AIWA-SF Thrive: Yeva Hyusyan

THRIVE is an AIWA-SF April project dedicated to highlighting Armenians who are doing amazing things in their personal and professional lives to better themselves and those around them.  These individuals are inspiring, dynamic, innovative and interesting. Today, we feature Yeva Hyusyan, Co-Founder and CEO of SoloLearn.

Name: Yeva Hyusyan, Co-Founder and CEO of SoloLearn

Yeva is the Co-Founder and CEO of SoloLearn, a community of millions of coders worldwide engaged in the most entertaining way to learn, play, code, create, discuss, and simply hangout with each other in the coding world.

Half of her professional life was spent in traditional settings ranging from design and implementation of World Bank and US Government programs in business and education, to sales and strategic partnerships as a Microsoft Armenia Country Manager, to inter-government negotiations.  An MBA from a business school in the Netherlands and an Executive Program at Stanford helped a lot then.

In the new life, Yeva has built a startup accelerator that created mobile games, robots, and ag-tech solutions.  To pay for this, she opened a coding school/bootcamp that still boasts 80%+ placement rate.  It was all about learning on-the-go, from own mistakes, from non-existing resources.  All of these experiences got reflected in SoloLearn aiming to change the way programmers learn, build their professional reputation, and get a job.

The extreme experiences of studying and living in the Soviet Union and the West, seeing the war and post-Soviet business opportunities, good tech and non-tech education have been the greatest movers to date and have shaped the attitude of “nothing is impossible, no matter what is happening now”, a so much needed mindset in the challenging, yet fun, world of entrepreneurship today.

Yeva shares 3 key learnings from her experience:

• There are three types of people.  People who focus on the positive, people who focus on the negative, and people who do not focus on either of the two.   The first group is happy by default so no action is really needed.  For the second group nothing is going to turn out right anyways, so why act?  And only the third group believes in their own ability to make things happen.  They know that it’s a process with ups and downs, successes and failures, learnings and mistakes.  For this group, nothing is ever set in stone.  Geniuses apart, this is the group that is best positioned and motivated to innovate and implement for a change.  If you are after something big, these are the people to team up with.

• While it’s relatively hard for a woman to get a “seat at the table” in today’s man-dominated business world, we, as women, get a unique and unfair advantage when we are “at the table”.  Interestingly, while our “womanly” behavior is the main obstacle to get in, it happens to be a great asset afterwards when we get so much attention and appreciation for being different, innovative, and feminine.  And this strategy of following the “accepted” rules to get in and being yourself afterwards (rather than complaining about how unfair things are) is probably the quickest to improve the man-woman balance we’ve been striving to achieve, which is so much needed by our economies and societies.

• Success and happiness is a combination of one’s genetic code and environment.  So creating the right environment in our families, schools, and workplaces is just as important as for the geneticists to find the right DNA code and structure.

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About AIWA-SF:

The Armenian International Women’s Association is a dynamic global 501(c)3 dedicated to empowerment, education and enrichment. Through many projects and initiatives,  AIWA is dedicated to inspiring, empowering and connecting Armenian women worldwide.

AIWA-SF is an affiliate chapter of the Armenian International Women’s Association,  the EIN #: 04-3113182. Donations marked for AIWA-SF are routed to the affiliate chapter.

To get involved with the AIWA-SF affiliate, please visit http://www.aiwasanfrancisco.com or send an email to aiwasanfrancisco@gmail.com. We are grateful for all donations. To help us promote progress, contributions can be mailed to: AIWA-SF 15559 Union Ave #227 Los Gatos CA 95032