Hayk Hakobyan is the co-founder and CEO of Bizbaz. They offer comprehensive customer intelligence and risk assessment capabilities to acquire and serve unbanked populations in Asia and globally.

Their mission is to solve customer risk, enable generation of actionable customer profiles and transform financial and other B2B2C and B2C services.

‍

👋🏼 How would you explain your job to someone outside tech?

Orchestrating and facilitating information exchange and execution within our organization.

‍

🧐 What's something about you or your job that would surprise us?

I think of my job as making everyone else's job easier, better and faster.

‍

🏆 What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

In my corporate life, I was once employed to turn around an ailing business, Global Yellow Pages, a publicly listed company with star directors HQ-ed in Singapore. I have managed to accomplish phase one before leaving. Lot's of sweat, pain and stories.

In my startup life, launching and scaling Bizbaz.tech has been by far the most challenging and a highlight!

‍

🔍 What's a startup trend or space you're watching this year?‍

Risk, compliance and data protection — relevant to our startup bizbaz.tech

‍

💼 What advice would you give someone starting out in your industry?

Look for pain points in education, health or finance that you or a group of people or your country is experiencing and no-one seems to have a solution for. Then, think of ways you can potentially solve it.

Be creative, don't discard ideas because you think they are outlandish. Do some research to see if your ideas of solutions have some legs.

For the ones that do, go deeper and talk to some people who you think would feel the same as you. You will eventually find your cofounders!

Start small and validate as much as you can. Try to use your own or FFF funds. Then once your solution has legs and you have some paying or no-paying clients, you can look for some outside investment to scale faster.

‍

🗣 What's one thing you can keep talking about for hours?

Predicting someone's future behavior.

‍

🎥 What's your favorite movie/TV show?

Big Bang Theory

‍

🍨 What's your go-to ice cream flavor?‍

Chocolate

‍

We've edited this interview for length and clarity.