Varag Gharibjanian Podcast Transcript
Varag Gharibjanian joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Varag Gharibjanian. Varag Gharibjanian is a visionary leader known for his ability to drive growth through innovative strategies, disruptive technologies, and transformative deals, with a clear purpose of leaving the world better than he found it.
Varag is passionate about bridging business opportunities with technology to create tech enabled products that make a meaningful impact. Over the last 10 plus years, Varag has dedicated himself to untangling the knots and bottlenecks faced by enterprise and startup technology companies. Drawing upon his expertise, he has assembled a team of unique strategists, operators, and technologists who share his vision of helping companies grow through better strategy and powerful deep technologies, including AI, AR, VR, Hardware, Semi, Wireless, Mobile, and IoT.
Well, good afternoon, Varag. Welcome to the show!
Varag Gharibjanian: Awesome. Thanks for having me, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. This is so fun. I appreciate you making the time joining and hailing out of the great state of California there in L. A., kind of close to my stomping grounds. I did spend about 10 years in Orange County, or so.
Varag Gharibjanian: okay. I was born and raised there,
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Awesome. Very, very cool. But again, appreciate you jumping on and we’re going to jump right into the questions here. Let’s talk about really solving challenges, right? Over the past decade, you’ve dedicated yourself to solving the challenges faced by technology companies.
What do you consider the most complex bottleneck in bringing new tech enabled products to market? And how have you navigated this?
Varag Gharibjanian: It’s a great question. Some of the best technologies that I’ve seen are the ones that can struggle the most, right? Often the people who can create some of the best don’t use our most innovative technologies, let’s say, don’t get a chance to have to be seen and appreciated in the market.
I think it. Is a different muscle, right? And what I’ve seen work well is having, you know, somebody on board, maybe it can be the same person, although that’s more rare than ever these days for it to be a technologist as well, but to be in touch with what’s going on in the markets in which that technology could be applied to.
And so that means if it’s more B2B, especially that’s where I focus. Then, you know, being in touch with potential customers listening to, you know, what their problems are and or what products they might be trying to build themselves. If your technology, something that fits into a product, that’s. Kind of a different scope, but, you know, being in touch with customers as you are building, you know, I know it’s been said to death, but when you are building something that’s really brand new, really cutting edge, let’s say it’s a, it’s a new, you know, AI model, or if it’s a new piece of hardware.
I found, you know, those that have a better chance of success and bringing it to market are those that, you know, have the relationships with the right decision makers within a given market. And but even a precursor to that is knowing what markets you may want to tackle. Right and what makes the most sense and so you’re looking for ones ideally that are large that are growing that have stakeholders that have, like, a willingness to pay who have budget who consider, you know, the, the problem that you are solving with your technology of relative higher can see why combinator uses this great language of.
A recurring and urgent problem. I love that. So, some problems could be severe, but if they only happen once a year might be who cares. Right? And so. These are important questions to answer as you’re going out and building something new. If you want it to be. You know, adopted in the marketplace, or at least have a better chance of that.Right? So, there’s some other factors, but those are my 1st thoughts.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. And we talk about that a lot on the podcast being in touch with their customers, whether it’s surveys you know, or just areas where you can build a community where you can get real time feedback from your customers.
You can obviously tweak and make things around your service or your product so that you can absolutely serve the right. You know, solution to their problem, but I appreciate that. And Varag, your work emphasizes the importance of deep technologies like AI, augmented reality, virtual reality, and IOT.
From your perspective, which of these technologies holds the most promise for transformative impact in the next few years?
Varag Gharibjanian: So, I have a little bit of a controversial opinion on this one. I actually, there are technologies and there are computing platforms. And I think that computing platforms, which I would kind of define as like, as relates to technology, some subset of technologies that really changed the way business users and consumers interface with information technology.
And I believe it’s those computing platforms that actually drive. The biggest transformational change you know, we started with mainframes, then PCs, then, you know, to, to laptops, to mobile and that trend, they’re being more and more personal, a better user experience, a more natural relationship between the user and the computing device or that architecture.
And although AI is all the rage, I think that does have a play in computing platforms, but I find it to be one of the ingredients. And that’s why I’m very big on XR or extended reality, or just kind of an umbrella word for augmented or virtual reality in the vision pro just came out a couple of days ago.
I’ve got 1 beside me here. I feel as. That when we hit that moment with these devices, where they are as pervasive as, you know, a smartphone has been to each person, each individual, and then to each industry that that’s going to be what drives, you know, the most transformational change. It does take longer time.
It does take more ingredient, technological ingredients to come together content on top of that and a, and a change in the way, you know, users or consumers. See these devices. And I think we’re literally in the middle of that revolution. Now it is more silent than people really understand, but it is a big wave that’s coming.
