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This is a transcript of my interview with Endeavor Greece as seen at the video above at their series, Greeking Out 2.0.

My name is Michael Petychakis and I’m the CTO of Orfium. 

Could you talk about your journey up to Orfium?

I was in the University, National Technical University of Athens. I was extremely bored, so at my fourth year there I couldn’t find anything interesting. It was electrical and computer engineering. So we had a class with an amazing professor talking about AI at this point. So I was like, okay, that’s something! So we’re going back like 16, 17 years. So at this point, I fell in love. Like I remember I couldn’t sleep and exploring what’s relevant in AI and robotics back then. At this point, I took a scholarship and I went to Dubai, where I worked in a laboratory for humanoid robots. I spent almost a couple of years there. And at this point, I realized that yes, robotics are fascinating, but my passion is AI. 

So I returned back to Greece, I tried to get my degree and I immediately found my first startup back then. We had some traction, it was very interesting, but we’re talking about the Greek landscape of funding and stuff like 15 years ago, it wasn’t really good at this point. So we got some offers from VCs, but didn’t really go very well at this point. So we dropped it. And then I focused on my PhD. And while I was doing my PhD, I started a couple of smaller startups, didn’t really get off the ground. But I realized that I just love this part of creation. So nine years ago, it was March of 2015, I get a reach out from a guy who got an intro at a party in California from one of my best friends there and he had an idea. And this is how Orfium started. 

Obviously, with a lot of pivots and a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck. If you put everything together, you know, and nine years into the mix, this is how we got here. But long story short, we started as a B2C company. We thought we would be an alternative to SoundCloud. So we gathered a lot of users, a lot of music. The platform was okay, but not financially sustainable. 

How did Orfium grow from a 5-person team to a 600-strong workforce?

And then Rob came and he said, guys, you’re a good tech team, but you don’t know anything about the music industry. So here are the real problems of the industry. So we became a B2B company at this point and now we’re more a B2B enterprise. As I said, with a lot of extreme hard work and a little bit of luck and craziness. We were completely crazy! Like no matter what crazy deadline you would give to us, we would always deliver and we were always pretending that we had all the solutions. 

How has the tech ecosystem changed in the last two years?

Back then, we didn’t even have funds. We didn’t have events. So some of us, we started and founded the first tech meetups. And those were the hubs of meeting and chatting. And then, you know, there was the open coffee and there were some other key events. And then Endeavor started operating here. So we started the ecosystem, gathered the ecosystem together. A lot of things happen for the ecosystem to be called an ecosystem. It’s growing, it’s maturing, and what really changed for the last couple of years, I would say, okay, yes, more money, yes, more startups, more scale-ups, more maturity. But what really fundamentally changed for me is that now I can just take somebody on WhatsApp and go for a beer when I have a problem. 

And that’s an ecosystem. Because when you are in San Francisco, why San Francisco is important? Because even when you go to Starbucks, you’re going to find another funder. You’re going to find other people. And like, you know, we’re ScaleUp. We face weird challenges. So you need other people who’ve been through the journey. So five years ago, we didn’t have this kind of people. More and more people come to Greece. And we have those people. And it’s just amazing. We still have a long way to go because we need more startups, more people who’ve exited and all those things. And there are specific skills that we just don’t have in the ecosystem, but we’re getting there. 

What skills are missing right now?

I don’t want to really want to go and talk about titles, but there are specific skill sets. We’re just not here because you don’t have an ecosystem that’s 10, 15 years long enough. So you have like other CTOs with 10 years of experience in growing a startup. It’s not here because the ecosystem is not as long or like super execs in product, business intelligence, engineering, like all those super specific skills. But that’s why I said I saw the ecosystem changing the last couple of years because we started having people repatriate. There were some subsidies given by the government for people who repatriate. A lot of people took advantage of that. So we see those skills repatriate. And now I start seeing something even more weird for me. You know, we’re the Greek community. We’re all Greeks. So we start seeing people coming and living in Greece from abroad. So I think that’s what’s going to shift the ecosystem in the next four or five years. Like people coming and having a mixed culture. 

What’s the funding landscape like in Greece?

