Viki founder Razmig Hovaghimian’s winning bet

Some time before Rakuten’s acquisition of Singapore startup Viki for a reported $200 million, founder Razmig Hovaghimian and SingTel Innov8 CEO Edgar Hardless had a friendly wager on how much the startup could be acquired for.

The stakes? Dinner in any restaurant in Singapore.

Razmig’s prediction was unbelievably rosy at the time, said Edgar at a panel discussion held at startup accelerator JFDI last week. Innov8, a $200 million venture capital firm, is an investor in Viki.

It turned out that Razmig won.

But the bet was trivial compared to the series of gambles Razmig and his co-founders had made as entrepreneurs.

Experimenting with online videos

Razmig, who studied at Stanford, met Changseong Ho and Jiwon Moon from Harvard to work on a class project on using YouTube videos as tools for language learning.

The videos exploded in popularity while they were holding daytime jobs, and Razmig, who was working at NBC Universal on international distribution, realized that translation can untrap content and bring it to a larger audience.

“So we quit our jobs — we had put all our life savings in it — and in 2010 we released series A, came out of beta in December 2010, and we’re building, you know, a global destination for the best of world TV and movies, for the fans and by the fans,” said Razmig in an interview with Anime News Network.

Today, Viki has about 22 million monthly active users, with ten million coming from mobile. It has content in more than 160 languages and a team of 47 spread out over Singapore, San Francisco, Seoul, and Tokyo.

For Razmig, getting from not being able to afford the desired domain name — they were initially called ViiKii — to becoming the it-story in town required a good deal of faith.

Halfway across the world

Rather than being located in Silicon Valley, Razmig moved to the island state in 2008 on the backs of generous Singapore government funding. He settled in at Hackerspace.sg, a maker space that “looked like a massage parlor” at first glance.

Meng Weng Wong, co-founder of JFDI, termed the Viki co-founders the “hipster, hacker, and hustler” — the ideal “holy trinity” for many web and mobile startups. Jiwon was the graphics designer and language education expert while Changseong had the engineering chops.

Razmig, meanwhile, knew the content distribution business and had the sales relationships.

From bootstrapping to takeoff