Razmig Hovaghimian: from failed pizza maker to founder of Viki

Razmig Hovaghimian, CEO and co-founder at Viki.

Razmig Hovaghimian, the co-founder and CEO of Viki who sold his startup to ecommerce giant Rakuten on September last year, has quite a story to tell. (Note: Razmig will be speaking at Startup Asia Singapore this May 7 and 8. There’s still time to get tickets, and until April 30 there’s a 10 percent discount with the EarlyBirdApril code.)

Hovaghimian is ethnically Armenian but was born in Cairo, Egypt. A month after turning 16 he moved to the US – and he did so all by himself. That would prove to be training for his eventual path of becoming a great entrepreneur. Back then, he didn’t know what lay ahead of him except that he wanted to have a good education in the States. To survive in his new homeland, Hovaghimian worked multiple jobs – from being a certified sandwich artist at Subway to working from midnight to 8.00 am at a gas station.

Everyday felt like a new challenge, he says. “If that is not a startup education, I don’t know what is,” he says. “I knew where every Taco Bell in my neighborhood was, and where I’d get the best $0.99 lunches. It’s still hard for me not to stop by a Taco Bell when I see one.”

He didn’t apply to college after high school. Rather, he started his own businesses, such as a night-time pizza delivery service in which he used a bakery’s ovens after closing hours, and exporting used Levi’s jeans to Europe. Both ventures failed.

(See: How a high school dropout became a multi-millionaire entrepreneur)

He was eventually admitted to UC Berkeley as a political economy student, and minored in business administration, which gave him some background in the world of finance and marketing. He first heard about the term “startup” when eBay was doing recruitment at Berkeley.

“I was wondering what a ‘startup’ was – and they were talking about equity – a risk/reward model that was fascinating. I was paying foreign student fees though, and had a lot of help on the way, so I wanted to make sure I can pay it all back. So that led me to management consulting,” said Hovaghimian.

Hovaghimian heard from a friend about a company that was recruiting business analysts, and when he learned how much they would pay out of college, it was mind-boggling for him.

“I applied to that one company and somehow got the job. It was a phenomenal experience, and it challenged me at every level,” Hovaghimian says. “It forces you to really question your value-add to others, but at the same, teaches you that a fresh perspective or even a single executable idea can make a difference.”

A tool for language learning

After spending some time in the world of consulting in the US, Hovaghimian made a move to Japan working as a management consultant at ad agency giant Dentsu. That role gave him an inside view of working at an international corporation.

“That was a little bit like a startup. When I got to Japan, there were three people and by the time I left, there were 50 people. So I got to see how that shaped up and came together,” he reflects.

Hovaghimian headed back to the US to join Stanford Business School and was spending his time building things as a student. While at Stanford, he spent his summer working with the United Nations in South Sudan, living in a tent. When he returned for his second year of graduate school (‘06-‘07), his first ground-up startup was in the non-profit sector. He co-designed and patented Embrace, a premature infant incubator for the developing world that costs only $25. Embrace started as a class project at Stanford, went on to set up shop in India, and is now in 14 countries. Hovaghimian sits on its board.

He also started another class project at Stanford, where he met his co-founders, Changseong Ho, and his wife, Jiwon Moon, who was studying education technology at Harvard. The team was using YouTube videos and its crowdsourced subtitling technology as a tool for language learning.

Moved to Singapore for love and success

Viki and Rakuten