Hovhannes Avoyan - CEO at PicsArt

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Hovhannes, the CEO at PicsArt, and we discuss how PicsArt is using AI to give people the power of creativity, why you should always double down on your differentiators, and how to keep excited by setting goals that will keep you energized for the long term. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) Hello.

(Hovhannes at 00:00:36) Hello. Hi.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) How are you, my friend?

(Hovhannes at 00:00:39) I'm doing well. How about you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:41) Amazing. I love the background. You got a nice backdrop there.

(Hovhannes at 00:00:44) It's San Francisco.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:46) Oh, it's San Francisco. It's beautiful.

(Hovhannes at 00:00:48) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:49) Did you paint that picture behind you?

(Hovhannes at 00:00:52) No. Unfortunately, no. It's not a Monet. Yeah, I wish I could draw and paint like this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:03) My wife started painting, and I had her paint me a picture of the universe and hung it up in my man cave.

(Hovhannes at 00:01:11) Did she start it during the pandemic?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:14) No, but she started about five or six years ago. And then in the pandemic, she actually got furloughed and decided to refinish our cabinets and then posted about it online. And then she ran some ads and started doing cabinets for other people. And now she's making more money redoing cabinets, and she's booked up for months. And I think it's a funny connection too, actually, because when she was doing the before and after pictures, she was using PicsArt to do the image editing, and that's how I found out about it. And then I heard you were going to be on the show. I'm like, this is amazing. This is so great.

(Hovhannes at 00:01:54) You see? So I know many people who started doing more art during the pandemic because they have nothing better to do. And also, actually, that's something they always wanted to do but never had time. And now they have time. They can do it, you know? So they're really enjoying. And also, I mean, there's another component of that. It's a great stress relief. You know? People are really fighting anxiety and stress through art. We're definitely seeing this as a trend.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:24) I agree. I took up piano training. There's an app called Simply Piano, and I started—it starts you as if you know nothing about the piano, and then it walks you through slowly. And I started that. And what I found is you're exactly right. It helps reduce anxiety when you can sit down and just let stuff flow. Without sounding too weird, like, let the universe flow through you. It's a pretty exciting thing. Why did you decide art? Like, how did you come up with this app?

(Hovhannes at 00:02:56) Right. I think this is a question I was asked already like 100 times, and you know, maybe let me tell a story. I started because of my daughter. It started my fifth company. So when I was selling my previous company, I found my daughter crying, and she was 10 years old. And she wanted to—she actually posted one of her art works to one of the social networks and got very bad comments. And she was very discouraged to continue. She kind of was questioning if I'm capable to do these drawings, and she loved to do that. So, you know, as a father and entrepreneur, I mean, I did the best of what I can do. I created a company for that. So to help people like her to be creative and be in a positive environment. Yeah, people can share, collaborate, and create. So that was my prime motivation. And ultimately, I became also one of these users. It actually reminds me, you know, my situation when I was 14. I actually didn't get to the art school because I failed on the exams, on entrance exams. And actually, because I couldn't throw a vase the way they wanted, so I was disqualified for the art school. And so that's kind of things which, you know, I don't want my daughter to be discouraged. So that was one of my personal motivations for this company. And I succeeded. And she just graduated from California College of the Arts. She's a professional illustrator now, and she just joined PicsArt.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:48) Oh, that's amazing.

(Hovhannes at 00:04:49) Yeah. Yeah. She's working now for PicsArt.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:52) That's such a cool story. And it reminds me of little Steve Jobs, how he made the iPod for his daughter. Right? He's like, you're not going to have to walk around with that cassette anymore or all of those tapes. I'm going to make you something that can hold a thousand songs. Right?

(Hovhannes at 00:05:07) Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the best. When you really know you're solving your own problem or your daughter or, you know, your children's problem. I mean, that's the best problem. That's usually the best product built.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:21) Yeah. That perspective of entrepreneurs are essentially just solving problems that they care about, and then the company forms around it. That changed my mindset. I used to have a poor mindset where I would be upset. I was like, look at the wealthy people. Like, why do they have more? And then as I gained—you know, that was when I was much younger because I grew up poor. And then as I gained a better understanding of, you know, starting businesses and trying and failing and learning, I got a more mature view of how the marketplace and how the world works. And it's really just now when I see someone in a Lamborghini or some symbol of wealth, I'm like, I'm so interested in what they're doing because what they are doing is so valuable that people are giving them money for whatever problem they're solving. And so now I just become curious and interested in it.

(Hovhannes at 00:06:08) Right. Right. Yeah. Me too. I mean, I was from a middle-income family, but then I went to several crises in the country where I was born in Armenia. And we have several crises, and we basically got to the level where we were very poor and then had nothing to, you know—because, you know, the whole country was suffering the blockades and all the crisis of the collapse of the Soviet Union. So, you know, I've been through this. And actually, this kind of background is really giving you more strength to build a business. Yeah. If you've been in a survival situation in your life, then you are better prepared for business because business is mostly the survival game. Right? You should survive multiple crises and competition, and then the one who survived is typically the one who won.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:22) Yeah. Like, when I was thinking when I started my first business, and I was like, wow, this is so difficult. But it's not as difficult as when I got hit by a car, and I was in a wheelchair for a year, and then I had to go through rehab and learn how to walk again, and all of that. And then, you know, when you frame it in that perspective, it's like, okay. The worst day ever being an entrepreneur is not as bad as that.

