Meet The Disruptors: Christopher Babayans Of Ashured On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
“Patience is a virtue” — Act according to your goals, wait, and repeat. This leads to a snowballing of minor effects which result in a large change. It means you can start getting your goal today, right now, immediately, by doing one small thing and repeating every day.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Chris Babayans.
Christopher Babayans is an entrepreneur, programmer & author who has synergized his passion for technology & politics. The toxicity on social media platforms and abundance of divisiveness regarding politics as well as the government’s slow issuance of aid in the early stage of the pandemic moved him to create Ashured.com. He wants the federal government to be more accountable & responsive to the needs of citizens and for we the people to be united again.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I have an insatiable curiosity and at a young age I was left with a Windows 95 computer that had no internet, so I tinkered with every setting and configuration to learn about operating systems. This interest carried on as I matured, but I was also interested in politics, so I started college as a Political Science major. After the first year I didn’t find textbook politics enjoyable and knew computers would be interesting, so I switched majors to Computer Information Technology.
The fundamentals I learned through higher education gave me the ability to find doors to open for my career which grew my knowledge base while exposing me to concepts I would use to build Ashured. It was really hard to find those doors in the first place; The only door that opened initially was a questionable IT consulting firm that placed me in 10 weeks of training for a contract with one of their clients. After working there for a little more than a year, I joined American Airlines and got my first exposure to big data on the cloud which is how Ashured is built. In a synergy of my drive, skills, and desire to improve how we interact, Ashured was created.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
The way we interact politically online is toxic in its level of humanity, misguided in the sense it’s paired with the mundane, and fails to bring clarity on the collective opinion to our legislators. Ashured tackles these problems first by eliminating public profiles & avatars to remove any perspective of non-wholeness. Next, we focused on the connection between citizens and legislators directly more than the connections between citizens. Finally, by providing dedicated tools for politics, the connections you will make with your fellow citizens to our legislators will make our government function much more responsive to We The People.
Firstly, the only direct interaction between citizens is through choosing our voice on initiatives we make. This eliminates the area where political discourse becomes cluttered. Next, legislators can get immediate results for polls they make providing instantaneous insight on constituent opinions. Finally, the bills our legislators sponsor or cosponsor are displayed chronologically, and we have the power to yay or nay each bill, showing our legislator whether or not they should continue their support. These tools, and the ones to come, will give us oversight of our legislators, connect us to our legislators, and empower us.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
In the beginning, I had to watch YouTube videos on how to use a web development code library and I downloaded an outdated version of the code library as a result. I learned to plan a bit more when starting something new from that incident; it cost many hours and headaches upgrading the code and all the moving parts.
I also made several mistakes figuring out how to connect people with their legislators. I quickly discovered that zip codes can sometimes have two districts, so my effort in matching you to your legislators by zip code failed. I tried two different free interfaces to get your legislators based on your address, both of which were incomplete and erroneous. As my efforts to build this functionality myself kept coming up short, I accepted that I will have to pay a company for this functionality perpetuating the life lesson that some tasks are better to delegate to others to keep my focus high level.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
I have learned from everyone who I have worked with at all levels, whether we kept working together after the interview or not! Related to Ashured, the senior engineers who hired me and practiced patience with a novice like I was, have had great impact in my ability to build Ashured.
People who have achieved success in their life have shown me that persistent hard work will get me where I want to go. The best mentorship can sometimes come in a simple phrase like “better to add tools to your belt”. That made me focus on gaining the technical skills to build Ashured.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Being disruptive is good when a system has failed and/or can be greatly improved or revolutionized, so pursuing disruption, which usually does result in disruption of some manner good or not, doesn’t produce optimal results when you do it either for the sake of it, to be eccentric or purely for profit. The saying goes somewhat like, “If it’s not broken don’t fix it”, to which I add “and if it is, do!”. Nothing is purely positive or negative and that includes disruption; everything has a yin yang balance.
