Celebrating Armenian Talent in Tech!

2020 has been a challenging year on many fronts. As Armenians, we believe now more than ever before, our community must come together and help one another. In an effort to unite us with some positivity in a difficult time, HIVE Ventures set out to highlight the talent we have in the global Armenian community.

Towards that end, we launched the first-ever HIVE 30 Under 30 Armenians in Tech. We were overwhelmed by the number of nominations, reaching just over 400 applications, of which ~30% were women and ~60% were born in or living in Armenia.

We hand-selected four incredible judges to review the applications and select the winners. The judges were:

• Orion Hindawi, founder & CEO of Tanium, an Emeryville-based next-generation endpoint management and security company founded in 2007. Tanium serves half of the Fortune 500, the United States Department of Defense, and 12 of the top 15 US banks. Prior to founding Tanium, Orion was CTO of Bigfix.
• Vahe Kuzoyan, co-founder & President of ServiceTitan. ServiceTitan is the first Armenian unicorn and one of the most successful vertical SaaS companies in the U.S. Originally born in Armenia, Vahe immigrated to the US at a young age, where he witnessed firsthand the difficulties his father endured as he began his own plumbing business and as a result, built ServiceTitan to provide software to help business owners run their businesses.
• Tracy Young, founder & CEO of PlanGrid. Tracy worked on a construction site and felt the pain point of having to use pen and paper to do her job while on site. After searching for a modern construction collaboration software with no luck, she decided to build PlanGrid. PlanGrid was recently acquired by AutoDesk for close to $800M.
  on construction sites and was recently acquired by Autodesk for close to $800M.
• Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit and of Initialized Capital. Alexis has been successful both as an operator and as a VC; he built one of the most successful online communities with Reddit and has an incredible portfolio of investments at Initialized Capital.

While we relied on our judges for unbiased opinions on each candidate, we did provide a framework to help in the decision-making process. We asked our judges to evaluate all candidates based on three core criteria:

1. Education: Did this candidate exemplify stellar academic achievements in their chosen field of study (ideally within STEM)?
2. Professional Achievement: What has this candidate achieved professionally to date in the tech world and do you foresee potential in this candidate to continue to achieve great things professionally in the future?
3. Impact: To what degree has this candidate demonstrated a desire to positively impact their community, Armenian or beyond?

We are excited to celebrate the incredibly talented young Armenians we are highlighting of this year’s class of 30 Under 30. We also want to highlight that it was very difficult to narrow down the list to only thirty and that there were many incredibly qualified candidates who applied. We are very excited to watch each of these candidates grow over time and are sure they will each achieve amazing things in their respective fields.

Thank you to our judges for making time to review the applications. We are also grateful to the

entire community for spreading the word, including AGBU, American University of Armenia, SmartGate, and the Ministry of the High-Tech Industry in Armenia. Finally, thank you to all the nominees for working so hard and making the Armenian community proud of the talent we have!

Congratulations to the Class of 2020 HIVE 30 Under 30 Armenians in Tech!