The following people are already members in the Openfund's Board of Advisors - a
body constantly under expansion. Click on each name to see more information about
them.
If you are interested in becoming a member, you may contact us.
The categorization of the individuals listed below is indicative
of their primary aspects in their current main function, and by no means constrains
the contribution of each one of them.
Research & Development
Nicholas Ampazis, Assistant Professor at the University of the Aegean, Entrepreneur - Chios, Greece
Nicholas Ampazis received a BSc (Hons) degree in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College London in 1992, an MSc degree (with distinction) in Information Processing and Neural Networks from King's College London in 1995, and a PhD degree (with distinction) in Neural Computing from the National Technical University of Athens in 2001. During his PhD studies he received a scholarship from the National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos", Athens, Greece. Since 2005 he is an assistant professor at the Department of Financial and Management Engineering at the University of the Aegean, Greece and received tenure for this position as a faculty member in 2009. His main research interests include collective intelligence, information retrieval, data mining, and recommender systems. In 2006 he launched one of the first Web 2.0 startups in Greece (Feeds 2.0) for which he received a Global Innovator Award from Guidewire Group and the first prize for best business plan at the 8th International Venture Capital Forum (2007).
Nikos Anerousis, Head of Service Engineering Research, IBM - New York City, NY, US
Nikos Anerousis is currently head of Service Engineering Research at the IBM Corporation. Prior to joining IBM in 2003, he was the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Voicemate, a venture-backed startup company that pioneered voice authoring and publishing technology for the financial markets. He started his professional career at AT&T Bell Laboratories (subsequently AT&T Research) as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff. He has also served as adjunct faculty at the department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. Nikos has published extensively in the area of networks and systems management and has filed or was awarded over 20 patents. Dr. Anerousis is active in technology startups as an early investor and adviser on issues of strategy, entrepreneurship and innovation. Also, Dr. Anerousis graduated with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, where he also earned an M.Phil and a M.S. He completed his undergraduate studies at the National Technical University of Athens, receiving the Diploma in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Andreas Constantinou, Research Director, Vision Mobile - London, UK
Dr. Andreas Constantinou is Research Director at VisionMobile, a prominent industry analyst firm in telecoms. Andreas has nine years experience in research, development and strategy in wireless, specialising in mobile handsets, software strategy and open source. While at VisionMobile, Andreas has worked with several brand-name clients including Sony Ericsson, RIM, France Telecom, T-Mobile, Qualcomm and Symbian. His interests include uncovering under-the-radar industry trends and pursuing human-centric design. When not hopping on planes, Andreas spends his time in Athens, Greece. Andreas holds a Ph.D. in Image & Video Compression from the University of Bristol, UK. You can follow Andreas on twitter.com/andreascon.
Ioannis Emiris, Professor, Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Athens - Athens, Greece
Ioannis Emiris is Professor of Geometric and Algebraic Algorithms in the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications at the University of Athens. He has been a Tenured Researcher with the French National Research Institute in Computer Science and Control. He holds a PhD and MSc from U.C. Berkeley, and a BSc from Princeton University, all in Computer Science. His research activities lie primarily in the areas of Scientific Computing, Computer-Aided Geometric Design, Robotics, and Bioinformatics.
Paraskevas Evripidou, Software Engineer, Professor, Dept. Chair
Undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering at the Higher Technical Institute of Cyprus (H.N.D. in 1981) and University of Southern California (B.Sc. in 1985). Graduate studies at the University of Southern California (M.Sc. in 1986 and Ph.D in 1990 in Computer Engineering). He has taught at the University of Southern California, USA (part-time faculty, 1989-1990) and at the Southern Methodist University, USA (Assistant Professor, 1990-1994). His research interests are: Parallel Processing and Computer Architecture, Data-Flow Systems, and Functional Programming and Parallelizing Compilers. Paraskevas also set up the Cyprus Entrepreneurship Competition, an annual competition with an investment as the award.
Panos Ipeirotis, Assistant Professor, Stern School of Business NYU - New York City, NY, US
Panos Ipeirotis is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences at Leonard N. Stern School of Business of New York University. His area of expertise is databases and information retrieval, with an emphasis on management of textual data. His research interests include web searching, economic-aware text and web mining, data cleaning, and data integration. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2004 and a B.Sc. degree from the Computer Engineering and Informatics Department (CEID) of the University of Patras, Greece in 1999. He has received two Microsoft Live Labs Awards, two "Best Paper" awards (IEEE ICDE 2005, ACM SIGMOD 2006), two "Best Paper Runner Up" awards (JCDL 2002, ACM KDD 2008), and is also a recipient of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation.