(Hovhannes at 00:07:48) Right. And, you know, people really underestimate that. It's kind of a job. You need to build the skills. You need to have an experience. But at the end of the day, it's not a rocket science. You know? Everybody can do that with the patience and, you know, if you're resilient and you're able to tolerate stress and you learn from your mistakes, and you know, everybody can do that, but it's hard. It's not easy. And so you need to go through this and you need to learn, and then you understand this is a part of the job. I mean, to be under stress and keep iterating and keep adding more, you know, to your company, your product. It's a process, and it's not happening overnight. Every overnight success was built over 10 years or more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:45) Oh, 100%. I completely agree. So, like, what did you learn as the company grew from, like, 10 to 350 people?

(Hovhannes at 00:08:58) Actually, more. We have over 500 now. Yeah. I know. I've been, you know, I've been an engineer on my early first startup. I've been doing my own coding of my first product. So that's a very important skill. So I think my advice to every starting entrepreneurial people who just consider entrepreneurship is to really have a hands-on experience with coding. That's very liberating when you can code your own product and, you know, build that without, you know, paying someone else or explaining what you want. You can have the power to make your own product by your fingers and your brain. So that I think was super important for me, for my career, to be able to code and develop my first product myself without asking someone or asking permission or asking investment. And, you know, my background even before my first company, I was a PhD student, and I was actually working on AI in the early nineties when it was kind of like a funny science. Nobody really thought that it would become useful anytime soon. So, you know, we were trying to teach computers to play chess. And, of course, we failed. I think we were too early. My computer was, you know, the size of a three-bedroom apartment, but probably has less memory than my refrigerator today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:41) I love it. I like the refrigerator one versus cell phone. That's good.

(Hovhannes at 00:10:46) Yeah. I mean, cell phone is like super powerful. I mean, you know, a super iPhone will be unbelievably powerful as a computer for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:55) Yeah. It's like an alien technology if we had—

(Hovhannes at 00:10:57) Yeah. Yeah. We were using even punch cards for entering data into the machine. So, you know, punch cards, not even like monitors.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:07) So did you learn programming for this, or were you in technology? You said this is your fifth company.

(Hovhannes at 00:11:15) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:15) What were your first couple companies?

(Hovhannes at 00:11:17) Yeah. I mean, you know, I am a software engineer by education, and then I was in startups since '97 and, you know, sold my companies four times before PicsArt. Sold to, you know, like Lycos, for example, if you remember this company, the internet search company, I sold one of my companies to Lycos. The one before PicsArt, I sold to GFI. That's now one of the biggest IPOs in Europe. So, yeah, I mean, I sold several companies, but they were mostly B2B and one B2C, but most of them B2B. So I really was doing a lot more cloud services, SaaS companies before PicsArt. And PicsArt, as I said, I started because of the personal story. And also, I was always excited about mobile and wanted to do something on mobile. So that's what kind of got together, you know, experience and a strong motivation. And also, we were doing good technology and had a good team. So it's all together, we ended up with PicsArt, and we're growing very fast since 2012.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:46) Through the process of selling your previous companies, what sort of takeaways or points of interest do you have? Like, if you were talking with another entrepreneur who's going through, you know, or considering selling their company, what sort of advice would you give them?

