‘HSE Gave Me a Space to Listen to People Who Had Built Markets and Soak Up Their Experience’

Photo courtesy of Ravan Nuraddin ogly Novruzlu

Ravan Nuraddin ogly Novruzlu was born in Gazakh, Azerbaijan. Later, his family moved to Moscow, the city where he grew up, studied, and finished school. He enrolled at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, where he studied International Business and Economics from 2021 to 2022. He transferred to the HSE Graduate School of Business (HSE GSB) in 2022 and graduated in 2026. In this interview with the HSE News Service, Ravan talks about what it felt like to get a perfect score in his thesis defence, how the knowledge he gained at HSE helped him grow his listenership to half a million people, and why one should never stop learning.

— What were your first impressions after joining HSE? How was it different from studying abroad?

— My impressions were amazing: the university held a leading position, and the quality of education turned out to be as good as at the University of Klagenfurt. There was real discipline here—no ‘shortcuts’ to success. From the very first days, I liked the innovative approach to teaching most of all.

In Austria, universities are structured so that nobody is chasing after you: there are deadlines, and you do everything and answer for everything yourself. At HSE, the academic culture is more developed in a different sense: everything is clear and students are systematically informed about every issue. Student life was fairly close-knit in both places.

Honestly, I expected the level of teaching might drop after the move and my expectations were low. But once I continued my studies at HSE, I was pleasantly surprised, both by the level of the professors and by how everything here is organised.

I became stronger, smarter, and more resilient at HSE

To anyone considering a similar path, my advice is to study the specific programme and faculty you want to transfer to in detail before making a decision, because every situation is individual. But in short: it's absolutely worth it if you're choosing a university that genuinely carries weight, has strong rankings, and offers good quality education.

Photo courtesy of Ravan Nuraddin ogly Novruzlu

— How did your thesis defence go and what advice would you give to students preparing for their own final projects?

— I defended my thesis with flying colours and graduated with honours; I scored 10 out of 10 for my defence. My committee was one of the toughest, consisting of our (extremely strict) academic supervisor, the CEOs of several Russian companies, practitioners, and entrepreneurs.

My thesis topic was ‘Developing a Brand Centric Business Model for a Startup in the Music Industry.’ I'm an artist in the music industry myself, with my own processes and a certain scale already built as a performer, but I lacked an operational structure. No such model existed in our country yet. I built a model that fully controls and modernises those processes, removes the fragmentation, and allows for scaling, essentially a label ecosystem model in which I act as the producer and bring in artists.

When they read out my result, I was thrilled and shocked at the same time

At our university, a 10 is only given for something truly outstanding, and I hadn't heard of anyone else in our cohort getting one that year. Hearing that from a committee like that felt like a dream. But looking back, I know I put in an enormous amount of effort, and it led exactly to the results I was aiming for. I still remember that moment with feelings I can't fully put into words.

The only advice I can give students is this: be persistent and work hard. There's no secret ingredient; you just have to work and understand what you're doing it for. Most students pick topics they'll never need again. I thought about my topic for a very long time, and it paid off: my audience as an independent music project grew from 250,000 monthly listeners to 500,000, and my tracks started getting picked up for editorial playlists on streaming platforms. Right now I'm already launching a label business model to produce and promote independent artists, benefiting not just my own projects, but the Russian market as a whole.

— What memories—good and bad—stand out from your time at HSE? How have your studies impacted your personal and professional growth?

— It was genuinely frightening when, in our fourth year, students started getting expelled. Expulsions usually happen in the first or second year, so seeing it happen in the fourth year was something new even to me. Two people were expelled from our group alone, and all of us were in shock. On one hand, it clearly showed that the university strictly follows its own rules and doesn't go easy on anyone, no matter who your father is, what connections you have, or how much money you have. I think this is the right approach—it's the only way to preserve the quality of education and the future of the country, since the people who will run it in a few years are the ones studying right now. On the other hand, there was real fear that it could happen to any of us, and the academic pressure during that period weighed on everyone especially hard. That moment was a turning point for me, but I didn't give up; I just started working even harder.

HSE gave me an enormous number of opportunities, and I tried to apply all of it in my business projects rather than just keep it in my head as theory

It always mattered to me to see immediately how knowledge works in practice, and the university gave me exactly that space: business forums and meetings with opinion leaders where I could listen to people who had actually built markets and soak up their experience like a sponge.

I can't point to just one subject or one professor who influenced me more than the rest. Dmitrii Knatko always told it like it is and taught me to calculate risk with a clear head. Aleksandr Prokhorov ran business simulation games and covered management systems in various countries. Ural Ibragimov treated students with so much respect that it made you want to give it everything. Alexander Gabrielov's course ‘Risk Management’ got me systematically calculating risk in every project I take on. And Valentin Timakov's ‘Critical Thinking’ gave me so much that I still use his approach whenever I'm in a contentious situation. I'm grateful to every single professor who was part of my journey through university, as well as to HSE as a whole.

— You've been involved in managing social media communities. What’s exciting about it and what have you learned?

— I'm a blogger and influencer, and I have my own community with over 200,000 followers across all platforms and 100 million total views.

Photo courtesy of Ravan Nuraddin ogly Novruzlu

Something that shaped a lot for me was working to help scale a project belonging to a blogger with a million followers. He had a competition of his own that ran for six months, and everyone before me had given up because they lacked the discipline and consistency it required. I pulled it off, grew his project, and he offered me a permanent spot working with him as a team. But it was exactly at that turning point that I decided to build my own thing instead of working on someone else's project. That experience still gave me a huge amount of knowledge, and I've never once regretted it.

After that, I tested a whole range of content formats: educational, motivational, entertaining. I came to the conclusion that entertaining content performs the strongest, because when people pick up their phones, most of the time they just want to switch off mentally rather than take in more information. It was in that format that my views first crossed a million.

I created the first independent student media project at our university; it now has more than 5,000 followers and community members who share life hacks, help each other out, and network

We bring together not just current HSE students but also prospective applicants who dream of getting in, and we regularly run charity initiatives. In my view, universities shouldn't just use social media to inform students; they should give them exactly this kind of less formal space to talk to each other. At HSE GSB, we managed that really well with the HSE Business School Fest, where students built content together and collaborated. It's exactly that kind of collaboration that future startups come out of.

Communicating with different communities, at its core, comes down to networking and being able to see other people's pain points. Whenever I build a media project, I always ask what specific problem we're going to solve, and that's the single most important question of all.

— What advice would you give your younger self to make the most of the university experience? And looking forward, what are your next professional goals?

— I'd tell myself to be more patient and more persistent, to get the absolute most out of everything the university offers: attend every event, listen carefully to great professors, and put knowledge into practice right away. People learn most effectively when they're young, and the more knowledge we gain while we still have the energy for it, the easier and more successful the rest of our life will be.

Now that I've graduated with honours, I'm putting all the knowledge I've gained into practice. I was admitted to the Master’s in International Management, the only fully English-taught master's programme in Moscow, and I became one of five winners of the competition for early admission to this programme, out of a thousand applicants.

I don't plan on stopping when it comes to learning—I'm convinced a person has to constantly keep learning something new, or they lose their competitive edge

Over the next two years, I want to seriously scale up my media projects and grow as an independent artist to the level of major performers: start touring and performing live, and roll out that same label business model I developed for my thesis. The master's degree isn't a formality for me—International Management should give me a real understanding of how to scale into different markets and work with an international audience, since a significant share of my listeners and viewers live abroad and I need to understand their needs in detail to grow the project there, not just in Russia.

I believe HSE prepared me 100% for this new stage of my life, for which I'm deeply grateful.