Yorgos Panzaris, Researcher, Entrepreneur - Athens, Greece
Yorgos Panzaris has received a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and a PhD in the History of recent technology from Stanford University. He has researched and lectured on the history of networked computing and the emergence of Silicon Valley as an ecosystem for innovation and entrepreneurship. He is currently a policy advisor at the Greek Ministry of Development and a research associate at the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society. Yorgos is also the co-creator of AthensBook, a popular city guide for smartphones; and Geo|Ads, one of the first geo-aware advertising platforms for the iPhone.
Vasilis Vassalos, Associate Professor, Athens University of Business and Economics
Vasilis Vassalos is an Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Athens University of Economics and Business. Between 1999 and 2003 he was an Assistant Professor of Information Technology at the NYU Stern School of Business. He has been working on the challenges of online processing of data from autonomous sources since 1996. He has published more than 35 research papers in international conferences and journals, holds 2 US patents for work on information integration, and regularly serves on the program committees of the major conferences in databases. He was a co-founder and CTO of Enosys Software, a pioneering data integration company that raised more than $10 million in VC funding and was acquired by BEA Systems (now Oracle Corp). He has led a number of publicly-funded research projects in the areas of online distributed information processing. Ηe was a Marie Curie Outgoing International Fellow in 2007-2008 visiting UCSD.
Technology
Dimitris Andreadis, Software Engineering Manager, JBoss Application Server, Red Hat - Athens, Greece
Dimitris Andreadis is the Manager of the JBoss Application Server group in the JBoss Division of Red Hat. He has been a JBoss addict and contributor from the early JBoss days and joined Boss in 2004. He became the Lead of the JBoss AS project for three years since 2006. Previously he spent seven years at Intracom and Motorola in the areas of NMS/OSS, designing reusable frameworks and distributed systems. Dimitris studied computer science at the Technological Educational Institute of Athens and received an M.Sc. by research from University College Dublin, Ireland.
Charis Ermopoulos, Software Engineer, Google File System, Google - Mountain View, CA, US
Charis Ermopoulos is currently a senior software engineer at Google, working on GFS (the Google file system). In the past, he worked at NCSA and Motorola Research Labs on data mining and security related projects. He holds an MsC in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was pursuing a Ph.D. His interests include distributed systems and data mining.
Dimitris Glezos, founder, Indifex - Patras, Greece
Dimitris Glezos is the founder and product director of Indifex, which develops open-source, community-powered products for content localization and distribution. He holds a seat on the Fedora Board (the popular Linux distribution with an audience of 10M) and serves as its Translation Leader. He also holds a position on the Board of the Greek Entrepreneurs' NGO hub, OpenCoffee. His start-up interests revolve around community building, open culture and open source software.
Dimosthenis Kaponis, Software Engineer, Entrepreneur, Cosmical Technology - Athens, Greece
Dimosthenis Kaponis is the founder and managing director of Cosmical Technology Ltd. and a Ph.D candidate at Imperial College London where he also got his M.Eng in Information Systems Engineering. At Imperial, he worked as a Research Associate in the Intelligent Systems and Networks group, during which time he worked on two European IST research projects, architecting an electronic contract-based trust mechanism in workflow management systems. Prior to founding Cosmical Technology in 2005, he worked as a consultant and contractor for a number of companies in the United Kingdom and Greece, specialising on software architecture, software engineering, distributed systems, security and algorithms.
Nikos Kryvossidis, Director, Partnership Services, EMEA, Google
Nikos joined Google in 2007. At present he is responsible for the technical side of direct Google partnerships in EMEA for various Google product areas including Mobile. Prior to Google Nikos was Engineering SVP for Visto, an American company specialising in Mobile Email and Personal Information Management (PIM) synchronisation. Has also served in Symbian where he was responsible for Messaging, PIM, SyncML, Browsing and Location Based Services. Earlier on worked for Lucent Technologies in the area of ISUP and ISDN Services. Has also worked as a software engineer on Intelligent Network Services (Nortel) when AIN 0.1 and CS1 were being developed. Nikos holds an MSc in Computer Science from McGill University, Montreal and a BSc in Mathematics from University of Patras, Greece.
