Building World-Class Engineering Teams in Greece
Building World-Class Engineering Teams in Greece
Eight tech leads share lessons learned, funding news, 400+ jobs from 70 companies and more
I hope this email finds you well. Welcome to Hunting Greek Unicorns #18. I’m a startup guy based out of Greece, and every two weeks I will share news, jobs and more from the Greek startup ecosystem, and not only.
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🚀 Building World-Class Engineering Teams in Greece
This week, I’m excited to chat with a group of engineering leads from some of the most notable startups in Greece about an extremely interesting and timely topic: what does it take to build a world-class engineering team in Greece? I’ve witnessed many high-growth startups that took the decision to keep their R&D teams in the country, while scaling sales and operations around the world. Recently, another trend is also emerging; US and EU startups that create R&D teams in Greece either as their first engineering hub or as a location to scale their teams. So I really wanted to dive deeper and learn from within about:
what makes Greece an increasingly interesting engineering hub destination and in what ways we can further improve
how to hire a stellar engineering team and make sure they have a big impact in the organisation
challenges building and scaling a team and lessons learned
A very special thank you to Dimitris Togias (Head of Engineering at Omilia), Kostas Papageorgiou (Lead Engineer at Panther Labs), Nikolaos Dimos (VP Engineering at Workable), Nikos Fertakis (Tech Lead at Skroutz), Stelios Gorilas & Anastasios Skarlatidis (VP Engineering & Director of Data Engineering & Science at Pollfish), Stratos Pavlakis (VP Engineering at Blueground) and Sokratis Vidros (Founding Engineer at Clerk). They were all willing to share their precious time, stories, and insights with me and I deeply appreciate it.
These people are leading teams in some of the most prominent startups in Greece, which are world-class at what they do. Blueground, Omilia, Pollfish, Skroutz and Workable have raised over $220M in funding and scaled their R&D teams mostly in Greece, while the majority has business development teams and customers around the globe. They have around 1300 employees, including close to 400 engineers.
Clerk and Panther Labs are two US startups founded/backed by Airbnb, AWS, Stripe and Facebook alumni. Both teams recently decided to create a tech team in Greece.
An increasingly attractive destination for startups building an engineering team
What makes Greece an attractive place for startups building engineering teams? All tech leads agreed that a good ratio of engineering skills to compensation is an important reason that makes the country highly attractive to local and foreign companies. Startups extend their runway employing talented engineers, without incurring the very high costs that come with building a large team in one of the tech meccas of the world. Nevertheless, it would be short-sighted and unfair to attribute this entirely on the basis of cost-efficiency. More elements are at play here.
The Greek startup scene has recently found itself in flywheel mode, accelerated by a number of expats that return to the country bringing experience from top-tier companies.
Greece has gradually become a more mature and attractive startup ecosystem. A few teams led the way, adopting an engineering culture and rethinking the way of work, compensation, benefits and participation in decision-making. That was a big shift from the sales-oriented organisations of 20 years ago. Some of these startups turned out to be very successful and one thing led to another. There’s also now a much richer VC ecosystem to support them. At the same time, employee loyalty is rather high and job hopping isn’t in fashion yet compared to other ecosystems.
— Stratos Pavlakis, Blueground
In recent years, we are noticing a "reverse brain-drain". During the crisis a lot of bright Greek minds left the country to live and work abroad. We are noticing that many people are now looking for an opportunity to return to Greece, becoming significant contributors to local innovation.
— Kostas Papageorgiou, Panther Labs
Another important aspect was highlighted in several conversations; a combination of strong engineering foundation along with high percentage of fluent English speakers. This contributes to a much easier integration of engineers inside a team with offices and clients in multiple countries.
There is a strong foundation created by Greek academia, which provides a deep focus in Computer Science and Mathematics. Even though most universities don’t teach the practical know-how the market demands, I believe graduates are taught the core principles and can easily adapt to the market. The tech space is fast-changing, so being taught the right foundations make people able to be easily trained later on any required skill.
— Sokratis Vidros, Clerk
A significant percentage of engineers have solid academic background in Computer Science educated at undergraduate or postgraduate level in local and international universities. There’s also a high number of fluent English speakers (English being a mandatory course for most high school students) that makes the integration inside a diverse, multinational team much easier.
— Nikolaos Dimos, Workable
In what ways we can further improve
What are some of the areas we should further improve in order to become a more mature tech hub? Many tech leads mentioned the absence of a large pool of senior managers across functions (engineering, product, design, etc) that are able to craft products for the global markets and lead teams effectively. We have a short history in building world-class tech products and it is expected that people with the experience to lead such teams are very few. This creates an opportunity for the current senior managers to have a broader impact and shape the local management culture.
There is no previous generation we can learn from, no previous startup scene, which means we had to learn how to build effective engineering organisations on our own (and still do). This is why people who return to Greece after having worked in big companies and at senior roles are so important. In my experience, there isn’t an adequate pool of experienced engineering managers. There are several good individual contributors, but fewer people who can lead a team.