The system Amazon improved, getting groceries and such, wasn’t broken, yet they greatly improved it and most consider their disruption net positive while acknowledging the negatives it’s brought on society like making malls, mostly a thing of the past. The same goes for smart phones because while many realize the negative impacts the computer in our pocket that also makes phone calls has, the massive positive impact they’ve had on our lifestyle is unpassable. A failed disruption that couldn’t make a large enough positive impact on a system that stood the test of time, our vision, is the Google Glass; it just wasn’t packed with lifestyle improvements the same caliber as the smartphone.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
“Patience is a virtue” — Act according to your goals, wait, and repeat. This leads to a snowballing of minor effects which result in a large change. It means you can start getting your goal today, right now, immediately, by doing one small thing and repeating every day.
“Whether you think you can or not, you’re right” — This phrase is to show you the power of your mind. You can only perpetuate your idea into existence if you think you can which will lead you to taking small steps toward the goal. If you don’t think you can, you’ll never take a single action.
“Shoot for the stars so if you don’t get all the way you’ll be on the moon” — This is great because there’s a certain level we all need to reach to thrive and if we aim far above that level it’s likely we’ll get to that thriving point necessary for living well to do good.
“Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow” — I found this especially true when I started my first business converting video tapes to digital. Initially I had so many questions regarding how to arrange a meeting with a client but I found that simply by asking them if a time would work for them would result in a meeting arrangement. We can overthink something which requires only action, not thought, to execute.
“Just do it” — While this is similar to the previous quote, it’s a simpler presentation of it and it’s so important it should be restated. Often the only reason our accomplishments are never fully realized is that we don’t keep moving in that direction. We don’t need to know how to do something to do it. There’s always a step you can take to clarify mystery in moving forward to our goal that can be taken.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
It’s important to do one thing well. Rather than be a jack of all trades, all my work will be related to Ashured. There are many additional features planned for Ashured and before we can do that, we need to get the accountability and responsiveness from our legislators that Ashured already provides.
We’re focused on growing the user base of citizens and legislators next. Once we grow the user base we will seek investments from non-politically slanted groups. The oversight and influence that Ashured gives to we the people will continue to grow with time as we build new features and sign up more users.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
I was listening to a podcast and their discussion on the inadequacy of how we get our political news put my mind on the track which resulted in Ashured. Their dissatisfaction deeply resonated with me and felt similair my own. Some points made were about how sound bites don’t provide us enough context to come to sound conclusions about political matters, how the importance of politics is reduced when paired with corporate advertising, and how it is difficult to get one’s point across on existing political platforms with all the chatter.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
It would be a blend of the cliches “If you want something done right you have to do it yourself but you can’t do it alone; Good help isn’t cheap, is hard to find and you will always get what you pay for ‘’.
In previous experiences, anytime I’ve tried to save a few dollars it’s ended up costing me down the line, every time. For example, when starting my video tape to digital business (http://vhsrescue.com), I started out with a cheap VCR to USB device and had to buy the expensive one I was trying to avoid a couple weeks later. Another example is when I was buying DVDs and DVD burners; the option which saved me a few dollars cost me time in repairs and troubleshooting. In my previous experience building apps, hiring developers with a focus on price has resulted in lackluster results.
There are some things we must do ourselves because it’s so difficult to find someone else who can. Even if we find that person, their cost may be out of budget, there might be some of the things lost in translation to the person you’re delegating work to, and if they do accomplish what you set them out to do, you might not ever understand how it was achieved.
With those things in mind, there is certainly an overload point for each person where we realize “I can’t do it alone” and that occurred to me in my video tape to digital business. I was so caught up in the day-to-day operations of meeting clients, and performing the tape to digital conversions, I couldn’t grow the business. To my earlier point, if you want a job done right do it yourself, every sane client was satisfied because I did the work alone yet this was ultimately a net negative because the company never reached its full potential.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I want to inspire a movement that unites the nation, makes both parties work together often, in a consistent manner and smoothly and gives us oversight and influence over our legislators. To bring a golden era of politics around the world where government officials are responsive and accountable to the will of the people.
How can our readers follow you online?
https://www.tiktok.com/@ashureddotcom
https://www.instagram.com/ashureddotcom/
https://twitter.com/ashureddotcom
This was very inspiring. Thank you for joining us.
Meet The Disruptors: Christopher Babayans Of Ashured On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