Patrick Malone, CTO Microsoft Hellas - Athens, Greece
Patrick Malone was born in Athens, and holds a BSc degree in Software Engineering from the University of Birmingham, and an MBA from the Athens Laboratory of Business Administration (ALBA). He has been working in Microsoft since 2005, initially as a Senior Developer Evangelist, starting 2006 as Architect Evangelist and since January 2008 as a Technology Director. The technology department is responsible for the company's relationship towards the software developers in the community, promoting the software platform, and also adaptation of the company's newer technologies in the market. Before Microsoft, ο Patrick was for 3 years an independent technology consultant in various organizations, while earlier he was the Technical Director of Broker Systems, a pioneering company that produced software for stock market agents. Patrick is married and has a 4 year old daughter and a son that just arrived, that make sure he has no free time at all – but the time he spends with them make the best parts of his day!
George Moschovitis, Serial web entrepreneur - Athens, Greece
George Moschovitisis the entrepreneur behind well known Greek Web properties (www.me.gr, www.joy.gr, www.cull.gr, etc) and the lead engineer behind popular Open Source projects (Nitro, Og, etc). George worked as a technical consultant on high-profile commercial and research projects in Greece and the European Union and conducted extensive research on advanced computer graphics and signal processing algorithms as a Ph.D. candidate at the National Technical University of Athens. He received his diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the same university. Currently, he serves as the CTO of n-Squared Labs SA, a VC-backed startup.
John Nousis, Serial Web Entrepreneur - Athens, Greece
John Nousis is yet trying to finish his degree in the Physics Department of the University of Athens. However, he proved to be disproportionally active in the entrepreneurial world. Just after finishing high-school, back in 1997, John co-founded his first start-up with Stefanos Vasdekis in the web hosting field. After a successful exit two years later, he moved on to co-found a number of internet companies (always together with his true soulmate, Stefanos Vasdekis) in the fields of ecommerce, web publishing, software development, internet consulting, online travel reservations and social networking. His favourite and most successful venture up to now is an ecommerce store that was selling software to US customers. Today, he spends his time on his ongoing projects and on new ones serving selected international markets.
George Papadakis, Co founder Phaistos Networks
George is the Head Of Operations at Phaistos Networks since 1997. Having supervised the implementation of a plethora of web services (Pathfinder.gr, Adman.gr, Trinity.gr among others), he is knowledgeable enough in terms of how to incorporate up-to-date techniques while creating usable and accessible web applications.
Panayotis Vryonis, Social media consultant - Athens, Greece
Panayotis Vryonis studied Mathematics at the National and Kapodistrian University Of Athens. He decided not to get his degree and instead work as a software developer for small and larger projects. In 1999 he co-founded and held the position of CTO at e-Go Travel Ltd, a company providing on-line travel services for Greek destinations. In 2001 he joined the leading Greek interactive marketing agency, yellownetroad and after the merger of the two companies, became Chief Developer of OgilvyOne Worldwide Athens. An active advocate of Open Source Software, he was one of the founding members of the Hellenic Linux Users Group in 1998 and served multiple times on the Group's board. He is one of the first Greek bloggers and the first greek podcaster. His greek blog aggregator, called "monitor", played a key role in the early stages of the Greek blogosphere (2005). Since early 2007, Panayotis Vryonis works as a social media consulting for PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement).
Business Development
Tasso Argyros, co-founder > CTO, Aster Data Systems - San Francisco, CA, US
Tasso (Tassos) Argyros is the CTO and co-founder of Aster Data Systems, where he is responsible for all product and engineering operations of the company. Tasso was recently recognized as one of BusinessWeek's Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs for 2009 and was an SAP fellow at the Stanford Computer Science department. While at Stanford, Tasso was pursuing a Ph.D. in the Distributed Systems Group with a focus on designing cluster architectures for fast, parallel data processing using large farms of commodity servers. He holds an MsC in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Diploma in Computer and Electrical Engineering from Technical University of Athens.
George Gatos, Atlantis Consulting - Thessaloniki, Greece
George Gatos, MSc, studied financing and specialized in entrepreneurship in the UK and the US. He began his career in the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation of the University of Florida and later as worked as an external consultant with a primary focus in development of products and services based on new technologies. Today he is employed as a consultant in strategic and entrepreneurial development in Atlantis Consulting.
