My story

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a civil engineer. My grandfather built the infrastructure of an entire village including buildings, warehouses, and a hospital. My father carried that same instinct onto active construction sites where I spent most of my childhood. Building things that outlast you was just the family language. When university exams landed me in Mechanical Engineering instead, I tried to carry that instinct into hardware. It was too expensive and too complicated. Software was free, and I was good at it. The material changed. The impulse never did.

What drives me is having a real say in where a product or organization is heading. More importantly, I care about the people around me while we build it. The team is never secondary. For me it has always been the whole point. That restlessness led me to cofound ThinkBiz, the first student entrepreneurship club in Greece, and later Mindspace while still at NTUA. Not because I had a grand plan, but because I wanted to be around people who build.

Greece has an immature innovation ecosystem. I say that not as a criticism but as a fact I have spent a decade working around. Early on I realized that working with people from more mature ecosystems like Silicon Valley, Boston, London, or Berlin gave me a perspective I could not get locally. So I went remote, not to escape Athens, but to import the kind of thinking that changes how you see problems. That shift shaped everything that came after.

Through Mindspace and the Greek Startup Universe I designed programs that gave founders and students access to the networks and mentors that most ecosystems take for granted. Those communities grew to support 2,000+ startups and 3,000+ students. Some of the startups raised €15M in VC funding and achieved €100M+ in exits. One team, Augmenta, exited for €100M. I had assigned them the mentor who later became their CTO, whose track record helped them secure the funding they needed to grow. I did not build their company. I connected the right people at the right time.

That belief, that the right connection at the right moment changes everything, became Founderhood, a platform I cofounded and led as CTO and CPO for seven years. Managing both the technical and product vision taught me the most vital lesson of my career: the power of radical focus. I realized that while the builder in me wanted to create every possible solution, true impact comes from perfecting the core features that move the needle most. It was an intensive masterclass in balancing the drive to build with the discipline to simplify.

Today I apply those lessons to Wispit, my personal venture studio dedicated to creating focused solutions and supporting the startup community. I continue to show up for early stage builders by sharing my experience and developing new tools like Brandseal. After more than a decade in the arena, I still believe that the right connection and the right product can change everything.

Distinctions

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  Alumni Clinton Global Initiative University 2016

  2016 - Present

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  Angelopoulos Fellow 2016

  2016 - Present

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  Scholarship for MIT International Workshop on Innovating

  2016