Yes, in 2020 we partnered with BigPi. At this point in time, nobody knew who we are. In Greece, we’re just getting out of our dark corner where we just got in. And we partnered with BigPi. We’re very lucky. We grew. Today, obviously, the ecosystem is way more mature. We see way more funds operate. Also, we see a lot of Greek startups getting money from abroad, which is another big benefit. So the funding ecosystem has matured. And, you know, like, because we’re a village as I like to say and I speak with everybody I see that now all those big funds that brought the ecosystem here now they’re raising even bigger funds to do follow-up rounds so that’s great because that means we have a lot of startups that reach a maturity level and now they need to go to series B, series C so like it’s getting better. 

Why did you choose California for your HQ? How has international expansion been?

Well as I said our story is quite bizarre like we started as a Greek US company. For the first two years, because we didn’t have any money, literally zero, we couldn’t afford to get a ticket from the US to Greece. So, you know, for two years, Chris and Drew were living in California. Dimitris and I, we were living in Athens. We never met. We were doing everything through Skype back then. We started like this. We started where we had an office in the US and an office in Athens. Office, like we couldn’t rent anything at this point. So this is how we grew. And obviously since then we’ve grown internationally. We have offices literally almost everywhere in the globe. Like when you see the globe. The reason is because we’re working in the entertainment industry. We’re focusing on music and music is everywhere. It’s an international product. So the same track that you listen in the US, you listen in Japan, in Africa and everywhere. 

What’s next for Orfium?

The main plan for the company is expansion. Expansion to the whole entertainment industry. 

Right now we’ve grown from just music. We merged last year with Soundmouse, a big historical company in the space, and now we’re looking for more expansion, more integrations. The entertainment is growing. You can feel it every day, like either you have it on your Spotify, you see it on TikTok. So it’s just everywhere. So we’re trying to help all the big entertainment companies take advantage of that so we can see a bigger ecosystem. Everyone here is a creator, so we’re just supporting that community. 

How do you find talent?

Well, I’ve been asked a lot about that lately, especially as now the Greek government is trying to push some new laws about visas because we have the tech ecosystem, you know, mainly I’m responsible for tech. Mainly the biggest ecosystem I have is in Athens, but it’s all over Europe. So I have big offices in Sofia and London with technology. So I would say my biggest tech ecosystem is in Europe we’re growing a base also in Sri Lanka. Very interesting case over there. And I’m proud of that. 

So how do I hire? Depending on the teams, because now I have teams all over the world. So, you know, when I want to hire for a specific team, you know, I want people to be co-located. I’m not super fond of completely remote teams. So I want co-located teams. I feel like they’re way more creative when they work together. I’m not forcing everybody to be in the office every day, but like bands, you know, before they make a great album they jam and jam and jam and all of a sudden we see the creativity happening. This is how I look at teams as well. So regarding more specifically, like, there are some roles, as I said, that I can hire here in Greece and, you know, here is my biggest department, but I cannot hire every role. And obviously it was really hard to hire from third countries, meaning non-Europe. Even if you wanted to bring somebody from the US in Greece, it was almost impossible. I have, you know, internal stories where we’re just going to try to do that. And it was impossible. So I hear now that the visa is becoming easier. We’ll see. We’ll try it. But for roles like this, what I’m doing so far is I’m either moving them to Dublin or London because over there it’s easier. They already have the framework. 

Where do you predict Greece’s ecosystem will be in ten years?

Well, amazing question. As I see more people coming from abroad, other cultures, other skills, other backgrounds, we’re going to become more mixed and multicultural. So I think that’s something we need. You see it in all big tech ecosystems from London, New York, San Francisco, like there is a mix of cultures and experiences. So this is what’s going to really boost. My big hope is that this is going to happen and this is going to be accelerated because, as I said, like the money is there. Now we’re in Europe, like we see more and more funding happening even across the seas, happening in Athens, in Greece. So I wouldn’t say money is the problem. 

And the other thing that I believe we suffer and I would like to see that changing is angel investment. Like there is a big gap there. So I see it improving in the last couple of years. So actually that goes to the other question. But as we see more exits happening, angel investment is going to accelerate as well. So we’re going to have more startups and it’s going to be easier for people to say, yeah, I’m going to start my own idea. 

So hopefully, my hope for the next 10 years is to become more of an ecosystem so I can have more people where I can text to go for a beer and talk about my problems. That’s what I need personally. And more angel investment, more startups.