We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Gabriel Yared Aya a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Gabriel Yared, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

In my personal opinion, no big business can be successful without taking a risk. The bigger the risk, the more potential reward. So I equate business ownership or entrepreneurship as calculated risk, or like playing poker. The more in tune we are to our innovations and projects, the better we accomplish them, causing more unique outcomes from these risks.

Gabriel Yared, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

It all started around 2013, when me and a bunch of friends started skating together. This took place in Addis Ababa, before there was any skatepark or even skate community. In the coming years we started building the idea of Ethiopias first skatepark, first skate organization, and the future of skating in Ethiopia as a whole. I’m 2016 we built the first skatepark I Addis Ababa, then a year later we did the same in a large city named Hawassa.
We continue to build and innovate the skate scene from that point on.
As years go on, many skaters started cultivating their personal skill sets and now skaters are doing anything from welding, manufacturing clothes, to farming and more.
We’ve seen a shift from youth that skateboard to now seeing young men and women contributing to society in many different ways,

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I personally watch as many videos as I can on a particular subject. I also read online books and hard copy books to gain more insight and experience in the field im in. This helps us entrepreneurs to learn from other peoples mistakes.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

We have a million stories that show how we’ve overcame obstacles. First is our attempt to raise over 40,000 usd in an attempt to build Ethiopia’s first skatepark. We got on gofundme, we posted videos and asked anyone in our community to help us achieve this goal. We did it in under two weeks and got to work immediately. We also built the 700 sq foot skatepark in 2 weeks time..

Contact Info:

• Website: Ethiopiaskate.com
• Instagram: @ethiopiaskate
• Youtube: Ethiopiaskate