— Nikos Fertakis, Skroutz
Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Madrid and most big European capitals have at least one Google, Amazon, Facebook engineering office. These are companies that have a positive impact on the local ecosystem. They nurture local talent by providing high quality on-job training and exposing engineers to state-of-the-art technology. Engineers will eventually leave these companies and join others in the local ecosystem. Athens doesn’t boast yet the presence of an engineering office of such global tech enterprises.
— Kostas Papageorgiou, Panther Labs
Furthermore, the transition from university to the industry was brought up in conversations and makes an important point. A strong engineering foundation might be created, but a better connection of fresh graduates with companies is necessary.
I have experienced first hand the different approaches across countries such as Greece and the UK in the relationships between companies and universities. For instance, career fairs in UK universities are very well organised and occur quite often, while in Greece we still have a lot of room for improvement there.
— Nikolaos Dimos, Workable
Overall, the Greek tech ecosystem is still relatively small, yet very promising with more success stories in the making.
There are several success stories in the making, which will spawn more companies and expose us to bigger, more interesting problems to solve and level up the ecosystem. Despite the unprecedented pandemic, this year was one of the most successful so far for Greek startups.
— Sokratis Vidros, Clerk
Mentality and work ethics have matured the past two decades. Greek companies are now very similar to the European ones. We have taken serious steps in investing in people and evolving them as professionals and thus achieved a modern and sustainable culture that yields results while at the same time is rewarding and fulfilling for employees.
— Stelios Gorilas & Anastasios Skarlatidis, Pollfish
Creating a strong engineering team: Hiring top talent and retaining them
What does it take to recruit a stellar engineering team? Most of the answers were related to the following themes:
Interesting product
State-of-the-art technology stack
Strong company culture & employer brand
Engineering brand: open source projects, meetup presentations, twitter presence, blog posts, organise trainings, participate in conferences, clear career paths, etc.
Make sure you keep a finger on the pulse of what devs & engineering teams really value; and this goes beyond packages or languages to types of companies and cultures - purpose driven tech emerging as one of the key trends. When you can afford the time and money, try to give back to the community and the ecosystem. Sponsor a meetup, give a conference talk, publish content or open source that nice little utility you developed. Not just once - to look cool. Do it a few times because you actually care. Also, can't stress enough how critical it is to create original job ads, have short response time with quality feedback to candidates and how positively this reflects on potential candidates as selection and interview processes are the first touch points with the company’s culture.
— Stratos Pavlakis, Blueground
Hiring top talent is not enough to create a world-class team, so how do they make sure their teams remain motivated and have a big impact in the organisation?
Teams have visibility and direct impact on the company goals. The result of their work is translated into revenue increase that can be monitored directly from the engineers. Teams are empowered end to end when it comes to feature development i.e. develop, test, release, monitor and assess impact throughout the lifecycle of every feature.
— Stelios Gorilas & Anastasios Skarlatidis, Pollfish
I think ownership is key. Engineers need to be proud of their work and care about the systems they’re building. They also need to understand how this affects the users/clients, thereby engaging in product discussions is valuable. We’ve struggled a bit in the past with silos and finding a good balance here is not trivial, but in my experience teams with ownership over what they’re building thrive.
— Nikos Fertakis, Skroutz
Team autonomy is a crucial motivation factor. Autonomy in deciding the software tools to solve the right problems and ability to deliver what the team is asked for without many dependencies from other teams. In addition, a team feels it has a big impact in the organisation, when they create outcome-based roadmaps that list questions, themes and outcomes instead of features. Planning with features limits the teams’ agility and problem solving flexibility.
— Nikolaos Dimos, Workable
We constantly interact with our people through one-on-ones, internal technical workshops or open Q&A discussions. We try to gather feedback early and adapt to meet our people’s needs. It’s not easy and we still have a long way to go.
— Dimitris Togias, Omilia
Having a big impact to the organisation is closely connected with defining success for them and their teams. The majority uses Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), a popular goal-setting framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes. Team happiness and work/life balance as success factors were also highlighted.
Success comes from maximising the amount of work not done and amplifying developer happiness.
— Sokratis Vidros, Clerk
Team happiness is a key factor. It’s really important to watch the team make an impact with their work and be willing to go the extra mile while also smiling.
— Dimitris Togias, Omilia
Challenges building and scaling a team and lessons learned
What were the challenges when they started and what are the challenges now that their teams have scaled? What are the lessons learned? Building and then scaling a world-class engineering team comes with a number of challenges along the road. Hiring the best people you can and retaining them, while also growing the product and infrastructure were among the most common points of focus.
Attracting top talent is always the hardest part, while the second most important is making the platform scalable (allowing more people and teams to work on it), so that it grows and evolves in a steady pace. This means creating the ecosystem in which several teams can co-exist, having clear responsibilities and working together relatively independently.
