by Hrag Vartanian
From the early years of industrialist Moses Gulesian to Star Supermarket mogul Stephen Mugar Armenian American business leaders have come forward to lend a hand to the Armenian community.
Among the earlier generation of Armenian American businessmen in Massachusetts are Ara Barmakian and Michael Gulbankian.
Born and raised in Cambridge, Barmakian's parents arrived from Malatya early last century. His father along with his four brothers established Barmakian Brothers jewelry business. Ara, along with his two brothers Diran and Vahan, joined the enterprise in the 1950's and broadened the business to include diamond wholesaling, manufacturing and retailing.
Ara remembers that when Barmakian Bros. first opened its office in the Jewelers' building on Washington Street in Boston it was the only Armenian-owned shop. In the seventies, waves of Middle Eastern Armenian immigrants arrived and now the building is occupied predominantly by Armenian jewelers. "Armenians are an important factor in the American jewelry business. In Los Angeles, they are very involved in manufacturing while here they dominate the field of custom-made products," Ara explains.
Barmakian Bros. employs close to 200 people and has stores in New Hampshire, Boston and most recently Framingham, Massachusetts, 20 miles from Boston. He is encouraged by the increase of diamond-related ventures in Armenia and in the future looks forward to the prospect of working with the country.
Michael Gulbankian's dream of working with Armenia was inherited from his father. Born and raised half way between Boston and Worcester in Southboro, his parents arrived from Kharpert and established a poultry and dairy farm.
In 1961, Gulbankian married and the following year he established a school bus business to compensate for the farming off-season. By 1972, he began transporting produce to Boston's agricultural markets and the venture developed into his full-time business. When the agricultural market fell apart in the mid-seventies under the consolidation of supermarket chains Gulbankian shifted his company's focus primarily to passenger carriers. Today 29 buses serve the Eastern Seaboard from Canada to Florida. His wife, Alice, is involved in the business and in 1963 established flower greenhouses (which today number seven) and retail on the Gulbankian complex in Southboro.
Always eager to give back to his community, Gulbankian has donated bus services to many Armenian organizations and activities. He soon turned his attention towards Armenia.
On September 23rd, 1991, the day after the Republic's independence, Gulbankian arrived in Armenia—it would be the first of 16 trips he has made to the present day.
Through the Knights of Vartan, he decided to sponsor two schools in the New Kharpert neighborhood of Yerevan. It was a commitment that fulfilled his dream, "I bought five computers for the New Kharpert Number One School and they later developed a computer program. I donated funds to establish a small gallery at the Number One School in my parents' name so they could exhibit antiques from the old village of Kharpert."
His commitment to Armenia has been unshakable, "I did whatever I could to get the two schools up to par." He funded the installation of a modern plumbing system, bought much needed school supplies and purchased uniforms for their athletic program that, Gulbankian says with pride, incorporates the traditional colors of his parents' home village.
He believes that Armenian Americans are embracing Armenia more and more and the cultural distance created by the Soviet period is withering. Gulbankian hopes that the Armenian American community will one day develop the vision to build more connections with Armenia, perhaps sponsoring Armenian American college graduates to visit Armenia after their studies and be exposed to the country and its riches.
TAKING ON THE OPPORTUNITIES ARMENIA HAS TO OFFER
Paul Korian agrees that Armenian Americans must have vision to build opportunities in Armenia. Together with five other Diasporan Armenian investors he has formed DK Development and purchased Hotel Armenia in Yerevan.
Originally from Jerusalem, he emigrated with his parents at the age of 10. He attended Boston's Northeastern University where he completed degrees in Pharmacy and Business Administration. His career began with the management program for Hosko Drugs (part of the Jewel Tea Corporation) and he continued there for 18 years as marketing director.
In 1986, he joined forces with three other individuals and started what grew to be Staples, an office supply superstore chain. The founding team utilized the knowledge from their respective industries and applied it to another field, "It was a large and highly segmented industry and it didn't have efficient supply chains. Most of us came out from supermarket and drug companies and we applied the highly developed distribution systems in those industries to office supplies. No one guessed how successful it would be."
They surpassed all business forecasts by opening 60 stores at the end of their second year. As Vice President of Merchandising and later Business Development, he left Staples in 1994 after launching the company's Canadian, British, German and French operations.
For the last five years he has been working to develop his own company, PK Development. He has also helped to launch Euroffice.co.uk in the United Kingdom and is investing in a 3-D illustration and animation web company.
In 1996, the Armenian government invited a number of Diasporan Armenian businessmen to investigate potential investments, Korian explains, "We were invited by the Ministry of Industry and Trade to look at business opportunities and spent a year and a half exploring. We were in the midst of that when the Armenian government decided to privatize the three major hotels in Yerevan."
