David Khosroshvili grew in the 1990s in post-Soviet Georgia; his country was reeling from the chaos wrought by communism. Life was harsh, poverty and corruption were rampant and there was a general state of confusion regarding the future. When all you’ve ever known is life in the USSR, imagining a different life takes time. Today, David is a successful entrepreneur and founder of WiFisher and part of the 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 Georgia.
David got involved with Georgian Students for Liberty as a local coordinator in 2014, becoming one of the very first coordinators from Georgia. Being interested in business and entrepreneurship, David wasn’t really looking to be involved with ideas in such depth. Through SFL, he got more acquainted with the ideas of Ayn Rand, the free market and the philosophical side of liberty.
“I always wanted to do business, and through SFL I came to understand that it will be difficult to succeed in business if you don’t have fundamental ethics and morality guiding you. The ideas of liberty are important to how I operate and they also influence my management style. I believe people should be trusted to motivate themselves at work and SFL trusts students to run their own events and pursue their own interests.”
After graduating college, David founded his own company WiFisher, which is very popular in Georgia and has expanded to Lithuania and Azerbaijan. WiFisher is an analytics and marketing company that works with traditional offline businesses to identify and understand their customers. Through the data WiFisher collects, they are able to help their clients become better equipped to build relationships with their customers and better cater to their needs. And for David, the ideas of liberty are essential to succeeding in this industry,
“At WiFisher we collect data about customers and we have to secure that data. We don’t collect personal information and we use special encryption to process customers in such a way that even I, as CEO of this company, am not able to collect or use personal information. Respecting individual privacy, in part, comes from the deeper understanding of the ideas of liberty that I got through Students For Liberty.”
As a serial entrepreneur – David founded two other companies before, Potters and Hostelpro – David is always traveling. He’s found that being a part of SFL has allowed him access to a large network that he can still leverage. In 2017, as he was expanding his startup into the Lithuanian market, he got word of an SFL conference in Germany, “I met a lot of cool people, and reconnected with people. That’s the thing about SFL, it is ongoing. An event or program can end, but SFL continues.”