My name is Luan Kenning, I'm 20 years old, and I'm the founder and CEO of Yavqo.
When people see a company, they usually see what exists today. They see the products, the website, the announcements, and everything with the Yavqo name on it.
They don't always see where it started.
For me, it started in 2017 with a few small projects, simple apps, and a lot of curiosity.
I didn't really know what I was doing
When I started working on the first projects that would eventually lead to Yavqo, there wasn't some huge business plan behind it.
I wasn't sitting there thinking about building a large technology company.
I just liked making things.
I'd get an idea, try to build it, realize I had no idea how to do half of it, spend hours figuring it out, and eventually get something working. Sometimes the result was good. A lot of the time it wasn't.
But every project taught me something.
And slowly, those small experiments became more serious.
School wasn't really where I found myself
I was never the person who felt like school showed what I was capable of.
I wasn't particularly good at it, and there were times when I wondered whether that meant I simply wasn't good enough.
Looking back, I think I just learned differently.
When I cared about something, I could spend an unbelievable amount of time on it. I could sit in front of a computer for hours trying to solve one problem because I needed to understand why something wasn't working.
That curiosity became far more important to me than any grade ever was.
Technology gave me somewhere to put that energy.
Instead of only learning something because I was told to, I could learn because I wanted to create something that didn't exist before.
I didn't have a huge circle around me
I also wasn't someone who always had a lot of friends around.
There were periods where I spent a lot of time by myself. At the time, that could feel lonely. But it also meant I had a lot of time to think, experiment, and build.
My computer became a place where an idea in my head could slowly turn into something real.
I think that shaped me more than I understood at the time.
Building things gave me confidence in a way other parts of my life didn't. If something didn't work, I could keep changing it until it did. If I didn't understand something, I could learn it.
There was something comforting about that.
Yavqo started small
In 2017, Yavqo wasn't what it is today.
It was small projects and apps. Some ideas lasted. Others disappeared almost as quickly as they were created.
There wasn't one magical moment where everything suddenly became a company.
It happened gradually.
One project became another. My ambitions became bigger. I started caring more about design, technology, products, and the experience people had when using something I created.
Eventually, Yavqo stopped feeling like the name behind a few projects.
It started feeling like something I wanted to dedicate a significant part of my life to building.
There were plenty of doubts
Building something is exciting when you're imagining what it could become.
Actually building it is different.
There are days when you're incredibly motivated and convinced you're working toward something meaningful. There are also days when nothing works, an idea fails, or you start questioning whether you're wasting your time.
I've had doubts.
I've made bad decisions. I've worked on things that went nowhere. I've spent time solving problems that, looking back, probably didn't matter nearly as much as I thought they did.
But I don't regret those things.
Yavqo exists because of thousands of small decisions, including the wrong ones.
Every failure forced me to understand something I didn't understand before.
I'm still learning
Being the founder and CEO doesn't mean I suddenly have everything figured out.
I don't.
I'm 20 years old. There is an enormous amount I still have to learn, both about building technology and about building a company.
I actually think that's one of the things that keeps this interesting.
I don't want Yavqo to become a company that believes it already knows everything. I want us to stay curious. I want us to question our own ideas, experiment with things that might fail, and be willing to change when we find a better way.
The same curiosity that made me start building small projects in 2017 is still a huge part of how I think today.
The projects are just bigger now.
What I want Yavqo to become
I've never wanted Yavqo to exist just for the sake of being another technology company.
I want us to build technology that people genuinely enjoy using.
Products should feel thoughtful. They should feel like somebody cared about the details. And they should solve real problems instead of existing simply because the technology behind them is impressive.
We're still early.
There are ideas we haven't built yet, problems we haven't solved, and probably plenty of mistakes still ahead of us.
That's part of building something.
When I look back at those small projects from 2017, it's strange knowing they eventually led here.
And when I think about where Yavqo could be years from now, I still feel the same thing that made me start in the first place:
I want to see what we can build.
Thank you to everyone who has supported Yavqo, used something we've made, given us feedback, worked with us, or simply believed in what we're trying to create.
We're only getting started.
Luan Kenning Founder & CEO, Yavqo