(Hovhannes at 00:13:03) Yeah. I never plan anything with the exit in mind. You know, when I'm starting something, I'm really thinking about to build the best product, first of all, and not thinking about, you know, how I'm going to make money on exit or how I'm going to exit from this startup. I think that's my approach. I mean, you need to understand if you are really solving the right problem and focus on that one. And if you can find some unfair advantages on doing that, it's even better. Yeah. And unfair advantages means either you know something nobody knows or none of your competitors knows or you know the way you can sell it better than your competition or you can build the technology better than your competition or you know the problems better than your competition. So you need to find an unfair advantage and then build on top of that. And make sure you are solving the problem which is big enough. And then that's, you know, that will be my recipe for success. Yeah. So for the beginners or beginning entrepreneurs, I would say, you know, that's something you should look at. And you should be also very patient about the problems you're solving. It's also important to have a passion. Because you are going to go through multiple cycles of stress, success, failure—or I'll say maybe failure, stress, success. And then multiple times. So for that reason, you need to be really—you should be in love with the problem you're solving. You should solve for something which you're really excited about, and you should be excited about the scale of the problems you're solving. So problems that could change an existing model or an existing market, be disruptive in this market. So, yeah, for me, for example, like PicsArt, I think I always believe that education is such an important thing to change the world. I mean, to educate people and especially give this education and power to people who don't have enough economic power to get this education or they're remote or poor, et cetera. So giving them opportunity to learn and, you know, get better jobs and get a good education, I think that's something that really drives me. And PicsArt for me became a platform, and, you know, I give the power of creativity and educate people to create designs and better editing skills, et cetera, to almost everyone in the world. I mean, can use our product. So, given the power of creativity to everyone became one of my drivers for this company. And this mission resonates well with this whole team. And the team of PicsArt are also not just employees of PicsArt, but they're also users of PicsArt. And they also believe in the mission, and that's why we get such a passionate and energized team. So even, you know, we are not meeting now in our offices. We work all remote, but we still have a very good energy even with the remote work. And because we understand our mission, and we really love the passion, and we really want to get it accomplished.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:45) I really liked with the application that it's got the tools, the utilities to do what you want to do with manipulating the photos and creating the art. But it's also got a community inside of it and an educational component, and I thought that was really interesting and really unique. And, you know, the first—I remember the first time I opened up Photoshop. It was like 20 years ago, but I was just like, whoa. It's just you're just on a screen, you know, which is what it is. But in your application, you know, I open it up, and it's got these interesting components I haven't seen anywhere else in iOS. It's got some really unique things that you've done. And I don't know if you know this, but I've been a software engineer for 17 years. So I really respect it from an engineering perspective as well. And so I saw this and, like, how you integrated, like, you showed there were these GIFs specifically, and the GIF kind of showed the different stages of the photo being edited.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:39) And then down below, there was information you could click and go on the steps. And it's like, the moment you open it, it's teaching you how to do the thing you want to do in a very visual, simple way. And I just thought, wow, that's so much work for them to put together. That's so much work on top of building the actual tool. You're building all of this content.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:00) And but then it was cool because it seemed like, and correct me if I'm wrong because I haven't spent an enormous amount of time in there. I just go in there and make the edits and leave usually. But when I was exploring it earlier, it seems like there's a community and the people in the community will post and share, and that helps teach other people. Is that correct?

(Hovanez at 00:18:18) That's absolutely correct. That's absolutely the—and it's done on purpose. I mean, we want people to share not just pictures. So we invented a new format we call the replay. That's our format. That's our media, a new form of media if you want.

(Hovanez at 00:18:30) When we allow people to share not only the final result of the process, but the whole process. So whole design process could be shared, and then everybody can use this process to learn and also replicate. So one of the coolest things, and we've actually worked on that technology for last three years. So it's still not an easy investment.

(Hovanez at 00:18:54) And you can, as engineer, you can appreciate the work we have done to get the level. But basically, it's allowed to share the whole process of the design. And basically, think about PicsArt as also like a kind of GitHub for designers when they're sharing their processes, and everybody can use the process. And they either duplicate or they create their own processes. They can fork it, and they create their own version of the process.

(Hovanez at 00:19:19) And they share back again to the community. So this part of collaboration—remember my story about my daughter when I said I want people to be in a positive space where people are sharing and creating and are sharing the assets, et cetera? I think that was a cornerstone of the whole business. It's the foundation of our platform to allow people to share and remix or replay and collaborate. So, yeah, as you notice, that was exactly right.

(Hovanez at 00:19:52) So we were using this whole process to make the creative process, the design process available to everyone. And it's fun. It's a very entertaining. I said, it's another our key advantage is that it's not boring, like Photoshop, and you need six months to train it and use it, and then you do you pass a set of certification and all these tasks. No.

(Hovanez at 00:20:13) You can be productive on day one, and it will be fun, will be entertaining. You can do it for work or for your personal life, but it still remains fun. And it's less work, and so you learn more. You start doing more and more. You get more advanced.

(Hovanez at 00:20:31) You'll become more creative, and then you're still doing it for your job, for your business, for your study, for whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:40) Earlier, you were talking about, you know, the concept of building the best product, solving the problem. I was thinking about Bezos and his concept of day one, and we've been applying that to our company. We're a startup. We're less than 15 people. But when you get out of that first five people, you really start to experience this new process and how things work on a different level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:07) And for me, what that's meant is that the concept of feeling like day one and always going back to the basics is a very important muscle to develop because your default, or at least my default programming, is to go do something new. And it's like, we solve this problem. Let's go do something new. But now I'm saying, okay. Let's pretend it's day one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:28) How do we just improve the podcast? We're building out a new studio in the room next door. We're improving the quality of our audio. And it's just an interesting thing that I'm learning right now about how our default is to do something new. But if you go back and you double down and act like day one, you get a much better, more refined product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:48) I'm curious. How do you get that culture within your organization as you've grown to be over 500 people?

(Hovanez at 00:21:56) One of the skills I developed, or one of the habits I developed down the road of doing so many startups and entrepreneurial jobs, is always question: Are we doing the right thing? So not just keep executing something you decided two years ago, but always, maybe a couple of times a year, question, are we really working on the right thing? Are we, where are differentiators?

(Hovanez at 00:22:27) Are we really differentiating ourselves versus our competition? Is it became a commodity business, or is it really innovation? Where is our innovation? Where can we be different than others and then in good sense? So this kind of habit which I built, it's also reflected in now the way we are working with our management team.

