Trip to Armenia

Earlier this year, our team had the courtesy to be invited by our investor, Mr. Hakob Hakobyan, to pitch at his annual start-up event: Up-Start Init @the Mariott hotel, Yerevan, Armenia. Our team of choice for this event: Hadrien, Federico "Chicco", and Vasileios.

What we thought to be a pleasant and relaxing trip, turned out into a huge adventure. Things can get messy quick when transporting a showcase prototype so far across the globe. We were very concerned with giving our prototype to the luggage at our check-in. We wrapped if it in Styrofoam and put literally TEN fragile stickers on the packaging.

The flight was long and tiring. It took us a whole day to get there. It wasn't a surprise our prototype suffered a bit. When we opened-up the package, we found our box had been smashed almost beyond repair. Panic was inevitable.

We ran to a DIY-store and bought equipment to repair it. Boy, that was a long night.

The second day was prep day. We tuned our pitch and our Prezi presentation, and talked with Hakob and his Mariam, his partner and fiancée, about the agenda of the event. We were grateful towards Air B'n'B for its awesome deals in the center of the city of Yerevan.

The third day was the big day. We had to start preparing very early in the morning even though the pitch was later that evening. We faced some last minute connectivity problems when trying to connect our box the open network of the Mariott hotel. Communication was a little tricky when trying to speak with the hotel personnel. Lucky for us, we managed to solve our problem almost at the last minute.

The Mariott is a big fancy hotel, and the pressure was on. We pitched in front of a 500+ crowd, with ministers and investors being present.

You can watch our performance here:

One of the big reasons our presentation was so successful was thanks to our investor Mr. Hakobyan and his fiancé Mrs. Torosyan. They made sure we were well prepared and gave us everything we needed in a country we didn't know.

The last day we had some time to ourselves to visit Yerevan before leaving back to Belgium. The plane-trip back home was even longer and more hostile for our prototype, but overall, our stay in Armenia was an amazing experience for the team and hopefully many more will appear here on the blog! No doubt we had to make week-long repairs to our prototype once we got back home but thankfully we all made it back home in one piece.