Yahoo Finance My first boss: Hovhannes Avoyan, Picsart founder and CEO
The people who helped shape business leaders
Armenian-American entrepreneur Hovhannes Avoyan founded Picsart in 2011 after his young daughter posted one of her illustrations and was bullied online.
Picsart, Avoyan's fifth company, is now billed as the world’s largest photo and video editing platform. It has over 150 million active monthly users and the company is valued at over $1bn.
I was a computer science student at the institute before moving under professor Eduard Manukyan’s supervision at the National Polytechnic University of Armenia.
It was the mid 1990s and Eduard had a research group which he converted into a start-up. He was a smart person, had vision problems and couldn't see that well but could memorise and visualise algorithms in his mind.
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We built expert systems, which helped in decision-making processes and it was one of the earliest forms of artificial intelligence (AI).
Eduard was like your classic professor and was strict in some principles yet he had the skills to attract talent, which meant some top engineers were working with him. He created big foundations for my future in both being an entrepreneur and understanding technology.
I also learned the art of persistence. He had been working on the project for many years and didn’t give up. It wasn’t easy as he was way ahead of his time and, while we didn’t get big success, we kept experimenting — working days and nights — and learning to get results was the way forward.
AI is a fascinating story. We launched our first AI feature at Picsart in 2017 where I was pitching to my board that we were going to be an AI company.
We launched our first generative product at last year’s Web Summit. Now we have built a powerhouse suite of 20 different AI tools, like generating videos, backgrounds, image to image and text to gifs.
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Users are in the driver's seat while we are helping with different steps in the process — it could be the ideas, editing or final production phases. For us, AI is like a co-pilot, not necessarily a replacement.
You need to have a sense of aesthetics, taste and have a bigger picture in mind when you are building something. AI isn’t replacing aspects of creativity, it’s enhancing it. Now you can focus on the bigger picture and you are less dependent on your skills.
I started Picsart after recognising a wider problem to my then 10-year-old daughter, who had posted one of her illustrations online and was bullied for it.
I soon realised that there was no place for her online to explore her creativity and get a welcoming response in a positive environment.
I thought it could be a big enough problem to launch. We saw massive growth and it justified our hypothesis that it wasn’t just my personal problem. It was an issue many teenagers had at the time and that they were being judged.
I hopefully was wiser and smarter having worked in start-ups since the 1990s – and with Picsart I was ready for when we scaled.
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Over a decade since launching and I now allocate more time to not be in meetings. I recently adopted a new routine; I do some fitness, walk, swim or do meditation for one or two hours in the morning before I look at my emails.
I also spend a lot of time using Picsart. Our employees even joke that I am the most active person on the platform while I also post lots of bugs that I see on our Slack channel.
If I had the opportunity to talk with Eduard again he would no doubt keep the same kind of sharpness and smart thinking he had when I worked under him. I would love to explore ideas and seek his views on all these new developments in technology.
He would be a very successful AI professor today.
Hovhannes Avoyan was speaking at the 2023 Web Summit in Lisbon
Watch: Picsart launches ‘Spaces’
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