(Hovanez at 00:22:50) So we go offsites a couple of times a year. And all this question from, compared to day one strategy, I said, okay, let's think in a blank page. What we will do differently? I mean, are we just investing in the wrong technology, or are we investing in wrong features? Maybe, you know, we should think fresh and then reconsider and do that. Are we having enough innovations in building a company? With 600 people, it's very hard to build innovation because the big—when the company is big, they will build an inertia. You build a—it's very hard to cultivate the innovation because it's getting very regulated.

(Hovanez at 00:23:31) It's very process-driven. It's data-driven. It's revenue-driven. So you start really prioritizing things which are bigger, more revenue today, but not necessarily it's good to provide you a competitive edge tomorrow. So that's kind of inertia.

(Hovanez at 00:23:49) It's the things which could become a problem for large companies, so they stop innovating. Or they start—they still do the research, and they feel that they're doing research, but this research kind of stays in their labs and didn't go to product because there always a barrier between research and the product. Almost like mission-critical things won, or non-mission-critical things, even if it's cool and it's so innovative. So that's why, you know, to think about mission-critical versus non-mission-critical and also focusing on non-mission-critical but innovative differentiators.

(Hovanez at 00:24:39) And thinking about all of them early versus just focusing all on mission-critical projects, but they become more like a commodity over time, right? Because, you know, the competition, the—if you're not innovative, even mission-critical, it starts getting flattened or starts declining.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:50) Yeah. And one of your key differentiators is clearly education, right? Do you see it like that? Because it feels like it.

(Hovanez at 00:24:57) Right. Actually, yes. I mean, also as a company, it's so different. I think I'm proud that PicsArt is a learning organization. So I really, proud of the education and learning is a very important part of our culture.

(Hovanez at 00:25:15) Well, you know, for example, we have many internal trainings. So we have even our academy, which, we're providing free trainings to students outside of the organizations with the intent to hire later on in PicsArt. So, you know, we are giving them some free trainings. We provide free internship opportunities. We provide lots of internal mentorship programs or training programs.

(Hovanez at 00:25:50) So this kind of thing is very in our DNA. And the same with our platform, and we have a huge amount—we did a huge amount of investments in producing educational content. So if you look at if you go to our YouTube page, for example, there, you can find lots of tutorials about how to do this and that, how to design this. And it's also, you know, became very popular on YouTube. I mean, if you search PicsArt, you will find a million tutorials about PicsArt.

(Hovanez at 00:26:23) You know, you can see that there are some of the tools have several millions of views. So this educating people on how to be creative and how to design stuff is very kind of organic to our culture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:41) I was actually just pulling up the YouTube. Oops. The audio sounds amazing. It's really high quality on the video that plays when you load your YouTube channel. Oh, it just scared me a little bit because I got these big headphones on today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:57) That was good. It woke me up a little bit. Yeah. The the YouTube channel looks unbelievable. It looks amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:03) Everything—see, the thing is, I'm a huge design geek. I'm an engineer by trade, but I just have a passion for design partly because I could never do it. And then I just kept trying and I can't—I got to the point where I'm proficient at it, but I still geek out on Dribbble.com and stuff, you know, just to see what the best designers in the world are doing. So I have a huge appreciation for it, and it's just so cool because as I interact with all your different content from your website to your YouTube channel, everything looks so unique. It just screams like this was created custom, and I really like that feel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:42) That's pretty cool.

(Hovanez at 00:27:43) Yeah. I mean, we are investing. Actually, you know, because it's just our—we are very much an engineering-product company. So kind of like, IS, that's also kind of almost like a—I think we always favor functionality, then usability, then aesthetics in a sense.

(Hovanez at 00:28:02) So I could try, first of all, to make it very functional, all the interfaces. And then, you know, usually, the aesthetics part has come after we build the things to be functional and useful. And, you know, you can see we as a product, we went to many iterations. You know, our early products were pretty ugly if you look from today's criteria.

(Hovanez at 00:28:27) But then later on, we keep investing in the aesthetics. So, you know, still, there are places when we are not really happy. I think especially on our website, we're still building after the—I think we start investing on the web more this year versus mobile. So that's because one of our key priorities for this year. But in mobile, I think we have a pretty amazing journey from, you know, static, very functional engineering design products to design by professional designers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:01) I also want to jump back a little bit to the PicsArt Academy before I got startled by the unexpected audio. For so I wanted to just say that I think it's very smart because, you know, every company has to deal with how they attract talent, and some people go internal recruiters or do they do a mix of things. But I have only seen—I saw one or two other companies do it, but it's been a while. And then when I heard you say, I go, woah. He's doing that move that I really like that I haven't heard of in a long time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:32) And it's so smart. By educating people outside your company, you're building the top of funnel for your talent pipeline. It's brilliant.

(Hovanez at 00:29:40) Right. You know, I've been professor at the university. So even, you know, when I was doing my companies and previous companies as well, I was, you know, next week at the university as an invited, you know, artistic professor. And that was the best recruitment channel for me.

(Hovanez at 00:29:55) So I learned very early, you know, ten years back or maybe even more, that, you know, when I'm teaching and lecturing—I'm not teaching anymore. Sorry. I have no time. But when I was lecturing at this university, so the best students became my best employees, and some of them became my co-founders. You know, my two co-founders of PicsArt are my former students.

