Volodia Yeghiazaryan’s case for boring repetition

Volodia Yeghiazaryan tells a story about leaving. His business was in a difficult stretch, the team was new, and the stakes felt high. He went away for a month, recalling the episode through a memory of Rotterdam. The instruction he left behind was brief: “Only call if it’s a real emergency.” A founder taking a holiday is an ordinary occurrence. A founder describing it as a gamble gives the holiday rather more plot.

In his telling, he returned to colleagues who were making decisions, organizing their work, and taking more responsibility. He describes the experience as a lesson in giving people room. It is a useful opening to his story because it puts the central question in human terms. How much of a company depends on the founder being there? And how much more could happen if everyone stopped waiting for him?

Yeghiazaryan, who also introduces himself as Val, is the founder and CEO of Shiftr. The business brings together software development, mobile applications, design, and AI work. His public reflections keep returning to a less glamorous subject: the repeated decisions that let a team deliver. There is a certain pleasure in finding an entrepreneur willing to make repetition sound interesting. Most people prefer to announce a revolution before lunch.

The math teacher in the background

His mother teaches mathematics. Yeghiazaryan credits her when explaining his own attachment to reasoning and patterns. It is a small family detail with considerable explanatory power. Numbers recur in his account of building Shiftr, alongside a desire to understand how separate actions produce an outcome. He likes a business result that can be examined, rather than simply admired.

While preparing a team meeting around Shiftr’s 2024 results, he recalls pausing as the previous years seemed to rush back at him. The reflection became an acknowledgment of the people who had supported the company when there was little tangible to point to. He emphasized action and teamwork, including the willingness to step back when that serves the group.

There is an appealing tension here. The person who reaches for a mathematical explanation also describes gratitude in personal terms. A spreadsheet can register a result. It has fewer columns for the colleague who stayed. His account leaves room for both. The arithmetic matters to him, but so do the people who made the arithmetic possible.

A Belgian lesson that stayed

As a business-management student, Yeghiazaryan says he was selected from an eleven-person shortlist for an internship in Europe. In Belgium, he worked closely with a company cofounder who spoke eight languages. The encounter exposed him to econometrics and the role of evidence in commercial decisions. He remembers wanting to understand how an actual business worked.

The detail about the eight languages could easily dominate the anecdote. Yet the lesson he carries forward concerns data: predictions need something firmer underneath them than confidence. When he discusses Shiftr’s processes, that early experience supplies a point of reference. He connects an education in business reasoning with the practical work of running his own company.

An internship rarely arrives with a label identifying which conversation will remain useful years later. Here, the memorable part was a way of asking questions. What do the numbers support? What can be measured? A founder can take those questions into a sales meeting, a delivery review, or an annual report without changing their essential purpose.

The argument for another ordinary Tuesday

In July 2025, Yeghiazaryan offered a compact explanation of the distance between a small business and a larger one. His chosen phrase was “Boring repetition.” He framed doing things repeatedly as a strategy. The line is unusually unadorned for a world that often sells entrepreneurial progress as a sequence of sudden insights.

Read literally, it is a modest claim. A useful action becomes more valuable when it can be performed reliably. That principle asks for a different kind of attention from the excitement of a first sale. Someone must notice which action worked, preserve enough of it to use again, and resist changing everything merely because familiarity has arrived.

Repetition also raises a question of judgment. Repeating an error only produces a more dependable error. The interesting part of his formulation is the implied selection: decide what deserves another turn. Against the earlier story of a team learning to decide without him, the phrase suggests a practical ambition for Shiftr. Build habits that remain useful after the founder has left the room. A business should be able to have a productive Tuesday without requiring a fresh founding myth.

What he chooses to count

For 2025, Yeghiazaryan reported revenue growth of 217% and contract-value growth of 243% compared with 2024. He put signed contracts at 116 and said longer-term contracts had increased 3.5 times. These are his reported company figures. Their value in this story is also revealing: they show the measures he chooses when explaining progress.

A contract count and a revenue figure answer different questions. One concerns the volume of agreements; the other concerns the money the business brings in. Longer relationships introduce another dimension: whether the work continues beyond an initial engagement. Taken together, those measures describe the kind of operating discussion he wants to have.

