🇦🇲🦊 Mr. Five Per Cent - Calouste Gulbenkian
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As the world experiences an increase in oil prices and a disruption in energy pipelines, it’s worth revisiting the story of Mr. Five Per Cent who, as an Armenian, had an important impact on the oil industry in the Caucasus Region and around the World.
Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian was a British-Armenian businessman and philanthropist. He played a major role in making the petroleum reserves of the Middle East available to Western development and is credited with being the first person to exploit Iraqi oil. He was born on 23 March 1869 in Constantinople. He received his early education at Aramyan-Uncuyan, a local Armenian school. His father then sent him to be educated at King's College London, where he studied petroleum engineering. He was a brilliant student and graduated in 1887 at the age of 18.
By 1895, he started his oil operation business. He had to return to the Ottoman Empire, but in 1896, Gulbenkian and his family fled the empire due to the Hamidian massacres of Armenians. They ended up in Egypt, where Gulbenkian met Alexander Mantashev, a prominent Armenian oil magnate and philanthropist. Still in his twenties, Gulbenkian moved to London in 1897 where he arranged deals in the oil business. In 1907, he helped arrange the merger of Royal Dutch Petroleum Company with "Shell" Transport and Trading Company Ltd. Gulbenkian emerged as a major shareholder of the newly formed company, Royal Dutch Shell. His policy of retaining five per cent of the shares of the oil companies he developed earned him the nickname "Mr. Five Per Cent".
In 1912 Gulbenkian was the driving force behind the creation of the Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC)—a consortium of the largest European oil companies aimed at cooperatively procuring oil exploration and development rights in the Ottoman territory of Mesopotamia. The name of the company was changed to the Iraq Petroleum Company in 1929. Gulbenkian ranks among the world’s greatest art collectors. At the time of his death in 1955, his collection included more than 6,000 artifacts. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation was set up to preserve and display his collection in Lisbon, Portugal.
Always interesting to see how Armenians through time have had an impact on things we use daily. Read his life story in this book! You can also learn about how other Armenians changed the world in our previous newsletter edition.
We are still fundraising for a TUMO box in Armenia to offer education to the youth. Every dollar gets matched! Your $5 donation will become $10! With your support, we will be able to give the opportunity to over 320 kids to attend this institution and provide all the tools they need to create their own future within Armenia. Reach out to us if you are interested in partnering with us on this project.
Armenian Tech News 📣
🚀 Congrats to Bardeen on raising their Series A to help automate everyday workflows! Led by Insight Partners.
💰 BigStory VC has invested $ 200,000 in SleepDoctor aimed at regulating sleep.
🎥 Narek and Sergey are trying to raise funds for TechStartup Armenian web series. Take a look and support!
💼 ServiceTitan acquires Schedule Engine, a provider of online booking for home and commercial services,
🥳 SRI Ventures announces a new spin-out, Confidencial, to secure sensitive information and collaboration for distributed enterprises led by co-founder and CEO by Razmik Abnous.
🚨 Hye Ventures Syndicate: As mentioned a few months ago (read about it here), we now have an investment syndicate looking to back Armenian founders that are raising capital. If you are interested in supporting product-driven, Armenian founders as an investor, fill out the form & we’ll be happy to share our investment opportunities with you!
Entrepreneurship World Cup (EWC) 2022 applications are now open. EWC is one of the world’s largest and most diverse pitch competitions and entrepreneurship support programs for emerging entrepreneurs. EPIC is the official lead organizer for Armenia. All applicants to EWC Armenia 2022 will have access to EWC Accelerates, a virtual training program that helps entrepreneurs hone their skills and increase their chances of winning national competitions and advancing to the Global Finals. The National Finals competition for Armenia will be held in mid-August. In October, all global finalists will be invited to participate in an intensive virtual startup boot camp and the top EWC100 will advance to pitch live at the EWC Global Finals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in November. For those who wish to participate in EWC Armenia 2022, please register on the following website!
What we’re following 🚀
Entrepreneurship:
Adapting to endure by Sequoia
The Importance of CAC Payback in Today’s Market Environment by Parsa Saljoughian
35 Impactful Questions Managers Should Ask Themselves Regularly by First Round
Burn Multiple for SaaS: Definition & Examples by Evan Bailyn
Distribution: A Problem Worth Solving by Konvoy Ventures
Crypto / Web 3.0:
Web3 Use Cases: The Future by Packy McCormick
The Web3 Marketing Stack: The Next Big Wave in Crypto by Tomasz Tunguz
Jobs 💼
Argonautic Ventures is searching for an Investment Associate to work closely alongside Viken Douzdjian in their new Seattle office. Read their job description!
PerigonAI is looking for a senior geospatial data scientist. Contact me if you are interested! Job location: remote, Dubai, UAE or Yerevan, Armenia
Miro is looking to expand their team in Armenia. Looking to hire backend and frontend engineers, QA engineers, and engineering managers. Check out miro.com/careers
Startup spotlight 👨💻👩💻
manot.ai, founded by Chinar Movsisyan, Astrik Mckertichyan, and Hovhannes A, is a SaaS tool primarily focused on aerial data - data captured by drones, satellites, and surveillance cameras. It labels the objects on images and videos automatically and allows the user to quickly adapt it to identify new (previously unknown) objects without writing any code. With manot, the annotation process becomes faster, cheaper, and easier. They strive to provide quality data at a high speed to our customers in smart agriculture, space, automotive, sustainable management, and performance analytics industries. Ultimately, Enabling Better Real-World AI. Most AI models are not ready to be deployed in the real world as they are trained on limited and generic datasets. Once the models are in the real world they encounter new information and have difficulty processing it. This results in continuous failures and costly inefficiencies. manot observes the environment in real-time and, by extracting the necessary data from the environment, efficiently improves model performance.
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