(Hovanez at 00:30:18) So I learned I already learned that, you know, the educating, it could be not just a charity or nonprofit thing, but it could be also very, very good for your business. You can bring the best talent by just giving this education for free. Yeah. But you can have access to this talented people. And so since for many years, more than ten, I'm practicing that to one scale or another scale, and we start building even more scale around that last year.

(Hovanez at 00:30:51) So start actually, the positive thing about this COVID situation is when things are online, it became so much easier to do this online training classes because everybody's online, and you're not restricted with the classrooms anymore and the location of people. So we can really recruit students from a larger geography. And then and everybody has already passed the barrier of being remote, so there's no initial friction of starting this remote education. Everybody get adjusted to this remote mode. And now you can really scale and do it like a more global level, and we are not really restricted with the number of students in the class.

(Hovanez at 00:31:38) There's no restriction of, you know—it's not 10 or 15 people anymore in a classroom or 20. It could be 50, you know, or in here we have several classes of 50 students are running in parallel, no limits. You know, before, you need to have big office space to do those kind of things.

(Hovanez at 00:31:59) And they should—all people should be in the right place, and they should commute to come over and things like that. Now, I mean, things are getting much, much easier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:09) Well, I think it's a brilliant move, and I'm a huge fan of that business move. And I'd love to see it happen more. I am curious to know, as a geek, have you gotten to use any sort of machine learning or AI inside of your product or business?

(Hovanez at 00:32:24) Of course. Yeah. Of course. I mean, the AI is a big part of our, you know, engineering or science, the R&D parts. We have a pretty decent group of data scientists, AI engineers.

(Hovanez at 00:32:39) I believe we should be—we should—we have only AI at 40-plus people, four or five PhDs, and working on many, many projects. I think we are running twenty, thirty projects on AI. Many things are already within a product. You know, some projects, some technologies are on a server side, but things—there are lots of filters which are using AI technology. For example, there are all the filters we have and all the tools we have, they have a segmentation opportunity.

(Hovanez at 00:33:13) So you can segment your face. You can segment hair. You can segment body. And then you can apply a certain filter only for you on your body or face or hair. Then we have a technology which allows you to convert your photo to a work of art.

(Hovanez at 00:33:30) So we applying different styles of famous artists on your photo. Even create a sketch. We have a—one of the coolest features we have is we—this is also we, one year ago, we—still very, very popular on Instagram and other social networks. When you take your photo and it's just sketch out of your photo. And you can even mesh the sketch in your real photo over in one photography or one design.

(Hovanez at 00:33:59) So this very cool, and it was used by millions of users every month. So, yeah, we have a—been a big part of this. And AI is a differentiator, but also it is enabling a much larger audience to become creative from day one. You know, you don't need to spend your 10,000 hours of painting to get to that level. I mean, you can start almost on day one and, you know, and you get more confidence in your creativity. This is starting more and more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:38) And you get the sort of the compounding effect of all the work, the human hours, humanity has put in, right? Because the painting had to come first, and you had all of these artists put all this time into the painting techniques. But then we're using technology to help mimic them and make them easier to apply. And now we're working with this higher level abstraction through this technology. And it's just really interesting to see the evolution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:03) I am curious to your thoughts. When we talk more about artificial general intelligence, the AGI, a lot of people discuss how the creative endeavors will be some of the last things to be automated. Or I've heard some people, some crazy people say it's just not possible. And I'm like, guys, impossible plus time equals possible.

(Hovanez at 00:35:28) Right. No, absolutely. I agree with you. I mean, many things we are thinking impossible are possible.

(Hovanez at 00:35:35) I think the pandemic was impossible in many people's minds one year ago, right? Who could believe the whole world will be shut down for six months? And still it is. So basically, now everything you say is impossible, something can happen that makes things possible. The same with AI. I mean, nobody was really expecting the things which are happening today. For years, I thought AI is dead and never going to be any practical implementation of AI until the last three or five years.

(Hovanez at 00:36:11) And today, AI is doing amazing stuff. Nobody could believe ten years back that you'll be able to recognize words, recognize speech and reply, talking with computers in a way you talk with other people, or that computers will be able to recognize faces or drive cars, right? Who thinks that was possible?

(Hovanez at 00:36:42) That's ten years back. Only science fiction. But today, I think we are very, very close to having completely autonomous self-driving cars.

(Hovanez at 00:36:51) So the barriers for things which are impossible are just getting lower and lower. I mean, I cannot think about what's going to happen in twenty, thirty years from now. So yeah, I mean, of course, in the near future, I will not try to kill human creativity. And I see it more as an enhancer of creativity and a good assistant of creativity. But long run, I cannot, I will not give any forecast. I mean, I believe things which we think are impossible will be possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:31) I think about that a lot. And right now, my current stance, as much thought as I put into it, is that we will definitely coexist. We will begin to evolve along with it. I don't think it'll just be the autonomous AI algorithms taking over the world. I think that we will continue to use them as tools and be dependent on them, but then they're dependent on us in some degree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:58) But I definitely see coexisting as the most likely path forward, or at least it's a path that brings me optimism.

