Dimitris Tsingos and his fellow students did not start a company because they longed to acquire a boss. In September 2000, five undergraduates in Heraklion, Crete, launched Virtual Trip with the opposite intention: they wanted to enter the global market themselves. A quarter of a century later, Tsingos returned to the chief executive’s chair at Epignosis. Independence, it turns out, can produce quite a lot of responsibility.
The return came in June 2025. He took on Epignosis full time and became president of Starttech Ventures, the venture builder he had been running. It is a useful place to begin his story, because it resists the usual tidy progression from founder to investor to occasional dispenser of wisdom. Tsingos went back to operating. The learning company was asking its co-founder to become a student of its next chapter.
Five students, one basement, several wrong turns
Virtual Trip began at the Science and Technology Park of Crete. Remembering its twenty-fifth anniversary, Tsingos described a beginning rich in excitement and poor in certainty. His account includes gratitude to his fellow founders, professors, early backers and later business partners. It also includes an admission that much of what they tried failed, and that their mistakes affected other people. The anniversary cake came with a fairly unsparing balance sheet.
That willingness to leave the awkward parts in makes the memory interesting. He credits trust and friendship with keeping the venture from collapse. Later companies, including Epignosis, AbZorba Games and Yodeck, grew from that experience. The satisfying version would make the basement a launchpad with a flight plan. His version allows for a considerable amount of falling over before anyone learned to fly.
His formal education supplies another part of the picture. He studied computer science at the University of Crete and later completed an MBA at Athens University of Economics and Business. The university’s account of his career puts the operator and the institution builder side by side: Virtual Trip, Starttech, Epignosis and the Hellenic Start-up Association. Writing software and arranging the conditions in which other people can write it became related occupations.
The school that changed its pupils
Epignosis took a less direct route to corporate learning than its present business might suggest. Tsingos and Thanos Papangelis initially wanted to create an online school for Greek students preparing for university entrance examinations. They called it eFront. Obstacles and changes of direction eventually pushed them towards international markets.
Then came another change in the classroom. As software subscriptions became more attractive, they turned their attention to small and medium-sized companies that needed to train employees. The potential pupil now had a job. The underlying preference survived: software should be easy to use, and learning should feel inviting rather than like a penalty imposed by the personnel department.
Tsingos dates that decision to 2012. TalentLMS, eFront and TalentCards became the products through which Epignosis pursued accessible, affordable learning technology. There is something appealingly practical about the origin. The founders kept revising the business around the people who could use it. An education company had to learn whom it was teaching.
A suspicious attitude towards expensive excitement
For someone who has spent years in entrepreneurship organisations, Tsingos can be wonderfully impatient with entrepreneurship’s social calendar. In 2019 he wrote about conferences, exhibitions and the curious business of being extremely busy without getting much done. He had attended enough events to recognise the pattern: impressive stands, enthusiastic conversations and disappointing commercial returns.
He questioned the time, money and attention consumed by this activity. The glamorous room might benefit its organiser rather more reliably than the startup paying to be there. His proposed correction was to become useful to existing customers. Connections should help solve their problems. The lanyard, however handsome, could not do the work.
That scepticism helps explain his investment thinking. At the end of 2018, he described Starttech’s Minimum Viable Investment Framework. Capital would follow the actual requirements of building a business, with two important destinations: launching a minimum viable product and reaching positive operating cash flow. The intention was to reduce waste and adapt as customer contact changed the plan.
A schematic of the two milestones in Tsingos’s 2018 investment framework, rather than a performance forecast.
The approach was deliberately narrow: early-stage business software, automation and an inbound commercial model aimed chiefly at North America. A defined market mattered. So did spending at the right moment. In a profession fond of announcing enormous rounds, there is a certain comic courage in asking whether the money is actually needed yet.
