When Suren Markosian was a kid, he wanted to be a bus driver.
Not because he loved buses per se, but because he was fascinated by the doors. Press a button and people walk in. Press it again and they go out. The driver controls the flow. That simple idea became his inspiration for working in technology — the idea that you could build something that moves people, that decides who gets in and where they go.
Decades later, he built an app used by more people than live in his parents’ home country. Armenia has a population of three million. List.am, the online marketplace Suren built there, has 3.5 million monthly active users. He has built something for Armenia that has more users than the country has citizens.
Most founders would use that incredible product-market fit as a launchpad — a push for more money raised, more countries reached, more MAU, more GMV. When investors and advisors push him to expand into other markets, he has a simple response: “To make more money isn’t a good enough reason. There are far more variables in business than just revenue.” His mission with List.am is to help make Armenia a better place to live. Expanding to other countries wouldn’t serve that mission. So he doesn’t expand and has no plans to.
In a world obsessed with scale, he carries a level of clarity and focus rarely seen.
This is not Suren’s first startup. Before List.am became the center of his work, he built two significant companies. The first was Crowdstar, a social mobile gaming company born out of experimenting with apps on social media platforms. He describes the work of designing games as “a form of living digital art,” where you craft fictional experiences for millions of people and try to stay one step ahead of what they’ll want next. But ultimately, pure entertainment was hard to stake a real mission on. So he moved on.
His next company was the one that made him. Epic is a digital reading platform now used in over 96% of U.S. elementary schools, reaching 50 million children and a billion books read. It came from a personal place: watching his own kids discover reading, and noticing that while videos and games were everywhere, books were expensive, inaccessible, and not fun. He and his co-founder, Kevin Donahue, set out to build a reading experience as engaging as a video and as fun as the games he once built. He cared deeply about the mission of making reading accessible to everyone.
In 2021, Epic was acquired by Byju’s for $500 million. By any measure, a hugely successful outcome. But the path there was messier than most people know.
When Epic launched, Suren handled customer support himself and responded to every email. He noticed something surprising. Many of the users weren’t parents, which was his intended audience. They were teachers, with different needs and different use cases from what he had envisioned. So he and his co-founder did something that seemed, at the time, counterintuitive to the point of recklessness given the cost. They gave Epic away for free to any teacher who wanted it. No strings attached.
What they got back was a distribution engine that became the envy of the industry. Teachers started recommending Epic to each other, then to parents. The consumer product grew. Revenue followed the mission, not the other way around. “We created a powerful new growth channel,” Suren said, “simply by understanding our users — their needs and desires and going above and beyond to deliver the experience they truly wanted.” As a parent whose kids loved Epic, I saw the power of turning reading into engagement and engagement into learning.
The lesson: your best growth strategy might be hiding in your data. The users who show up unexpectedly, for reasons you didn’t plan for, are often the ones who will carry you somewhere you never anticipated going.
List.am started long before Epic or Crowdstar. Suren built it as a hobby, in the early days of the internet in Armenia, because he thought the country needed a proper local marketplace. Someone needed to build it, and he decided it would be him. What he did not expect was how important it would become.
Today, List.am is the largest online marketplace and internet platform in Armenia. But saying it’s a marketplace undersells it. Think of it as the connective tissue of the Armenian digital economy. It integrates with government services. It helps citizens navigate bureaucracy, buy and sell goods, find housing, hire workers. It supports local businesses in ways that ripple outward through communities. It is woven into daily life in a country where daily life has not always been easy.
Internally, Suren’s goal is equally ambitious: to bring Silicon Valley work culture to Armenia. To show that people there can operate at a world-class level. He wanted to ignite the type of passion and craft to bring tech to the country. And he achieved it.
When I asked him about the pressure to expand into new markets, there was no hesitation. Staying true to the mission isn’t a sacrifice for him. That’s the whole point. “I want to be able to look back and feel proud of what we’ve accomplished as a team,” he said. He isn’t chasing scale and growth. He is seeking deepening impact in his chosen market. He wants to go further in, not broaden further out.
That orientation extends to how he thinks about building in general. He approaches every company the same way: either obsess over a specific problem and go all in, or experiment and learn until something clicks, then build from there. There’s no magic formula. Just focus, and the willingness to keep pushing.
There is something quietly countercultural about what Suren has built. In Silicon Valley, we are trained to celebrate growth milestones: fundraising rounds, valuation, DAU/MAU, and revenues. We treat expansion as the natural direction of any good idea. We assume that if something works in one market, it should work everywhere, and therefore it should.
Suren’s story challenges that assumption at every turn.
Epic worked because he followed the users who showed up, not the ones he planned for. He gave the product away to teachers when every rational instinct said don’t. He let the mission lead, and revenue followed. Most founders try to engineer that sequence, but instead, he paid attention to what his users were telling him.
List.am works because he refused to let success become a mandate for more. He built something indispensable in exactly one place, for exactly the people he cares most about. He turned his ambition inward and downward, into the root system of a country, rather than outward and upward toward some abstract global total addressable market.
The lesson for every founder is not that you should stay small. It’s that you should know who you are building for. A clear mission isn’t a constraint on your ambition. It is the thing that makes your ambition legible. It tells you what to say yes to, what to say no to, and when you’ve already won even if no one else has noticed yet.
Today, List.am has 3.5M users in a country of 3M people. His scale extends beyond the borders of his country.
He once said that what excited him as a kid was the idea of controlling the flow. A bus driver decides who gets on, who gets off, where the doors open. Suren has applied that same logic to his entire career. He decided what matters to him, then decided who he is building for. He opened the doors for exactly the people they were meant for, and he has kept them open.
Most founders want to drive everywhere. He just wants to serve his route.
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