(Hovanez at 00:38:08) Right. Yeah. I mean, who knows? Maybe we will become smarter later on. I mean, maybe we will find the technologies to make our brain even smarter. So who knows?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:21) Neural link software.

(Hovanez at 00:38:23) Yeah, Neuralink, right, exactly. And also maybe, I mean, we'll get the machines as smart as we are today, but then hopefully we'll be much smarter than we are now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:36) Yes. How many people would have to have Neuralink before you got it?

(Hovanez at 00:38:45) Oh, yeah. I don't know. I mean, it's an interesting question. And it's not about just risk or whatever. I mean, it's creating a new identity for me. That's the strangest part. And I mean, I need to see how it works, and are you staying yourself or are you just transforming yourself into something different?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:13) That is true. And then you have to think about it on other levels. As you acquire new skills, you're transforming yourself, right? That's true as well. So it's a real interesting thing to think about, but I believe that we'll get there in the next fifty years or so. I think that we'll get to that point in the next fifty. We got electricity a hundred and five, a hundred and ten years ago, and look what we're doing. We're beaming light across the world and talking to each other in real time over video. This is so cool.

(Hovanez at 00:39:47) So let's put in our calendar fifty years from now. Let's have a talk and let's discuss that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:52) We will both be uploaded into the computer.

(Hovanez at 00:39:54) Who knows?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:55) We'll be able to live forever. We'll have the conversation. Oh, man. So I'm curious to know, as an entrepreneur, as a leader, what is one of the hardest lessons that you've learned?

(Hovanez at 00:40:10) The hardest lesson is never give up, I would say. And this is something which is really important for entrepreneurs. In every company, I have near-death experiences a couple of times, that period when you think it's dark and you are done because of a crisis or economic situation or losing an important client or just not getting what you were expecting to get.

(Hovanez at 00:40:43) So in every company, you have a situation like that. And in our first startup, it was very, very stressful. Not sleeping at nights and getting very anxious and depressed and all these things. But then you understand it's a part of the game. I mean, if you sign up for this game, then you need to play it according to the rules, and the rules are, expect stress, expect things will not go the way you were predicting.

(Hovanez at 00:41:13) And you should stay calm, and you shouldn't give up. If you already believe in your product or skills, then ultimately you'll win because of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:29) I fully agree. Actually, never giving up is something that I had a lot of experience with, right? And I looked back, and this is probably a few years ago. I said, what in my past is the recurring trend? What's the thing that I'm doing that I'm not seeing? And it was often just giving up too early, right? Because I'd have an idea, I'd start working on it, make some money, and then I'd be like, well, I'm not super rich.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:02) It didn't take off. Let's just sell it off. And so I ended up building these projects, pouring a year or two into them, and then selling them for, like, 500 to 500,000, a million dollars. And then I just kept doing that over and over, and then I would see other products in that market take off, and I'd be like, I should've stayed there. And so I said, okay, this time, no matter how many times I feel that way, I'm just not going to let myself say the words. I'm not going to let myself take the action or send the email or whatever it is. You can get pushed to the point of wanting to give up, but it's very important to understand the actual moment and what that feels like to give up and then not do it. And for some reason, exactly like you said, even in this venture, which has gotten to the point where it's cash-flow positive now, so that's a very exciting step for us. But even in this venture, you get to that point and it's like, financially, it says it's not going to work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:59) Emotionally, it says it's not going to work. But I know that rule. I know this feeling. I know this feeling will go away. You'll wake up the next day, and your emotions will just, don't give up. Don't quit. Just don't do that one action that you know is ending it. It's like just backing up from the ledge. And then somehow, it's almost like a test from the universe. You're unlocking this combination, this very difficult combination.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:26) And somehow, one little thing gives, and you get a little bump forward. And then something else good happens. But then you get close to that ledge so many times, you start to gain maturity to understand that the first thing is I need systems and processes to not get me near this ledge, so I don't repeat these mistakes again, right? And then you also have to back up and say things will always go in this pattern of up and down, and it's important to stay as centered as possible through the ups and downs. And yeah, those are just some of the things that I've been learning in the past five years.

(Hovanez at 00:44:07) Correct. Oh, absolutely. And you should really love the whole journey. I mean, you should love the process. It's just a journey. And if you really don't love the journey, then it will be hard to go through all the steps. You should enjoy what you are doing. That's number one rule for me. If I stop getting excited about what I'm doing, then I should stop doing that and switch to something else because, otherwise, getting all the stresses and all those things and not enjoying the success and not enjoying the journey, I think that's too much for one life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:47) And part of the reason I just spoke so much, because I usually try not to, but because I really respect you and what you're accomplishing. And so I'm saying these things and sort of just being as open and raw and transparent so that if you see something that I'm saying that's wrong or that doesn't fit with you, I hope you would stop me or send me an email after or correct it because it's kind of how I calibrate myself.

