Open Coffee 24/5. Where Greek Startups begin.
On Friday 24/5 at 18:30 we found ourselves at the Benaki Museum, in order to attend the last “Open Coffee” for this year. OpenCoffee aims to be the single point of reference for Greek start-ups. In this context, they cover existing and, mainly, new developments on Greek start-ups, as well as the relevant topics of entrepreneurship and technology. At this last session of Open-coffee 3 fresh, innovative and clever start-up companies presented their goals and work. They shared with us their journey from the birth of their business’ idea to the fulfillment of their project and then to their success. For us, who attended the lecture, it was for sure one remarkable experience. We received many interesting and useful information and we, also, had the opportunity to have some networking with the rest of the attendants, which is a great way for someone who wants to get in the start up business, to meet people and expand his social circle. Open Coffee and their contribution in Greek start-up society is enormous and they keep strengthen their work more and more as the years goes-by.
The first speaker was Chris Spatharakis, co-founder and CEO at the start up company “Ferryhopper”. Ferryhopper was founded in 2016, by Christos Spatharakis, Vasilis Laxanas, Panagiotis Sarafis and Aiden short. All 13 members of the company have developed an innovative ferry ticket booking platform, which provides users the possibility to book direct routes to various locations, to make reservations for correspondent trips and to plan multi-located journeys all over Aegean. Ferryhopper connects distant or excluded islands with no direct access, making the trip by ship a pleasant and easy experience. In less than two years, the company managed to sell more than 200.000 tickets through the platform for more than 160 different destinations. They started their business in an unusual way, by promoting it through forums and they definitely weren’t aware of the unexpected success that it would have. Recently they did some really important partnerships with EasyGroup and EasyFerry.
The next speaker was Fotis Talatzis, the co-owner, of Novoville, a start-up which was created in order to help local governments to modernize their communication with their citizens. Novoville was founded in 2016 in response to the growing need for more participatory, accountable, transparent, efficient and inclusive local governance. Is a tech startup with a unique mission to transform the public services we all use and improve tomorrow`s government policies, making them citizen-centric.
Furthermore, next company is Radiojar. Mr. Stathis Koutsogeorgos who is the founder and Chief Executive Officer(CEO) of Radiojar, creator of the popular software for Internet radio, was there to share for the very first time the eight-year evolution of the company until today. In general, the main team of Radiojar’s company, gave us one of the most interactive lectures that we have watched, at this event. In the beginning, the speakers talked about their idea for their start-up company. More specifically, they analyzed us, how they decided to create their company, as well as their whole progress in a new “startup” environment. During his speech, Mr. Stathis Koutsogeorgos refered to the take-over of their company by the iHeartMedia-the leading information and entertainment company that counts more than 250 million listeners in the US-, which started as a cooperation at first and gave the audience a piece of advise, to be their self in order to succeed.
OpenCoffee was a great experience for us, students. It was very informative and we had the opportunity to get in touch with great start-uppers, ask questions and broaden our knowledge.
Dikibo Kwnstantina, Konstantina, Amelia K., Eva Vasiou, Marianna Menegatou
