I’m excited to serve as a co-founding partner of the Openfund, a seed venture capital fund attempting to transform local potential into global success.
Launched in June 2009, the Openfund looks for stellar teams and innovative ideas in and around software, mobile and the web, providing hands-on mentoring on all things start-up, access to a vast array of contacts and resources, next to a small amount of money to start with. In essence, Openfund offers everything a team of ambitious entrepreneurs needs to quit everything else, focus just on their skills, team and idea and properly start-up.
Among other roles, I consider myself especially honored to have contributed my small part in the tech start-up community of Greece, by setting up and serving as a principal organizer of Open Coffee meetings in Athens.
The greek Open Coffee movement, started in June 2007, has (by July 2012) organized more than a hundred meetings in 10 cities across Greece (48 in Athens alone), hosting hundreds of startup-related presentations and spreading the word of entrepreneurship into the thousands of people who have repeatedly participated in its open events. You may find out more at the official blog (strictly english posts are here).
It might sound strange for a page titled “miscellaneous” to host the description of my full time job since 2010, but here’s how it all panned out. While pursuing my PhD, I tried to figure out a way for my research findings to become valuable to a broader than academics audience. I ended up with a start-up, Askmarkets. At the same time, working in a lab, I wondered if there are any other people out there with similar entrepreneurial ambitions, and problems. Together with some friends, we created Open Coffee Greece. We then realized that the issues we were facing as entrepreneurs were pretty much the same across the local community. We attempted to provide a solution that will work out for many and the ecosystem at large, and this is how the Openfund was created. One thing is for sure, we are still at the beginning.