(Hovanez at 00:45:14) Right. No, absolutely. I agree with you personally. I mean, I think what you said was actually right. I'm with you on that. I mean, you should be patient. It doesn't happen overnight. None of the stories, starting with Edison inventing the light bulb or whatever, it takes thousands of experiments to get there, right? And that's what you should keep in mind. When you are climbing the mountain, you sometimes don't see the top, and you think it's too far. But yeah, you can give up and go back, but maybe you'll realize you were very close to the top, and you just gave up too early.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:08) Yeah. It reminds me a little bit of faith. Faith is an important thing, and I originally associated it only with religious activities, right? So for some reason, my default association with faith was directly with religion. But then I found out that faith is an independent concept of religion, and it's important. It's like a muscle, and it has to be exercised.

(Hovanez at 00:46:33) Yeah, right. So yeah, faith or fanaticism sometimes is usually associated with faith or some other things. But sometimes you need to be fanatic about your business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:45) So when you were talking about getting excited, I'm curious to know, when you find yourself not excited, do you find new ways? Do you adjust your schedule? How do you handle the transition from you're excited, you realize you're not excited, and then either making adjustments to your schedule or going off in a completely different direction?

(Hovanez at 00:47:10) Right. Yeah. But when I'm excited about something, that's super important. I mean, when you start the business, the excitement should be enough to keep you on this business for many years. It never happened with me when I lost my excitement about the business because of something that happened during the execution on the business.

(Hovanez at 00:47:37) So that's what I'm saying. The goal should be big enough and should be exciting enough to keep you excited for many years. Otherwise, maybe you chose the wrong goal. And that's the thing. You can probably reach any goal if you set it for yourself. So the main wisdom is to find the right goal. I mean, if you put in a good amount of effort, you can probably reach any goal in the world, but just choose your goal properly. And that means when you're selecting some product or business you are going to work on for the next five years, then make sure that it's not just an idea which your friend told you and you think it's an interesting idea to work on.

(Hovanez at 00:48:28) But it's really something you truly believe is an important problem to solve. You're really in love with your technology, product, or solution. And the mission you are working on is big enough, which is part of your identity, not just because of your market research. My belief in education is so strong, it will not go away anytime soon. And that's why it gives me more strength to build a product to educate the world and give them more way to create and collaborate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:08) I love it. I like how that's so meaningful at your core. It expresses itself through your business, which is just a really cool thing.

(Hovanez at 00:49:19) So that's what I'm saying. That's why, for example, when you truly love someone, it's something for life. It's not for another six months, right? So find something you truly love and it comes out of your heart, not necessarily from the brain.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:38) Yes. I actually heard somebody say, it stuck with me. I don't remember who said it, but they said, find something you love and let it kill you. And the context for that is find something that you love to spend the rest of your time on, right? Because it's like, what is worth dying for? Because you're pouring your time into this bucket, right? It's like, what is going to be the result of that at the end?

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:06) And it's like, okay, these principles or these missions are worth my life. And that's something that really makes me happy, whoever created this game called life, because it definitely gets better as you get older. You learn, like, what you said earlier about you're playing this game, you're playing the entrepreneurship game or bringing value to others game. Then you start to understand the rules and how the game works, and then you start to develop some skill at it, and then you keep going, and you just keep developing more skill, and you become a better player. And it's interesting all the way down.

(Hovanez at 00:50:44) Yeah, absolutely. And otherwise, you'll really give up. And if somebody gives you an organized offer, it's just the first opportunity. You get tired of the business, you just give up because you didn't believe, you started solving the wrong problem or you started investing in a problem you're not truly in love with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:06) Yeah. And to get a little weird for a moment, the other night—because you seem like you'd be right up this alley to explore this idea—I was thinking about time and the universe and life and how long it is until the heat death of the universe, like how long the universe will last, and it's a long time. And so it makes sense that if we're all stuck in this giant space, right, that we would have something that would keep our attentions going. It's like life almost feels like a game to keep things interesting as we go through time.

(Hovanez at 00:51:47) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:48) Yeah. It's weird. I'm a weird person.

(Hovanez at 00:51:50) Yeah. Right. I think we are moving, you know, like you have a very deep discussion about the meaning of life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:57) Yeah. Well, you know, you have education at your core. I have understanding the meaning of life at mine. It tends to come out in everything I do. It's just like these sub processes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:11) I think if I lived a long time ago, I'd be like a philosopher or something interesting because the default programs in my head that run, I call it the why program. It's always just like, what is going on? And I feel like, you know, I think back a little bit historically, if we look back maybe like a thousand years when religion was the main rule around the world, I feel like back then, more people were interested in finding out the meaning of life than are now. I wish we could—and it was best described, I didn't experience this, but I think the feeling was expressed in a movie I saw about the Apollo mission or the first rocket we put into space. Right? How the whole United States and everybody just gathered together and it was the thing everybody talked about and we were all working towards one common goal and everybody's focus was on it. And you'd go into a gas station inside of any city in the United States and everybody would be talking about the rocket. And I wish we could do that with something. I would prefer understanding the origins of life, but like what, or exploring space farther. But I wish we had that cohesive goal, that mission, that collection. I feel like we have all of this human energy and this power, and it's not being channeled and focused the way it could be if we all had this really big, crazy, audacious goal. You know?