Alec Karys, CTO, mShopper - Boston, MA, US
Alec Karys is currently the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of mShopper, a company which provides real time price comparison, shopping and ad services over mobile devices, and he is also a Mentor at TechStars in Cambridge, MA. Alec has over 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur, technical team manager and consultant at Amazon.com and various other technology and services companies. He was also co-founder and served as the CEO of Synapse Ventures Group, a virtual incubator, which provided start-up services to early stage technology companies, and Cognate Technologies, an E-Learning company based on patent pending technology from MIT research. Alec received his MBA and Electrical Engineering degrees from Northeastern University and attended the Engineering Executive Program at Stanford University. Alec has two issued patents in medical protocol authoring and delivery, and he has four patents in process in the area of mobile commerce.
John Lovitt, former SVP Rational/IBM, Investor - Mountain View, CA, US
John Lovitt has over 25 years of experience in sales, marketing, and general management in the software development and deployment markets. He was a senior officer in Rational Software from 1990 to 2003, with roles including Senior VP Worldwide Field Operations, VP Americas Field Operation, and VP Worldwide Services and Support. He played a key role in shaping Rational's team-oriented approach to achieving customer results through improved software development capability. John joined Rational in 1986 as the first products were going to market and grew sales to over $700 million annually, building a field organization of over 1800 sales and technical professionals while integrating several key acquisitions. Before joining Rational, John was with Hewlett Packard for 13 years and McDonnell Douglas for five years. John holds an M.S. in computer science from the Missouri University of Science and Technology at Rolla, and a B.S. in aeronautical engineering from Wichita State University. He is also active on advisory boards at WSU and UMR, and is past president of the MS&T Academy of Computer Science, in addition to serving on several corporate boards. He is active in Habitat for Humanity and has taught entrepreneurship at international summer camps in Eastern Europe and China.
Aggelos Maglis, CEO, Atlantis Consulting - Thessaloniki, Greece
Aggelos Maglis is the CEO and President of Atlantis Consulting group, and also a board member of Wadja Ltd. He holds a Civil Engineer diploma and postgraduate studies in Technological evolution and Industrial Strategy from the University of Manchester (Prest) UK. He is a member of the Evaluation Network of the General Secretariat of Research of the EU Commission, while he also represents Atlantis towards EU bodies such as the ETEPS (European Techno- Economic Policy Support Network) and the TII (Technology, Innovation, Information).
Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and Product Director, Huddle - London, UK
Defying his mother’s advice that ‘the internet will never take off’, Andy. began tinkering with the web in the mid-nineties before starting his career at Fibernet Group plc as the company’s European webmaster in 2001. In 2003 Andy helped found KnowledgeCenter, a knowledge management consultancy focused on the London insurance market. During his time at the company he provided web content and knowledge management consultancy to a number of prominent global clients including QBE, Benfield, Catlin, Arthur J Gallagher and Montpelier Re. With more than 10 years of industry experience, Andy is an expert in field of online collaboration and is heavily involved in the London start-up community. Andy holds a degree in Economics from the University of Sheffield, but has always regretted not studying something more practical like Computer Science. In his spare time he enjoys fencing and skiing (both rather badly) but excels at sitting in sunny beer gardens discussing films, music and cool stuff he recently saw online.
Ioannis Methodios, ex-CEO, Accenture Greece - Athens, Greece
Dr Ioannis Methodios served as the President and Managing Director of Accenture S.A/Greece. until 2005. Prior to this position he was the Managing Partner of the Consulting Department of Arthur Young/Ernst & Young/Greece, and a Management Associate in Booz, Allen & Hamilton/USA. Now, he operates as an independent management consultant, participates in real estate investments, and serves on the Board of a number of companies in Greece.
Nikos Moraitakis, Head of Strategy, Upstream Systems - Athens, Greece
Nikos Moraitakis is the Head of Strategy and Product Development at Upstream Systems. He had prior experience at Ernst & Young Athens, as a Senior Consultant in IT strategy and e-business. Nikos holds a BEng in Computing from Imperial College, London.
Sokratis Papafloratos, co founder, Trusted Places
Sokratis Papafloratos, 31, is the CEO and co-founder of TrustedPlaces, which he launched with Walid Al Saqqaf in September 2006, before raising a total of ₤1M in equity funding and leading the company to becoming one of the leading local review community sites in the UK. Prior to TrustedPlaces Sokratis headed up Operations for WideRay/Qwikker Europe, an American, mobile, technology start-up, funded by Sequoia Capital and Enterprise Partners Venture Capital. Before joining WideRay he spent four years in Vodafone in a variety of senior Strategy and Technology roles. Sokratis is originally from Thessaloniki Greece, where he grew up before moving to the UK to gain a MEng Electronic Engineering at the University of York.