And I do think that’s going to drive more change in the world than even the smartphone made for us over the last 10, 20 years. It’s exciting and I think that it’s going to move the needle more in each industry than maybe even some of the individual stakeholders within those given industries is the smartphone did.
So that’s where I’m a super bullish, although it will, like I said, take a longer time.
Brian Thomas: Sure. And we appreciate that. You know, again, everybody’s got a unique perspective or story here on the podcast, right? So we appreciate, you know, kind of where you’re landing in that. I, I, I do agree with you a little bit there.
We’ve done a lot of. Discussion here on the podcast around XR and how that’s going to be one of the big leap, leaps, I guess, into the future as far as technology. So I’m really excited to see more about that as time goes on. So, thanks again. Murag, as a leader known for driving growth through innovative strategies, how do you foster a culture of innovation within your team and among the companies you advise?
Varag Gharibjanian: Within the team. I’ll start there. It’s really about starts with, like, not being fearful of change, not being too fearful of a failure. Basically, those are the foundational ingredients you need to be quote unquote innovative. And to me, I kind of define innovative as. Being able to adjust very quickly to the market and not only just being able to adjust, but at some point, being able to make your impact in a given market, right.
And to do that, you can’t be scared of, of, you know, losing everything you have already going for you. You have to always see what the changing dynamics are and how you can apply what you do have, the resources you have, the team you have. And so that’s, that’s a mindset. That you need to be able to start with in terms of, you know, advising the companies.
It’s not too different from that. You want to create the structure, especially for larger companies. This is more difficult, but you want to create a structure and sometimes even a legal structure where you have the capability to be able to innovate and that won’t necessarily harm, you know, try new things and not harm your existing business.
That can come through the technology partnerships, it can come through, you know, custom software or hardware development you might do on the side, but you need to be able to have that environment where people can think and play outside the given box of the, of the company. It’s so important because the rate of change, as everyone knows, is increasing, not decreasing, right?
So if you’re not trying something new. Then, the time you have until you, which your products or services become irrelevant is only becoming shorter. Right? So, it starts with that mindset and then, like, the, the practice of. Of experimentation.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate your perspective on that. I know there’s a lot of things that you need to do during your daily workday to you know, using that critical thinking and creativity to advise the companies that you support on a regular basis.
So, thank you. And the last question of the day. Looking ahead, how do you see the intersection of business opportunities and technology evolving, especially with the rapid advancements in deep tech?
Varag Gharibjanian: well, if we just take, you know, AI, for example, right, all this action we’ve had in the last year and a half, 2 years, there are, I don’t know the exact data, but it seems to me that it’s, it’s only maybe even just a single digit percentage of. Knowledge workers, let’s say that are even using large language models in their, in their like daily work.
And I think that’s a number that’s going to grow. But it already can offer you so much that it’s changing the way people not just like produce content, but also even might develop a business strategy, might test different ideas they may have, right? They might you might input certain data about you know, your business and, and ask or prompt different questions.
That can stretch the way you think you can almost use these large language models is like a second brain and I already do that in my day to day. And I’m, I’m shocked at what it can produce. That doesn’t mean everything it produces is perfect, but as a 2nd brain that is in some cases way smarter than we are on our own.
It’s incredibly powerful. And so, I think that’s going to continue to involve as of all of us. People discover. What it can do for them, and it’s kind of a something that you have to try and then on its own over time, you realize like, oh, I can also prompt this question, or I can also input that information.
And same way is like, if you can think if we think back to, like, the early 2000s. You know, not everybody was using Google, but then after enough time, people realize that they can search for various questions in a much less natural way than we can now with a given large language model. And I think it’s going to be something that people start to do more locally so that, you know, they have data privacy and all that.
But that is, you know, a trend that is going to drive hard in the next 3 years. When we look at more what I was speaking to earlier, more computing platforms, I think that’s going to take longer, but that’s also going to change the, the productivity of every given employee, right? So, their ability to do more complex computing actions and wherever they are, when they’d like you know, basically the vision pro here can allow you to.
Do everything you would with four monitors, but wherever you want to be, right? So, the productivity level of every given employee is going to shoot up drastically here in the next three to five years, which is very, very exciting.
Brian Thomas: Thank you, Varag. I appreciate your insights really do. And you’re absolutely right.
We’ve I think last January, the conversation around AI and LLMs really started to kick up and it just. Didn’t it was nonstop, I think through every podcast and I’ve had non technologists on the podcast. But everybody was using some sort of new app that was leveraging some sort of AI platform or large language models.
So, I do appreciate your insights really do. And Varag, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Varag Gharibjanian: Brian, nothing short of a pleasure. Please keep doing what you do. It’s great to be here.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Varag Gharibjanian Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