(Hovanez at 00:53:49) Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, I agree. Years back when you don't have Internet, you don't have at least that strong TV broadcasting and all these things, you know, you have more time and you spend more time just thinking and talking with your close friends. Today, the whole industries of the entertainment and all the other instincts are fighting for their attention. And actually, you end up just, you know, you start paying attention to too many things, and it's taking the attention from deep things like, what's your true belief, what's your true love, things like that. You keep entertained by the media all the time. And that's, you know, kind of create a little bit more like superficial approach to life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:35) Yeah. No. You just sparked a really interesting thought in my head. So I saw this graph of humanity's increase in tools. Right? You see the tools go up in your abilities, but you also see a correlation with things vying for your attention or things trying to distract. It's like your distractions go up, but your tools go up. And so the formula there is discipline. Right? Because if you're disciplined enough to focus, but you also have the tools at your disposal, then you can do really, really, really great things. But you could have all of these tools, no discipline, and you're just on a distraction roller coaster your whole life.

(Hovanez at 00:55:15) Right. And, you know, if you remember earlier, I was taught that when our core differentiator is to keep fun and work at the same place. So I think we still feel that entertainment is a very natural human kind of desire, but we want to, you know, entertaining also give them learning. So people not just waste their time being entertained, but they also learn. And that's what I see that's our mission. It's just to keep training people by entertaining. And, okay, or entertain and teach and educate and give them new skills which they can use for their life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:58) Is PicsArt on the big iPad as well?

(Hovanez at 00:56:03) Yes. I think, you know, we are—iPad was a slightly low priority for us, but now we are investing more resources on iPad because we see the rise of consumers in big people which are not doing it for fun, but also doing something for their work and supporting large screens like iPad and the Mac. I think we are working now on the web, and web is, you know, we are expecting major releases later this year on web. And we want people to use the larger screens for their design.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:37) I also thought it was interesting because I have small children. So I've got a three-year-old girl and a one-and-a-half-year-old son. But the three-year-old, Aria, we got her this tablet, I think like an Amazon tablet or something, and they had like a specific kind of kids one where you could lock it up well. But whenever I go out and I see, you know, birthday parties or whatever for the kids, it seems like all the kids have these tablets, and they don't have like the phones. Right? They have these bigger tablets. And one of the things I thought was really interesting is how I think it was Apple put this playground, like coding playground on the iPad as like a default installed app so that the kids—I'll give you an example of how my three-year-old uses this. She learned the entire thing in like a couple weeks. It's weird because it's like, oh yeah, your kid's young and they learned it. Yeah. But when you live with the child and they can't put sentences together and they just got potty trained last week, yet before they were potty trained and could put three words together, they were able to play multiple games on the iPad, turn it on, turn it off, switch it, go into the kids YouTube, change the show when they're not interested in it, and do all of that, and they can't even speak to you yet really, and they are still in diapers. And that to me is unbelievable. The education potential of putting an educational something or another on the iPad and getting that—kids could do art on it. There's so many interesting things, but I think it's really interesting when it comes like long-term education. Because when I was three, if I had a coding playground on an iPad tablet, I would have started at three, not eight.

(Hovanez at 00:58:25) No. I think, you know, education is one of the areas which needs more disruption and innovation. So education have been very conservative. Maybe, you know, second after health care, just like maybe the most conservative kind of industries which, you know, used to serve the same kind of teaching techniques for years and hundred years and sometimes. So I think now they need to innovate and to be innovative, and people will start earlier and learn things earlier in better way and better methodologies and all these things. And that's what I mean. Like, maybe fifty years from now we'll be much smarter than we are today because also, we don't change our education, not necessarily all the connections, but also maybe methods of teaching will be different. And I believe our brains are very capable. And, you know, with the proper training, I think we can probably do more than we are doing now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:20) I agree. And historically, you take a step back, we've been on this path of passing information down to the next generation. Like if you look at it like that, from the printing press to all of the technologies that we're making it better, easier, and faster for people to get information. If you take like in the Matrix, right, you could just download it and have all the experience. I don't think that's impossible at all.

(Hovanez at 00:59:53) Yeah. I agree. I agree. And, you know, another hope I have for humanity, and probably that will be the very nice closing for this podcast, is like the life expectancy will be much higher. So people, you know, fifty years from now, they live maybe two hundred years, and they will become much more smarter in the last hundred years of their life. So—

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:20) I love it. Yes. Let's get people smart and then allow them to live for a long period of time. We have a better life. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much. This has been fantastic. I'm a huge fan of PicsArt. Super grateful that you built such an amazing piece of technology. If there's ever anything we can do to help out, we'll put links for people to download the application in the show notes, and we'll push it out through our networks. I'll add you on LinkedIn, and we'll post quick clips. It was an absolute honor to get to meet you and hang out with you today.

(Hovanez at 01:00:51) It was a great pleasure for me too, you know, and thank you for interesting conversation. I really enjoyed it too. So thank you very much.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:00) Have a great day. Thank you.

(Hovanez at 01:01:01) You too.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:04) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.