— Stelios Gorilas & Anastasios Skarlatidis, Pollfish
In the beginning it was easier to communicate and collaborate due to the small team size. Our main concerns were engineering practices, continuous deployments, testing and focusing on the right things in terms of product. Having many junior engineers was quite challenging, as building products is different from university projects in lots of ways. As the team got bigger, there were several communication gaps. We defined teams, hired senior engineers to mentor, and our organisation chart grew more complex. I often use the analogy: “Our body grows faster than our clothes (Hulk-mode). This has happened multiple times”. We have identified four key areas: internal documentation, provide autonomy and responsibility to people/teams, hire senior people and constantly share vision/ideas with everyone.
— Dimitris Togias, Omilia
I think there are two main lessons learned. First, leading and managing engineers means writing less (or no) code. During the early days, we’d expect team leads to write code, but as we’ve grown this has become untenable. Second, establishing an engineering career ladder as early as possible. We’ve gone through multiple iterations experimenting with different structures as we saw fit. At the moment, we are looking into properly defining the engineering manager and individual contributor roles as a dual tech career track.
— Nikos Fertakis, Skroutz
It was inspiring to talk to all these engineering leads and get their insights on the Greek tech scene, as well as on building world-class engineering teams. All of them agreed that Tech In Greece is gradually becoming more and more mature and relevant. There is some great talent and a developing engineering culture that is attractive not only for local companies, but also for US startups building tech hubs in the country. The ecosystem is on a flywheel mode with many success stories and much more in the making!
🦄 Startup Jobs
Greek startups are hiring! Here are some of the latest job opportunities:
Accusonus - UX/UI Designer (Remote) - Apply here
Beat - Data Scientist (Athens) - Apply here
Blueground - Operational Excellence Manager (Athens) - Apply here
Douleutaras - Senior Product Manager (Athens) - Apply here
Epignosis - Junior Mobile Engineer (Athens) - Apply here
FlexCar - Business Analyst (Athens) - Apply here
Sunlight - DevOps Engineer - SysAdmin (Heraklion) - Apply here
Useberry - Full Stack Developer (Athens) - Apply here
Weav - Senior Backend Engineer (Remote) - Apply here
👉 For more open roles check out the job board here, with 411 jobs from 70 companies.
🗞️ News
GuestFlip, an online reputation management startup for the tourism industry, was acquired for an undisclosed amount by Travelbook Group, a company offering tech solutions to hotels.
Sunlight, a virtualisation tech startup for data-intensive applications with R&D team in Heraklion, Crete, raised $6M Series A led by OpenOcean.
Yodiwo, an IoT startup with R&D team in Patras raised a funding round from Brookstreet Equity Partners.
Obrela Security Industries, a cybersecurity company founded in 2009, raised €4.5M from EOS Capital Partners.
inne, a biotech startup based in Berlin with a mission to help women track their fertility in a more accurate way raised a funding round from existing investors including Blossom Capital, the founder of TransferWise and more.
Radicle, a peer-to-peer alternative to GitHub, launched on HackerNews and trended on top stories last weekend.
Free Now, the parent company of Beat, is exploring the option to build a new big call-centre hub in Greece.
The Athens Digital Lab incubator announced the 10 teams that will support over the next months to digitally transform Athens.
Ignite Ideas, an acceleration program by Athens Center for Εntrepreneurship and Innovation and Nestle Hellas, announced the 9 teams entering the program.
Wealthyhood, a personalised and commission-free investing platform, is the winner of Alpha Bank’s FinQuest Accelerator 2020.
💭 Reading or listening
The second Greeks In Tech Live is taking place on the 20th of December with an impressive line-up of Greek founders around the world (few recent acquisitions in there as well). More details here.
An interesting chat with George Hadjigeorgiou, co-founder & CEO of Skroutz and
Panagiotis Karampinis, Managing Director of Endeavor Greece, on how Skroutz started, lessons learned, growth rates, what the future holds for the company & more.
A post by Babis Makrynikolas, VP Product & Pricing at Blueground, discussing the bold move Amazon made to transition to a marketplace, creating tension between teams but paying off now as about 60% of total sales come from third parties.
A step-by-step registration guide to Elevate Greece from Thaleia Misailidou, Principal at Marathon Venture Capital and the Mantis BI team.
Around $1B has been invested in startups with Greek founders during the first three quarters of 2020. 20% of them in companies with strong presence in Greece. More details here.
Jon Vlachogiannis, co-founder & CEO at AgentRisk, on making assumptions based on a winning, surviving dataset and why this can be devastating for companies. Link
An analysis by Markos Tsirekas, co-founder & CEO of Timewith, on the future of Facebook marketplace and what this means for vertical marketplaces.
Michael Petychakis, CTO at Orfium, published a post on writing code while being a manager (or writing code after you’ve retired 😛).
Putting together an investor update and a collection of investor update templates from Marilena Kakkou, Community & Office Associate at Metavallon. Link
Two Greek software engineers in London, George Stefanis and Paris Apostolopoulos, launched a new podcast and in episode #2 they chat about Deepmind, Apple M1, Linux & AWS.
I’d love to get your thoughts and feedback on Twitter or Facebook.
Stay safe and sane,
Greek Startup Pirate 👋