Recap: Chicago Hub Speaker Series with Narek Gevorgyan

Narek Gevorgyan

We kicked off our Chicago Hub Speaker Series with a founder who's done this more than once — Narek Gevorgyan, who has built and exited a shelf analytics company used by Coca-Cola across 15 countries, scaled a global payroll platform across five countries, led GTM and product strategy at AWS for a nine-figure database service, and is now building Dataplay.ai.

The conversation covered a lot of ground: outsourcing, retail tech, global payroll, big tech, and the lessons that only show up in hindsight. Here's what stood out.

Narek's biggest regret from Starkflow, his global payroll and Employer of Record platform, wasn't a product decision — it was a sequencing one. His team built an extensive talent-matching and payments platform, but customers barely touched it because the service was mostly delivered manually anyway. Looking back, he believes he spent too much time building and not enough time selling in that critical first year, when the real challenge is simply figuring out what customers actually want.

His advice for early-stage founders: talk to customers and validate demand before investing heavily in engineering. The build can wait. The signal can't.

If there was one line that anchored the whole talk, it was this: ask for money. Not opinions, not feedback, not "would you use this?" — actual payment. If users pay, that's a real signal. If they don't, something needs to change.

This shows up throughout Narek's career. At PopProbe, the AI-powered shelf analytics platform he co-founded with Hope Research Group, the value was clear enough that Coca-Cola deployed it across 15 countries, with Nestlé following later. At Starkflow, the business grew to roughly $2 million in annual revenue — proof the model worked, even as questions about long-term scalability eventually led him elsewhere.

One of the more tactical takeaways came from a mortgage startup Narek validated along the way: every business has its own unique acquisition channel, and generic marketing like Google Ads can get expensive fast. In that case, targeting public real estate transaction records outperformed paid advertising by a wide margin.

The broader point: finding a niche distribution channel can matter as much as the product itself, and it's often cheaper to find than to buy.

Narek pushed back on the idea that founders need to be industry experts before they start. At AWS, he watched employees routinely pick up entirely new technical domains on the job. Most knowledge, he argued, can be learned quickly through focused effort. Deep domain expertise really only becomes essential in highly specialized fields — aerospace, semiconductors, robotics — and matters far less for most software startups.

Asked what he'd do differently, Narek didn't hesitate: he'd be more persistent with sales, stay focused on customer problems instead of comparing himself to better-funded competitors, and keep building rather than walking away too early from a business that had already reached meaningful revenue.

It's a reminder that a lot of founder energy gets spent looking sideways — at competitors, at funding rounds, at noise — instead of forward, at the customer.

Narek was refreshingly blunt about the economics of startups. Only around 5,000 companies receive pre-seed or seed funding in the US each year. Roughly half of those fail before reaching Series A. Only a small fraction ever produce a meaningful founder exit. And compared to staying at a FAANG company — where an L5 engineer can earn 2-3x what a Series A or B CEO takes home — entrepreneurship often comes with a much lower expected financial return once you account for the opportunity cost.

He shared this not to discourage anyone, but as a gut check: know why you're doing this, because the spreadsheet rarely makes the case for you.

After handing off leadership at Starkflow, Narek spent two and a half years at AWS as a Senior Technical Product Manager on database services. He credits that stretch with making him a stronger founder — not because of any single skill, but because it exposed him to how world-class organizations operate at scale, how deeply different businesses depend on cloud infrastructure, and how to think in systems rather than features.

It's part of what he's now applying at Dataplay.ai, his latest venture.

Thanks to everyone who joined the first session of the Chicago Hub Speaker Series — and to Narek for the candor. If you missed it, keep an eye out for the next one.