Foundations with Larisa Hovannisian

Welcome back to Foundations, with your host, Larisa Hovannisian. Today’s guest is Stepan Khzrtian.Stepan is an attorney, entrepreneur, and writer whose work sits at the intersection of law, governance, and what it means to be Armenian – at home and abroad. ​Licensed in California and Armenia and practicing law for over a decade, Stepan acts as special counsel to entrepreneurs and executives on strategic matters that shape ownership and direction.He is the author of “House of Keepers of the Order”, a political philosophy novel which explores governance, citizenship, and nation-building set in the not-so-distant future Armenia. He is also the co-founder of Corpora, a tech company that automates legal and tax compliance, as well as Huys Foundation, a nonprofit that supports youth in achieving educational excellence for the benefit of Armenia, the Armenian nation, and humanity.He splits his time between Yerevan, Armenia and Watertown, Massachusetts with his wife and their son.

Welcome back to Foundations, with your host, Larisa Hovannisian. Today's guest is Sidney Minassian. Sidney is the founder and CEO of GTM.io, a go-to-market operating firm for B2B tech companies, and he's spent more than 25 years building companies between Silicon Valley and Sydney. He founded Contexti, later acquired by Versent, ran Saasyan, an AI-driven SaaS platform, and co-founded Liaise, a Silicon Valley NLP venture. Saasyan's focus was AI-powered student safety and wellbeing, so he's thought about AI and young people longer than most. What I appreciate about Sidney is how openly he talks about the whole arc. He's lived it all, from rapid growth to hard resets, from acquisition to failure, and he believes commercial rigour and human leadership reinforce each other.

Thanks for joining us today. We're recording this while the story is still moving, which is unusual for us and part of why I wanted to do it now rather than in a month.And I’m so glad to have with me today a friend of the pod, technologist Armen Rostamian. So, what happened?On September 12, 2026, Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, the company that makes Claude — published an essay called "We Must Pace the Frontier." His core sentence: we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.He is careful about what he means. Pacing is not pausing. It is not halting training. It means making sure that the work of aligning and safeguarding these systems has time to keep up with how capable they're becoming — and that outside parties can actually verify that it's happening.

Today's guest is Shant Hovnanian. Shant is Wharton educated, infrastructure building-real estate developer, technology pioneer/ inventor, and entrepreneur whose career runs through the roots of the telecom and artificial intelligence together . In 1985, together with his father and engineer Bernard Bossard, he co-founded CellularVision, pioneering LMDS — Local Multipoint Distribution System — a broadband millimeter-wave system now providing tremendous capacity for 5 G networks. The company later became Speedus Corp, where Shant served as Chairman and CEO, he and his team authored numerous patents for wireless tech, artificial intelligence based medical diagnostics technology, spanning four decades, from the original LMDS antenna architecture to more recent smart wireless hub systems. His appointment as a State Department delegate to the U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union in Geneva in 1995 to approve the largest swath of bandwidth in telecommunications history directly enabled today’s 5 G cellular networks and Starlink’s license for its satellite global service. Describing the technology back in 1992, he put it simply: it was "basically giving you fiber-optics to the home, and it is interactive." In 2000, Mr. Hovnanian partnered with Siemens in establishing Zargis Medical to develop Cardioscan and associated telemedicine systems. Cardioscan was the first FDA-approved AI based medical device using its proprietary algorithm to analyze heart sounds via the doctor's stethoscope. The product won the coveted 2010 Gold Edison Award for the best medical innovation in that year. From broadband to artificial intelligence, these days, that four-decade development, finance and technology career has brought him home — he's based right here in Yerevan.

Welcome back to Foundations, with your host, Larisa Hovannisian. Today's guest is Zara Martirosyan — a clinical hypnotherapist, transpersonal regression therapist, and family constellations facilitator based in Dubai. Zara's path wasn't a straight line: she built inKin, a global wellness tech platform, then found her own mental health needed the same attention she was giving others, which sent her deep into meditation, hypnotherapy, energy work, and eventually a full career shift into holistic healing. She now runs a private practice, group programs, and hosts her own podcast, Stillness of Heart. Her guiding line: "practice what you preach" — every modality she teaches, she's tested on herself first.

My guest today is Manana Hakobyan. Manana is Chief of Staff for GenAI at Scale AI in San Francisco — which means she works inside one of the companies the frontier AI labs depend on to make their models good. Before Scale, she was a product manager on IBM's Data and AI team. She holds a master's in data science from Harvard and degrees in economics and data science from Berkeley. She has a line I keep coming back to: "humans will always be in the loop.”

Welcome back to Foundations, with your host, Larisa Hovannisian.This is the first episode of season two, and I want to start by telling you what's changing.Season one was about builders and their stories — where they came from, what they decided to make, and what it cost them. Those conversations still hold up. But something kept happening while we were recording them: the ground moved faster than the stories could settle.So this season we're changing the format. Every week, I sit down with one of these builders and we talk about what actually just happened at the intersection of AI and the human — the releases, the deals, the breakthroughs, the things that got announced on a Tuesday and quietly reorganized something by Friday. Not AI as technology. AI as the thing already reshaping how we learn, work, age, and become ourselves.The question underneath all of it, and the one I'll keep coming back to all season: what does it mean to be human in the age of AI?My guest today is Armen Rostamian. Armen is the CTO of Eleveight AI, and over nearly two decades he's built technologies and products spanning satellite imagery, defense drones, and brain-computer interfaces. He's advised Armenia's Ministry of High-Tech Industry and participated in writing the country's national space strategy. He describes himself as someone who does "left-brain things in right-brained ways," and the principle he keeps coming back to is simple: leave every person, place, product, and team better than you found it.

Welcome back to Foundations with Larisa Hovannisian. My guest today is Aren Deyirmenjian, Country Representative for AMMA (Armenian Missionary Association of America) and a seasoned professional in entrepreneurship, social impact, and community development. Aren has long been a thoughtful voice in shaping how return, belonging, and impact are approached in Armenia. In his current role at AMMA, he’s leading initiatives that center long-term impact, and people-first solutions. In today’s episode, we explore the foundations of Aren’s values-driven leadership, the emotional landscape of returning to build, and what it truly means to serve — quietly, intentionally, and for the long haul.

Welcome back to Foundations with Larisa Hovannisian. For this episode, I’m joined by Marina Mkhitaryan, a civic innovator and social entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience designing and leading initiatives that bridge civic tech, youth development, and cultural resilience.Her work is rooted in a belief that systems change begins with people, and that every young Armenian should have the opportunity to lead, create, and thrive. In today’s episode, we’ll explore the foundations of Marina’s mission-driven leadership, her approach to building trust between the diaspora and the homeland, and what it really takes to create long-term change in Armenia.This episode was recorded while Marina was still part of AGBU. She is now with Armenia Tree Project.

Welcome back to Foundations with Larisa Hovannisian. I’m joined today by Ruben Malayan — an artist, calligrapher, and cultural thinker whose work has reignited global interest in Armenian script and sacred aesthetics. Known for his intricate calligraphy and thought-provoking commentary on identity, Ruben’s art is more than visual — it’s a statement. His career bridges the personal and the political, the historical and the modern. In this episode, we’ll explore the foundations of Ruben’s artistic voice, and how he uses art as a form of resistance and remembrance.