Hovhannes Avoyan was doing AI before it was cool, and now Miami is home base for his next act

Picsart CEO talks resilience, creator economics, and why the future belongs to founders who can handle pressure and think big.

One afternoon, Hovhannes Avoyan’s daughter came home in tears.

She had shared her drawings online and was met with harsh feedback. For Avoyan, a serial entrepreneur already deep into building companies, it hit a nerve. Here was a young creator putting something vulnerable into the world, only to be met by the rougher side of the internet.

“It created a fatherly moment for me,” Avoyan told Refresh Miami. He wanted to build something better, a place where creativity could feel open, positive, and accessible to people like his daughter.

That instinct became Picsart, now a global creative platform with roughly 400 employees and millions of users making everything from social content to polished brand assets.

“I was doing AI back then when it was not cool,” he told Refresh Miami.

Before launching startups, Avoyan was working on a PhD in artificial intelligence in his native Armenia. He left academia to build companies instead, and by the time he founded Picsart, machine learning was already part of how he thought about products.

The company launched one of its earliest AI-powered features back in 2017, allowing users to turn ordinary photos into artwork inspired by painters like Vincent van Gogh or Pablo Picasso. At the time, that felt futuristic. Today, it looks like an opening chapter.

For Avoyan, AI has always fit neatly into the company’s broader mission: making creativity available to everyone.

“The focus now moved from learning different skills and techniques to more imagination, creativity, and storytelling,” he said.

For decades, creative work was partly defined by technical gatekeeping. You had to master complicated software, spend years sharpening craft, and learn systems that often felt built for professionals only. AI is flattening that curve fast. The new premium is having taste, vision, and a point of view.

The startup truth nobody posts on LinkedIn

Avoyan has sold four companies. Picsart is his fifth.

“From outside it looks like overnight success,” he said. “All this overnight success was cooked for many, many years.”

And Avoyan does not sugarcoat the entrepreneurial journey. “You cannot control most of the things which happen around you,” he said. “What you can control is your resilience and actually being tolerant to the stress and understanding that the stress is part of the game.”

Over the years, Picsart has had to absorb geopolitical shocks, shifting markets, and sudden changes far outside company walls. Businesses get hit by things they cannot plan for. Founders get tested in ways no business school can really prepare them for.

That, Avoyan argues, is the job. In his view, if you cannot live with uncertainty, startup life may not be for you.

Creativity’s new job description

Avoyan sees AI not as a threat to creativity, but as a tool that lowers the barrier to entry.

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That matters because creative work sits at the center of modern business. Marketing, brand building, storytelling, product launches, community growth, and digital commerce all depend on content. And content has historically required teams, budgets, and specialized skills.

Now, much of that work is becoming easier to produce. The winners, Avoyan suggests, will be the people with strong ideas and clear narratives, not simply the people who know how to use software best. In that world, creativity becomes less technical and more strategic.

Enter agentic AI.

Not assistants, agents. Tools that can work independently, handle research, create content, support marketing, and continue operating while their human counterpart sleeps.

A founder who once needed a team of five may soon be able to operate with one person and a stack of AI agents. A creator may become a business. A freelancer may become a small media company. A marketer may effectively gain a digital staff.

Avoyan sees that opening doors for what he calls solopreneurs, people building meaningful businesses with tiny teams and much greater leverage.

Picsart is leaning into that future. Its Earn with Picsart initiative pays creators for branded content based on output and engagement, even if they do not have massive followings.

Why Miami is still the place to be

Avoyan moved from San Francisco to Miami during the pandemic and never looked back.

He points to quality of life, easier travel to Europe, favorable time zones, and yes, the obvious draw of life near the water.

But he also sees real business upside. Miami has already shown it can attract waves of technical talent, first around crypto, and now increasingly around AI. Avoyan believes the city has a chance to make a stronger play, if it commits to attracting top builders, researchers, and serious technical companies.

The next creator economy may look very different

The old model of digital creativity was built around gatekeepers: expensive tools, technical know-how, and audience scale. The next model may look very different.

Small teams. Faster output. AI-powered operations. Creators who think like business owners. Entrepreneurs running lean companies with virtual workers that never clock out.

For Avoyan, this is a future that he’s already working to build.

Funny enough, it all traces back to a father wanting to make the internet a kinder place for one young artist. That small instinct became something much bigger.

And if Avoyan has his way, the next generation of builders may have more creative power at their fingertips than any generation before them. The question is what they choose to make with it.

Pictured above: Picsart CEO Hovhannes Avoyan (center), and co-founders Art Mehrabyan (left), and Mika Vardanyan (right).

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