Thanos, a Serial Entrepreneur and Professor

To interact with the top international managers who participate in SEP, the Senior Executive program at SDA Bocconi, which he coordinates, "you need to have company experience," says Thanos Papadimitriou, 39-year old Athens native and SDA faculty member in Operations Technology and Management. And he has plenty of experience: Conversation Starter, a Harvard Business School blog, defines him as a "serial entrepreneur" at the bottom of his post Are you the bottleneck in your organization?

"I was lucky to among the first in Greece to get to know the world of computers and electronics," he says. At 17 he opened a free radio with a few friends, at a time when only the state radio stations were legal. "Young Greeks were following the Italian example from a few years earlier," explains Thanos, "and for a period of time, our radio had the most listeners in Athens." The radio station didn't accept advertising and the initiative never became a business, "but lots of my partners stayed in that sector and are now some of the most popular DJs in Greece."

Papadimitriou left Europe right after to study computer science at MIT and UCLA. His first job was consulting for a spin-off of MIT, Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP). "I was there for four years, and I went from a company with 400 people to one with 5,000 people. It was a highly tumultuous moment: the United States had just gotten out of the crisis from the early '90s, created by the end of the Cold War, and industries like aerospace were substituted by technology industries. From my point of view, since I had to bring IT systems to companies, I had to analyze processes in detail and the process-based approach turned out to be useful in many other phases in my professional life."

Papadimitriou left the CTP when he decided there was no more room for professional growth in the short term ("I was too young for the next step") and he started a PhD in Management at UCLA. "But I missed my previous work, so I founded Alpha Detail with two friends, a market research company in the pharmaceutical sector which analyzes doctors' behavior. We started with a PowerPoint presentation, and thanks to that we raised one million dollars from our former employers and we opened in February 2001." When things seemed to be starting well, with several projects and promising contacts for the start-up, the US economy was shaken by September 11 and everything stopped for a few months. "We weren't able to pay our salaries in November and December," says Papadimitriou, "but we bet on our future and it worked. After a short while, the company started invoicing 14 million dollars a year, but I had left all operative roles to finish my PhD." An academic effect of his entrepreneurial experience was a paper accepted at the prestigious VLDB (Very Large Data Base) Conference in 2000. The statistical methodology developed for Alpha Detail is also at the base of another article, written with Valeria Belvedere and Alberto Grando, to be published soon on the International Journal of Production Research.

At the end of the PhD in 2003, Thanos contacted two students at the University's School of Engineering specializing in natural languages processes and computer science who had a great idea: to compete with Google with a semantic search engine, which is able to understand searches in depth and provide only truly relevant responses. "I was their advisor for the start of Infocious. But technical excellence is not enough. Google was so well-established by then that it couldn't be ousted, so we modified the project and created Lingospot, a service aimed at anyone who manages information websites or group sites to increase the number of pages visited and advertising revenue." Actually, thanks to semantic search engines, published text is interpreted and the most important words are automatically linked to other text on the site or the group of sites that deal with similar terms, while advertising based on keywords are analyzed and presented in an order that follows the effective relevance compared to the text.

Papadimitriou came back to Europe in 2004 continuing a double academic – as a SDA professor at the Operations and Technology Management Unit at SDA Bocconi – and entrepreneurial track. "It's true that here, I have to admit, starting a company is much more difficult, both due to a larger aversion to risk and due to the absence of an efficient venture capital market." Establishing himself in Milan, where he teaches courses in Operations, Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship both at SDA and at the University, he founded mBryo along with two other people. It is a sort of incubator with offices in New York which helps develop entrepreneurial ideas and write good business plans, and he collaborates remotely, managing a delicious blog on entrepreneurship, Chefs Not Bakers.

In Greece he is involved in M2C Media, a company that manages music transmissions and advertising messages in large distribution spaces, which reached a market share of 25%, along with InHouseMusic, a music production company that creates both advertising jingles and commercial tracks (Sandyman can be found on YouTube to get an idea of the genre). "You can't escape your past," he says now, commenting on his return to radio even though today's media has a more technologically advanced form.