that will be irreplaceable to customers. Try to figure out if the product is going to work, have a market fit in the first year of its life — says, Ara Mahdessian
Building a startup is very hard, to make it successful you have to get done right 5 things:
- You have to build a product that solves a really big pain point for the customer, so there is so much value that it is irreplaceable
- Make sure the market is big enough
- Have a good idea of how you are going to acquire the customers of your targeted market
- Make sure you don’t have a tight competition or if you do then know how to beat them
- Learn how to go to new markets, how to launch new products
Selling your Startup for $1B
Despite all the difficulties keep going and keep growing, — Ryan Sutton-Gee, COO @ PlanGrid
When starting a company it is important to have a good lawyer, good tax person and make sure to hire the right team at the right place, — Alex Moore, Corporate Development Deal Lead @ Amazon
Always Be Closing, Why Every Founder Needs to Learn Sales? — by Hratch Achadjian
- Always be very specific
- In the process of negotiations always anchor high. Ask for 2X whenever you need just X
- Sales is not just a numbers game a lot of it is an emotional decision. To be able to emotionally influence the selling cycle you have to do your research, build trust, develop empathy and spend your time. If you try to rush it you are more likely to fail than close successfully.
- Be comfortable with taking an awkward pause during negotiations. If you need to you can count to 10 in your head 1. 2. 3…………………….10 — this will give you the emotional advantage before your opponent lowers the asks.
Why Armenia? Why now?
The reason to come to Armenia was the advantage to build a good team and have a need to produce quickly and effectively, — Nerses Ohanyan, SVP, Customer Success @ Vineti
If we want to be serious about tech and have a successful ecosystem in Armenia, we can’t just grow the engineering talent, it gotta be the full lifecycle. Having product management is the next important thing to develop here. — Vahe Kuzoyan, Co-Founder & President @ ServiceTitan