Petros Katsampouris, CEO, Vivechrom - Athens, Greece
Petros Katsampouris is the Managing Director of Vivechrom S.A., the Greek subsidiary of AKZONOBEL. Prior to this position he served as Deputy General Manager in ELGEKA, Business Unit Manager in KRAFT/Jacobs-Suchart, Sales Director in Pepsico-Tasty and Marketing Manager in Nestle. He is presently President of the Panhellenic Union of Paint Varnishes and Printing Ink Industry of Greece, and member of the General Council of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises.
George Saliaris-Fasseas, Country Manager, Google - Athens, Greece
George is the country manager for Google Greece, where has setup the Athens office. Prior to that he was Managing Director of OgilvyOne worldwide, Athens, the country's largest, most rewarded and successful interactive marketing agency. OgilvyOne, Athens handled the web campaigns of more than 50 blue chip brands and just in 2007 it won 24 Ermis Awards (including Grand & Innovation Awards), a New York Festival Award for Vodafone Live Feeds while being the only 4 star country in the global Ogilvy network. Until 2005 he was the founder and Managing Partner of yellownetroad (the leading greek interactive marketing agency which merged with OgilvyOne) focusing on serving clients in using technology to build relationships between themselves and their customers. Yellownetroad run successful e-relationship programs for Athenian Brewery (Amstel, Heineken) 20th Century Fox, Allianz, JWT, Germanos, Goodys, Lufthansa, Siemens, Toyota, Yahoo & Wunderman. Before that he was involved in the international fresh produce business serving supermarkets, working as a Marketing and Procurement Manager for Richard & Hochfeld (UK). He holds a BSc in Management Sciences from Warwick University and an MSc (with distinction) in Analysis, Design and Management of Information Systems from the London School of Economics. George has served in the board of Directors of EDEE and is a continuous education fanatic. He had been a keen athlete and a Greek national karate team member. He is fluent in Greek, English, French and speaks Italian.
Sotiris Siagas, Investment Director, i4G SA – Thessaloniki, Greece
Sotiris Siagas is the Investement Director of i4G SA, the management company of i4G Business Incubator with a focus on IT start-ups and member of the Euroconsultants Group. He has experience in business plan valuation, risk capital investements, financial analysis and business development. He has served on the boards of early IT companies. Sotiris is also the CFO and co-founder of Kapou Geoinformatics SA. He holds an MBA from Imperial College Business School (London) and a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Aristotle University (Thessaloniki). He is certified investment professional by the EVCA, member of the Technical Chamber of Greece and the IEEE and speaks 3 languages.
Christos Tsangos, CEO, Microsoft Hellas - Athens, Greece
Christos Tsangos is the CEO of Microsoft Hellas since 2003. During his time there he expanded the operations of Microsoft in Greece significantly. His efforts culminated in establishing a strategic partnership with the Greek State in 2006, which is expected to further increase the penetration of Technology in the public sector, research and education. During 1997-2003 he as the CEO of Intel Hellas, charged with the initial establishment of the company in Greece, Cyprus and Malta. Before that, since 1995 he was still in Intel, as the EMEA Director for Networking Products. During 1992-1995 he was the European Marketing Director for Madge Networks UK Ltd, the largest networks company in the country, winning the «HMS Royal Export Award» for 3 consecutive years. He has also worked as the European Enabling Technologies Manager at The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). Christos has also offered consulting services for IDC, Dataquest and the EU. He studied Computing and Electronic Engineering at the University of Reading and Data Communications at the University of Manchester.
Stefanos Vasdekis, Serial Web Entrepreneur - Athens, Greece
Stefanos Vasdekis received his diploma in Civil Engineering from National Technical University of Athens in 2003. In his first year as a student back in 1997, he co-founded with John Nousis his first business, a free web hosting company that was paying back its members. This project targeted the USA market and was sold in 1999. Since then, he has co-founded (always together with his soulmate John Nousis) several other web businesses in the fields of ecommerce, web publishing, software development, internet consulting, online travel reservations and social networking. Most have failed, while some are still running and three out of them already had a successful exit. Today, he focuses on small projects that target selected niches in a few European, Asian and American markets.
