# Home ![Welcome to my page!](https://2695849369-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2F-M9debjbWGq6bMJAGwgV%2Fuploads%2Fgit-blob-31f1aeb34ca5f6cbc15b62f9403d623d0f561229%2Fme%20at%20MetroRock.png?alt=media) Welcome to Ashoat Tevosyan’s home on the Internet! I’m a software guy with a focus on consumer and social applications. I grew up in Seattle and live in Brooklyn now, with my wife and daughter. ## Getting in touch You can get ahold of me by emailing my first name at gmail dot com. ## Selected accounts * [GitHub](https://github.com/ashoat) * [Twitter](https://twitter.com/ashoat) * [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/ashoatt) * [Medium](https://medium.com/@ashoat_t) # About me # Research interests One of my favorite questions when I meet somebody new is “what are your favorite Wikipedia topics”? I’m not really a “researcher” per se, but that’s kinda what I mean by “research interests”. ## Humanity at scale I am fascinated by “humanity at scale”, in other words how people organize themselves, collaborate, and communicate. I frame a lot of human history this way – civilization, markets, etc. I think a lot about how incentive structures affect social structures, and am particularly interested in organizing models that try to manage the accrual of power instead of amplifying it. In this light I have a particular interest in “structure without hierarchy”, and take inspiration from the open source movement. I believe the biggest variable underpinning progress is how quickly ideas spread. ## Biology Perhaps the Wiki subject I spend the most time on is biology. I’ve spent hours reading about things like the evolutionary lineage of ducks, monoamine neurotransmitters, the inflammatory immune response, etc. If I could travel to the future, the first thing I’d want to look up is the human brain. ## Philosophy My head is always in the clouds. I gravitate towards abstract questions and philosophy. I have a particular interest in ethics and epistemology. # Passions ## Music Probably my greatest passion is music. My favorite genres include contemporary hip-hop, EDM, indie rock, pop, and Americana. I’m a sucker for ballads. I like to say that half of my brain is song lyrics. At any given moment there’s usually something playing in my head. It takes some willpower to keep myself from singing along when I hear a song I like. My primary musical expression comes through dance. I love going to concerts and music festivals. I also play a bit of guitar and have been known to DJ occasionally. ## Skiing Skiing is my favorite sport. I started when I was 16, but only got really obsessed in my 20s. My favorite places to ski are the Monashees in British Columbia and the Tetons in Wyoming. I gravitate towards sports that give me a feeling of “flow”. When I’m skiing I lose track of all my worries about the past and the future. My entire being is concentrated on the next turn. ## Cycling I get that same feeling of “flow” biking around NYC. Over the years living here I’ve starting biking more and more, to the point where it’s now my exclusive form of transportation. I look forward to bike rides and dread taking cars or public transit. The difference is so stark to me that I’ve been known to peel off from social groups during transit. ## Games Some of my favorite games are poker, chess, Go, bridge, and mafia. I gravitate towards turn-based games, deep decision trees, and psychological elements. I also enjoy a variety of modern board games. ## Burning Man I’ve been going to Burning Man since 2014. It’s changed my perspective on a lot of things. It’s really hard to express what Burning Man is to somebody who has never been. Here’s my best attempt: 1. Burning Man is an experiment in organizing a decentralized society without the traditional incentives of money and power. 2. Burning Man is a metaphor for life. The burn symbolizes the impermanence of life and all of its inherent meaning. We are at our best when our personal flame burns bright. 3. Burning Man purifies the intention of creation and celebrates art for art’s sake. 4. Burning Man is the biggest and best party you have ever been to. If you want to know more, the [10 Principles](https://burningman.org/culture/philosophical-center/10-principles/) are a good place to start. # Life story ## Birth My parents are Armenians from Baku. Their lives were thrown into turmoil by the fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. I was born shortly before the collapse in Moscow, where my parents were studying. We immigrated to the US when I was two. ## Childhood I grew up in the suburbs of Seattle. My parents both got jobs at Microsoft working on Windows. Our family dinnertime conversations were punctuated by stories of office politics. As a kid I was obsessed with the Internet and spent much of my time in online forums. In junior high I started my own, which morphed into a free web hosting service that still operates today. I also maintained some open source forum mods, which helped me land my first programming contracts. ## Adulthood In college I built some browser extensions to add missing features to Facebook, including one that added a search button on people’s profiles. That helped me get an internship there, and on my second day I started working on a long-term Hackathon project to build out that same search feature. At the time Facebook felt like a fantasy novel. The two-story building that housed engineering and product was teeming with a frenetic and optimistic energy. To a wide-eyed college student it felt like we were connecting people across the world for the first time. Halfway through my internship my team’s manager let me drop my assigned intern project and focus primarily on my search project. This was an incredibly enabling experience. By the end of the internship they wanted me to drop out of school and join full-time. I spent almost five years working at Facebook. Partway through I moved to New York, where my last role was managing the Public Conversations team. We had a charter to improve the quality of discourse on Facebook, particularly in the context of public posts by pages and public figures. After Facebook I took 5 years to travel and work on projects, most notably [Comm](https://comm.app). I eventually decided to try to pursue it as a startup, which lasted another 5 years. I still maintain Comm, but it’s now a non-profit. I’m currently working at OpenAI.