The selection fits his recurring interest in processes. Growth creates more occasions for a team to coordinate, clarify, and deliver. Each new agreement carries work behind the signature. The numbers therefore lead back to a very practical question for their author: can the organization handle the additional commitments? A rising chart is pleasant company. It cannot attend the project meeting on anyone’s behalf.

Getting the work through the door

At Shiftr, the operational problem has included the stretch between an inquiry and the start of delivery. The company worked with an automation partner on connected systems for gathering requirements, arranging meetings, preparing estimates, recording approvals, and assigning work. Human review remains part of the described sequence, including a preliminary CEO decision.

That is a more concrete picture than the broad promise of an AI-powered business. A prospective project needs enough information to be assessed. An estimate needs a scope. An approved job needs to reach the people who will do it. Automation becomes useful at those particular transitions, where information otherwise has to be requested or entered again.

For Yeghiazaryan’s story, the significance lies in his choice to apply technology to his own organization’s routines. Selling software and organizing a software business are related problems. Both involve deciding what people need to know before they can act. The founder who once gave a new team more room is also investing in a clearer route for work to follow. Those choices suggest two ways to reduce the queue outside the decision-maker’s door.

A coffee, a client, a plain sentence

His working world includes less formal exchanges. In March 2025, he described a Sunday coffee with Arman Mkrtchyan, founder of Yan Marketing. They discussed Los Angeles businesses and the relationship between design and digital marketing. The conversation concerned a practical frustration: a business can spend effort on its online presence and still struggle to get a useful result.

The pairing is telling. Design shapes what someone encounters; marketing shapes how that person gets there. Treating them as related work gives a local business owner a more coherent conversation than two separate sales pitches. Yeghiazaryan’s account places him in that discussion as someone looking for collaboration in the Los Angeles market.

His advice on communicating with prospective clients is similarly direct. He urges businesses to explain why they exist, which problem they solve, and whom they serve. He also argues for ordinary language over professional jargon. That advice sets a fair test for his own company. A prospective client should be able to understand the offer without translating it into English a second time.

Clarity sounds inexpensive until people have to practice it. A vague promise can accommodate almost anything; a plain sentence gives the listener something to evaluate. His emphasis on explaining the purpose of a business sits comfortably beside his interest in evidence. Both make a claim easier for another person to question.

“Speak like a human.”

Volodia Yeghiazaryan

The salary conversation comes early

Yeghiazaryan’s views on hiring have a sharper edge. In January 2025, he argued that compensation expectations should be connected to contribution and to the economics of the company doing the hiring. He questioned the assumption that a recognizable credential, international experience, or fluent English automatically establishes seniority.

His practical response was to discuss salary expectations within the first fifteen minutes of an interview. That is a specific managerial choice, and one that saves both parties from discovering a basic mismatch after several conversations. Candidates may disagree with his wider assessment of the market while still appreciating an early answer about pay.

The position adds texture to the founder’s enthusiasm for teamwork. He wants colleagues to take responsibility, and he expects the arrangement to make commercial sense. Those expectations have to coexist in the same workplace. His Rotterdam recollection concerns what can happen when people receive more freedom. His hiring argument concerns the contribution he expects in return. Together, they make his idea of ownership more demanding than a word printed on a company wall.

A founder with questions left over

His interest in AI extends beyond office administration. In June 2025, he explored the idea that repeated conversations with an assistant might accumulate into a detailed representation of a person. He imagined what years of shared preferences, language, and decisions could mean for a digital counterpart. It was a speculative question, rather than an announcement of a Shiftr product.

The subject offers an interesting companion to his business habits. He notices repetition in individual life as well as in an organization. A series of small interactions can become something larger than any one exchange. In the company, he wants that accumulation to produce dependable work. In his writing about AI, he wonders what else it might produce.

For now, the clearest thread through his account is the effort to make a business less dependent on improvisation. A mother’s mathematics lessons, a Belgian internship, a team given space, an interview that addresses pay promptly: the scale changes, but the interest in how things work persists. Yeghiazaryan has a phrase for the daily discipline involved. It is short, slightly unfashionable, and quite capable of surviving another Tuesday.