Kapan Math Club was founded with the mission to have a lasting impact on Syunik and Armenia in the long term horizon of 15-20 years and beyond.

Before moving forward, let’s get 5-10 years back in history

As a co-founder of a startup from 2015-2020 I noticed that previous olympiad participants from STEM subjects have immense aptitude for innovation and complex problem-solving. I worked with several previous olympiad participants at mobile app Pixomatic, and these guys were solving all the software problems I was throwing at them, enhancing our product with features that never existed before in the world. When we got acquired by a US company. Think about it - a product that was created in Armenia, by the team of local Armenians, who studied and graduated from local schools and local Universities, without any investments from outside, completely bootstrapped with the loans from Armenian banks and our houses as collateral, and tax incentive from Armenian government, that product got noticed by a US company and got acquired.

I decided to give back to the country that, despite numerous problems, could raise the talent able to innovate at the level that catches the attention of foreign corporation. So that somebody else in future can exceed what we did.

There were several constraints as our future philanthropy guiding principles:

• Anything we invest should have long-term impact and not short-term relief, in most cases Armenia couldn’t get advantage of time, the compounding effect of time was non-existent for Armenia for the past 200 years at least, yes we need to understand this, all the great things that can happen will happen after years of hard work, so the idea was to do something very long term.
• All investments should go to people, no single dollar on physical materials and buildings, I don’t know how that become a norm, but we might spend millions of dollars on the walls and when hire mediocre staff with minimum wage, in contrary we aim to hire the best of the best.
• Moonshot mission that will change our reality, we cannot predict the future that will be in 20 years, we don’t know what will happen in 20 years and we need to pick an action that if we succeed even being fully blind in 20 years event horizon, we can say it will help our people to act accordingly in future and at its best of their ability and create immense and asymmetric  value for our society and especially for Syunik.

An idea to focus on Olympiad Math came naturally, it fits all the above mentioned constraints, and with right execution it can bend reality by creating a new cluster of innovators: engineers, scientists, software developers and entrepreneurs in Syunik.

Speaking about execution, with already conceived idea I have met previous International Math Olympiad participants and medalists in June 2020, Aleksandr Karalyan, Gagik Magakyan, Vahe Karagulyan and Lyov Panosyan and we have started fast from first meeting to first lesson in 2 weeks window. Aleksandr Karalyan has led all the operations with brilliant execution since then.

After the start of the first lessons, we have made additional research and a pattern emerged: many brilliant Armenian engineers and entrepreneurs, especially startupers, are previous Olympiad participants. But there was a problem: 90 % of all Math olympiad winners at the Republican stage are coming from Yerevan, and 90 % of that 90% just from 2 Yerevan schools Physmath and Quant. We had a super concentration in Yerevan, at least half of Armenian youth live outside of Yerevan and lack the environment to realise their potential. That insight pushed us to not stop in Kapan town, but open as well in Goris and then in Sisian so that students from nearby villages could visit our lessons.

Kapan Math Club started with 40 students in Syunik in June 2020 and currently we are teaching 340 students. Kapan Math Club is the biggest Math Olympiad club outside of Yerevan by number of the students and results. There are 2 towns remaining Kajaran and Meghri to cover the whole Syunik.

I have tried to outline the line of thoughts on why we decided to invest our time, funds and energy into the Kapan Math Club. After 5 years of the operation we have come to the point and size that we cannot accelerate and move alone. We have proofed the concept, we have executed the plan, and we have decent results. If you decide to support us we won’t fail your expectations and funds. We have a brilliant team, with the highest intelligence density in Armenia :) but we need friends and supporters to turn our plans into actions continuously.

Here what we are going to do in our next 5 year:

• Cover whole Syunik marz with Kajaran and Meghri and increase students number to 450, give possibility of any Math talented Syunik kid to realize full potential.
• Have IMO medalists.
• Our alumni club is where students network, help each other with career opportunities, co-found startups, and support Kapan Math Club - and it’s also our talent pipeline: our graduates become our future teachers.
• Endowment fund that covers all the financial needs of Kapan Math Club.