Ioannis Vasilaras, Ex-CEO, Infote - Athens, Greece
Dr Yiannis Vasilaras has a long career in the telecommunications industry. He was the Managing Director of INFOTE (yellow pages), subsidiary of OTE, until 2008. Prior to this position he served as Director General and as Director in various OTE operating units, and earlier as Telecommunications Engineer. He also taught courses related to electronics and physics in the University of Athens.
Marco Veremis, Chairman, Upstream Systems - Athens, Greece
Marco Veremis is the Commercial Director and Chairman of the Board at Upstream Systems. He has prior experience at McCann Ericsson, London, UK, as well as at Grey Advertising, London, UK and DDB London, where he served as account manager and account planner. Marco holds a B.A. in Economics from Warwick University, and M.Phil in International Relations from Oxford University, UK.
Andreas Veneris, founder, Vennsa technologies
Andreas Veneris is the President/CEO of Vennsa Technologies, a company that develops automated solutions to chip debugging and verification. He has 15 years of R&D experience in CAD software for chip debugging, verification, synthesis and test with more than 80 publications and five patents in that field. In addition to these credentials, he was an early member at OnRamp Inc., a pioneering internet multimedia company that went public in 1997. While at OnRamp, he was a member of the team that performed the first webcast ever (37th Annual Grammy Awards, 1995), an event acknowledged by members of the American Congress. He also worked in the early development stages of Mosaic (later Netscape) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (Illinois). His operating experience is complemented by extensive experience in team building and technology transfer. As an associate professor at the University of Toronto and the Athens University of Economics and Business, he managed a large group of R&D activities and delivered them to the industry with specialized in-house tools. His multi-million R&D proect raising effort has attracted funds from premier semiconductor companies in the Americas, Asia and Europe. Prior to that, he was a visiting faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where he also obtained his Ph.D. in 1998 in Computer Science. He holds an M.Sc. degree from the University of Southern California (1992) and a Bachelor degree from the University of Patras (1991). He is a senior member of IEEE, ACM, AAAS, Technical Chamber of Greece, Professional Engineers of Ontario and The Planetary Society and he has co-authored two books.
Financing
Francesco Benincasa, Francesco Benincasa, Investment Director, Portfolio Capital Europe - London, UK
Francesco Benincasa is the CEO of Portfolio Capital Europe, a specialist investment consultancy with a focus on the emerging markets and high growth businesses in Europe. He has set up funds and raised capital of in excess of €50m for emerging market funds since 2005. Francesco has been involved in internet businesses since 1995 and set up ihavemoved.com in the UK and Europe in 1999 where as CEO he raised over €10m through three rounds of funding. He is currently working with online startups in Asia and Europe.
Aristos Doxiadis, Managing Director, Notos Associate - Athens, Greece
Aristos Doxiadis has been a private equity professional in Greece since 1995, most recently as Managing Director of Notos Associates (since 2000). He is also an angel investor in web startups. He has directed business consulting firms and has worked on anti-poverty programs for the European Commission. He has a B.A. (Soc. Stud.) from Harvard and an M.Sc. (Econ.) from London.
Evangelos Simoudis, Managing Director, Trident Capital - Palo Alto, CA, US
Evangelos Simoudis joined Trident Capital in 2005 as a Venture Partner and has been a Managing Director since 2007. Evangelos focuses on investments in Internet and Enterprise Software businesses. Prior to Trident, Evangelos spent 5 years as a partner at Apax Partners, a private equity and venture capital firm where he invested and served on the boards of early and mid-stage IT companies. At Apax he also chaired the firm’s IT advisory board. Prior to entering venture capital, Evangelos had more than 20 years experience in high-technology industries, in executive roles spanning operations, marketing, sales and engineering. His experience as a technology executive includes serving as President and CEO of Customer Analytics, a Trident-backed, eCRM company acquired by Xchange, Inc. (NASDAQ: EXAP), and as Vice President of Business Intelligence Solutions at IBM. Evangelos' current directorships include DesiHits, Hip Digital, Host Analytics and PivotLink Software. Prior directorships include Bristol Technology (acquired by Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ)), Composite Software, Confluent Software (acquired by Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL)), Doppelganger (acquired by Hip Digital), Princeton Softech (acquired by IBM) and Vidavee (acquired by Vignette (NASDAQ: VIGN). Evangelos earned a PhD in computer science from Brandeis University and a BS in electrical engineering from Caltech.