Athens as a place to build
His geographical argument has been equally deliberate. In 2017, Tsingos made the case for sourcing founders across the Eastern Mediterranean and bringing them into an Athens venture-building programme. He pointed to technical education and entrepreneurial ambition across a region that included cities such as Nicosia, Beirut, Cairo and Tunis.
The proposed arrangement combined local development with international sales. Teams would build in Athens and pursue customers in North America and northern or western Europe. Starttech would contribute methods and commercial help as well as capital. He acknowledged gaps in digital marketing and customer development, which gave the programme something concrete to address.
By 2022, finding people had become its own constraint. Starttech announced a competition intended to help ten selected technology professionals relocate to Greece, with financial assistance and legal and administrative guidance. Tsingos explained that vacancies were limiting portfolio companies’ growth. The practical response to a shortage of talent was to make arrival easier.
There is a consistent idea here: an international company can be built through an international team in Athens. The city serves as a working base, while customers and potential colleagues can be elsewhere. His interest in institutions makes more sense when seen at this scale. A founder’s problems rarely stop neatly at the office door.
The investor who still argues about effort
Tsingos’s advice is often blunt. In a 2018 essay on dedication, he argued that building a startup required a full commitment and challenged the idea of combining it indefinitely with another full-time job. Readers may dispute the prescription; he leaves little doubt about what he thinks. His vocabulary is occasionally less decorous than a business-school brochure would prefer.
“You have to use your whole arse. In other words, have dedication.”
Dimitris Tsingos, 2018
His later writing gives persistence a more reflective treatment. In September 2025, a message from co-founder Periklis Akritidis prompted him to revisit the balance between luck and effort. He acknowledged his own good fortune in having education and opportunities in Greece. He also expressed a desire to help people from places with fewer opportunities gain a chance to build.
Persistence, in that account, improves the conditions for success through repeated attempts and learning. He allows that stopping can sometimes be sensible. It is a personal philosophy shaped by experience, rather than a probability model founders should paste into a spreadsheet. The distinction matters: conviction can keep a company moving, while customers retain the right to disagree.
By April 2025, his invitation to prospective founders put customer discovery and validation into a staged programme. He wanted people prepared to build a B2B software company alongside Starttech, with training before expansion. His impatience with startup theatre had acquired a syllabus. Even ambition was expected to do its homework.
A citizen, including after office hours
The organisational habit extends into public life. Tsingos led YES for Europe from 2010 to 2016 and was the founding president of the Hellenic Start-up Association. These roles put him among entrepreneurs trying to improve the environment around their companies, as well as the companies themselves.
European federalism is a declared commitment. He helped write the Rome Manifesto in 2017 and founded the movement that became Together for Europe in 2020. His political ambition is a European Federal Union. Whether discussing business or Europe, he repeatedly comes back to the problem of how individuals can act together with a shared purpose.
There are quieter interests, too. His family co-owns an organic winery in Distomo, Boeotia. He describes an appetite for mathematics, philosophy and poetry, and a personal rule, adopted in January 2016, of reading at least one book a month. A reading list that wanders from programming to poetry seems well suited to someone who can turn a discussion of management into a discussion of citizenship.
Back in charge, with a constitution in mind
By July 2026, Tsingos was using the classical city-state as an analogy for Epignosis. He associated it with participation, responsibility and accountability. He said every employee was offered the right to buy shares on preferential terms. A more democratic company remained a long-term goal; he described meritocracy as a nearer objective.
He also outlined a proposed constitution: a common statement against which people could assess management decisions and guide the behaviour of AI agents. His commitment that employees would not lose their jobs because of AI sat alongside an expectation that they would learn to work with it. These are leadership promises and plans, with their value dependent on what follows.
The return to Epignosis puts his accumulated arguments into daily use. Customer needs, careful spending, cooperation and shared ownership now have to coexist inside the same operating company. After years spent explaining how ventures should be built, he has again accepted the inconvenience of building one. The students who wanted freedom from bosses eventually produced a founder willing to take the job himself.