Foundations with Larisa Hovannisian

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.”