Legal & Accounting
Andreas Acavalos, ex-General Manager, Price Waterhouse Coopers Consulting - Athens, Greece
Andreas Acavalos is a Management Consultant, specializing in organizational strategy. He has served for over 20 years as a Partner of PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Greece and was Managing Director of PwC Consulting S.A., the firm’s consultancy arm, until its divestment in 2002. He now operates as an independent consultant and serves on the Board of a number of companies in Greece and Switzerland.
Nayia Antoniou, Associate, Christopoulos and Associates
Nayia is an associate with the firm which she joined in 2008 as a trainee. Her practice is focused on Company & Commercial matters, advising on company establishment, corporate governance and the entry into all type of commercial contracts, including agency and distribution agreements. She advises in particular on the legal framework within which Cypriot companies operate in Greece. Nayia also represents clients in the registration of trademarks and competition law matters. Nayia qualified to the Athens Bar in 2009. She obtained her law degree from the Democritus University of Thrace in 2006 and an LLM in International Commercial Law from Westminster University, London in 2007.
Dimitris Christopoulos, Managing Partner, Christopoulos and Associates
Dimitri is the founding and managing partner of Christopoulos & Associates. He has extensive experience in the field of taxation law and acted as External Legal Counsel to the Ministry of Finance on Corporate Taxation issues from 1993-1995. Other appointments include membership of the Board of Directors of the Franchise Association of Greece in 1997 and legal counsel to a leading group of companies in the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry. Dimitri is experienced in advising in all types of Real Estate and development projects, with a particular focus on the hotel, leisure, time-sharing and tourism industries. He also has established a specialisation in advising on the protection of Intellectual & Industrial Property rights, often working cross-border with correspondent law firms. In 1999, Dimitri acted in the first buyout of a domestic company by an international fund to take place in Greece, establishing his expertise in the area of Mergers & Aquisitions. He represents clients in Litigation & Dispute Resolution matters arising in all of the firm’s areas of practice, in particular tax and white collar crime, and advises local administrative bodies in respect of the liability of companies to tax. Dimitri has represented a number of clients in their bids in tenders for telecommunications licenses. Dimitri contributes regularly to the legal and financial press. He has been published widely in “Erga Omnes”, a legal publication of which he is on the Editorial Board, and the “Hotelier”, a leading publication in the tourism industry. Dimitri qualified to the Athens Bar in 1994. Having graduated from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 1990, he attended the Universite de Bordeaux, from which he obtained a DEA de Droit Public & Fiscal in 1992 and 1993 respectively.
He was born in Athens in 1978. He graduated from the Department of Law of the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens and holds a master degree in public law the Department of Law of the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens. He is a PhD Candidate in the field of constitutional law. He runs the blog elawyer.blogspot.com since 2005. He has established in March 2008 the office “Data&Protection-Legal services in the Information Society”. He also blogs at elawyer.blogspot.com .
Marketing
George Achillias, Marketing and Communication Strategist - London, UK
George Achillias is a Strategist and Professional and at the same time a highly qualified Director specialized in Sales and Business Development. He has developed high level expertise on Social Networks, Online Sales and Web 2.0, while being involved in setting up media in modern marketing activities and relevant roadmaps. He is also an expert on interactive campaigns, long and in depth experience how to innovatory use New and Social Media. Finally, he has served as an International Sales Executive with more than 8 years experience growing global sales divisions and exceeding financial goals and multi-million dollar revenue.
Nikos Anagnostou, Entrepreneur, Blogger - Athens, Greece
Nikos Anagnostou is the co-owner at OFB, a consulting boutique that supports open source solutions for the enterprise. He has also served as the COO of Project Online, a project management ASP and design software wholesaler and as the Applications Manager and Finance Director at Oracle Greece for approximately 10 years. Moreover, Nikos is a founding member of the Greek Open Coffee and co-creator of Greekstartups.com. He blogs at metablogging.gr, webtropic.cc and wapplog.com about Social Media, technology, web applications and startups.