The small group of Diasporan investors purchased Hotel Armenia hoping to create a model that other Armenian American businesspeople could follow.
Soon, their work encouraged the Overseas Private Investment Corporation of the U.S. Government and a branch of the World Bank to support the project. Korian expects that in the fall of 2002 the project will open as a five-star hotel under the auspices of the prestigious Marriott International Hotel Chain. Korian insists that working on the project has not been easy, "Since we've been in this project we've had to deal with five Prime Ministers, two Presidents and three legislatures. That kind of shifting can cause a lot of apprehension both to individual and institutional investors."
"The government must create an environment where investors can feel secure and believe that legal issues will be resolved fairly. They also need to help foreigners make the right decisions. You can't rely solely on Diasporan Armenians, it must be attractive to anyone in the world. Armenia does make an effort with its tax laws to allow for a tax holiday for the first year and a 50% tax holiday for the following five years. The problem is that there is no business in the world I know of that you can get up and running while making a profit that is substantial and meaningful in the first 3-5 years. The tax codes need help. We need to build bridges to Armenia. It is a necessity and that needs to happen."
He has also joined other Diasporan Armenians to form an incubator group for the hi-tech industry in Armenia. Future potentials seem endless.
The future of technology is very familiar to Noubar Afeyan. The biotech wizard has started more companies at the age of 37 than most entrepreneurs initiate during a lifetime.
Originally from Lebanon, he first settled in Canada and studied chemical engineering at Montreal's McGill University. He moved to Boston in order to complete his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the city's prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He explains that his decision to remain in Boston was encouraged by the city's leading role in biotechnology and the strong Armenian community.
In 1987, Afeyan initiated his first venture, PerSeptive Biosystems, and after nine months of hard work he was able to gather support from various funds and venture capitalists.
Producing tools for the biotech industry, he used his doctoral research to launch his first product used for protein purification in research.
He admits the venture forced him to learn quickly and the company went public in 1992 with sales hovering around the $1 million mark. After five years of phenomenal growth with sales of over $100 million, Afeyan sold PerSeptive to Perkin-Elmer. After the sale the two companies merged and Perkin-Elmer became PE Corp. Afeyan stayed on as the new Chief Business Officer to ensure that the company had its hand on the pulse of the biotech industry. His biggest accomplishment was launching the company's Celera Genomics project that has captivated the media because of its goal to sequence the human genome.
In 1996, Afeyan was involved with the founding of another innovative company, ChemGenics Pharmaceuticals, developing out of some of the technology he began at PerSeptive. The following year ChemGenics was sold to Millennium Pharmaceuticals.
Afeyan recognized his greatest skill was in the development of new ventures and founded NewcoGen (New Company Generation) Group in the summer of 1999, "I have had the good fortune of being involved in so many start-ups. I've seen it enough times that I have a sense of the special ingredients required to have a high degree of success in a technology-based company. My views have evolved over 12 years to think of company creation as almost an evolutionary process where the company isn't designed but emerges from a set of activities that you do. You need a team so that it can adapt very rapidly. My background in biology and my work in genomics has influenced my views on the company creation process."
Today, he teaches his newfound perspective on business development at MIT's Sloan School of Management and believes that NewcoGen will offer him the platform to launch projects for years to come. The company's mission is to generate new companies and invest in established firms in the field of genomics. In the last 12 months, NewcoGen has already initiated four IT companies and three in the field of life sciences.
The most important lesson he has learned is balance. He insists, "People think success is about ambition, hard work, perseverance, creativity, but in my opinion it's not about any one of those things, it's about balancing all of them and not catching yourself being one-sided in what you're doing. You also have to balance your work team, risk-takers with people who do it the old-fashioned way because you really need both."
Proudly Armenian, he is a board member of St. Stephen's church in Watertown and Armenia Fund USA, a lifetime trustee at the Armenian Assembly and a member of the Council of Armenian High Tech Executives and Entrepreneurs. He has also become a board member of the Boston University Medical School and helped launch a half a million-dollar Armenian community endowment there to support its Armenia-based projects.
His latest interest in Armenia is his most ambitious. He hopes to link MIT's international renowned and influential Media Lab with Armenia. The project, Digital Armenia, will begin early next year, "It is a novel education effort that leverages MIT's new digital technology that they've been creating to help developing countries improve their ability at computer literacy, embedding it into how kids grow up. They have had successful programs in Costa Rica and Thailand. I think we will be able to get a pilot program going and establish learning hubs so that teenage kids can have access to an environment where they learn to be active members of the digital age."
As Boston business leaders look forward they are focusing on developing a future that adapts to the emerging realities of the Diaspora and Armenia.
