NEWS.am: Noubar Afeyan: Diasporan mentorship can fuel ventures in Armenia
< 1 min readSource: http://news.am/eng/news/268931.html
YEREVAN. – Mentorship network with Diaspora can fuel business ventures in Armenia, Mr Noubar Afeyan, Senior managing and CEO of Flagship Ventures, a US -based venture capital firm, told Armenia News – NEWS.am on his visit to Yerevan.
Mr Afeyan delivered a lecture in the American University of Armenia on how to conceive and run venture projects.
Grammatically, the chief content of his lecture was “entrepreneurship”, but Afeyan himself insists on “entrepreneur-ing”, thus stating that being an entrepreneur is more of a conscious effort than an inborn trait.
Asked how Armenian ventures can move along in a completely different environment (compared to the Western countries), with very limited access to venture finance and with scarcity of businesses keen to employ innovations, Afeyan answered that one cannot but admit this, and this lays a quite different playfield. So the question is should they expand, and in what areas it’s easier to expand.
Probably there’s a reason of expanding in IT, which doesn’t need brick-and-mortar offices and large capital investment at the initial stage.
“So here’s where it is going to happen first. Second is in areas where there is a lot of science behind innovation,” he said.
Overall it’s a long, tough road, he added. “But I think what Armenia can consider to benefit from is the potential of the Diaspora, and I don’t think Armenia has much benefitted from it yet. I would really urge a lot of local entrepreneurs to create networks with professionals even outside of IT. That’s the only thing I can imagine that can accelerate the process. Otherwise the progress would be slow,” he added.
The process could be championed by academia and universities, such as the AUA, he said.