Mike Butcher, editor, Techcrunch Europe - London, UK
Mike Butcher has written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. He is a former editor of New Media Age magazine, the leading new media weekly in the UK, and the European edition of The Industry Standard. Since 1996 has launched or re-launched numerous media web sites and in 2000 he was nominated as NetMedia’s European Internet Journalist of the Year. In 2004 he was voted ‘One of the 100 Innovators of the UK Internet Decade’ by GfK NOP, the fourth-largest custom research business in the world. In July 2008 he was put at No. 48 out of the Top 100 people in London’s creative industry by The Independent newspaper and The Hospital Club. In August 2008 TechCrunch Europe was awarded the best “Web 2.0 and business blog” in the UK, by the readers of Computer Weekly magazine. He is a regular commentator on the technology business, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, Channel 4 and Bloomberg. Mike’s personal blog is mbites, while he twitters as @mikebutcher.
Andrew Hyde, Community Director, Techstars - Boulder, CO, US
Andrew Hyde is a designer, community organizer and a coffee evangelist, recently working with Techstars as the Community Director. Among a number of start-ups, he has also founded Startup Weekend, focusing on community building and providing an encouraging introduction to entrepreneurship. Previously he has worked on Interaction Design projects for leading ad agencies, non profits, and political campaigns. Andrew enjoys riding his bike year round in the great town of Boulder, Colorado.
Alex Kombogiannis, CEO and founding partner of mpGreek - New York City, NY, US
Alex Kombogiannis grew up in Athens and went to NY at 20 years old to attend college. While studying at NYU, Mr. Kombogiannis started working in NYC with then small start ups like Yahoo, AOL, Netnames (now part of Verisign) in the online marketing, business development and deal making for online services. In 1998, at 25 years old Mr. Kombogianis started an internet company – Entropia Inc. and Ideal Entropia SA serving the Greek online space as a search engine and portal for Greeks called iBoom Network. The company expanded very quickly within 1 year with location in NY, Chicago, Boston, Montreal, London and Athens. It was acquired by Ideal Group SA for $2.5 million in Athens which is part of the Levendis Group of companies. In 2001 and after 3 years of managing Entropia Mr. Kombogianis setup a marketing management company which was serving online marketing integration for fortune 500 companies in NYC. Client of Digital Republique included JP Morgan Chase, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Match.com amongst others. Parallel to that, in 2003 Alex Co-founded with George Kontos Greased Networks and mpGreek which was the first digital music downloads service for Greece. With the biggest online catalog and the most digital services mpGreek has contracts and affiliations with major Groups in Greece including Tellas SA, Pegasus Group, Vivodi Telecom. In 2005 mpGreek won the Gold Ermis for best internet service in Greece. Now at 34 years old, with a base in Athens and NY, Alex Kombogiannis is looking into the future of digital services that will change the ways Greeks listen and buy their music, watch TV and films. both for Greece, Europe and America.
Arda Kutsal, General Manager, Crenvo Consultancy - Founder/Editor, Webrazzi.com - Istanbul, Turkey
Arda Kutsal is an entrepreneur, business adviser and blogger living in Istanbul, Turkey. He is the author of the most popular Turkish Web 2.0 blog, Webrazzi and also General Manager of Crenvo Consultancy. Crenvo provides consultancy services to mostly internet companies about marketing, strategic management, investments, research and product management. He is one of the most influential people in Turkish internet market.
Panos Samprakos, Executive Creative Director, OgilvyOne Worldwide, Greece
Panos has been working in the space of online advertising and Interactive Marketing for more than a decade, trying to bring in touch brands and online users, in way that is both direct and efficient for both parties. Since 2005, he has been directing the interactive unit of OgilvyOne Worldwide Athens, from the position of "Executive Creative Director", guiding creatively the creation of websites and online campaigns. The works that he has directed have repeatedly been awarded in Greece with Grand Ermis awards and have earned international acclaim at the NY Festival and MIXX Awards. Panos blogs at www.panos.gr, while he has founded one of the most historic James Bond fan sites, the "Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang!".
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial web entrepreneur - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Boris is a serial web entrepreneur. He started his first company, V3 Redirect Services, in 1997 and sold it in 1999 to Fortunecity.com which was about to go public on the Neuer Markt. In 2003, he started a Wi-Fi Hotspot operator in the Netherlands, HubHop, which finally sold-out to a big operator. Since then, Boris has started several projects and companies including The Next Web Conference and Fleck.com. More recently he started TwitterCounter.com. You could describe it as a combination of Feedburner and of Google Analytics for Twitter. He also served as the chairman of IPAN (Interactive Professionals Association Netherlands) from May 2005 till April 2008.
