In the spring of 2012, Nikos Moraitakis left Dubai for Athens. He had a job in mobile marketing and experience selling across borders. Greece had a debt crisis and another election approaching. His proposed next move was to start a company that helped other companies hire people. The timing offered ample material for anyone inclined to laugh.
Moraitakis got there first. His blog, The Drachma Start-up, carried the subtitle Diary of an Entrepreneur with Incredibly Bad Timing. It was an economical way of acknowledging the obvious while getting on with something else. He and his former Upstream colleague, Spyros Magiatis, founded Workable in June. The country’s uncertainty was considerable; their proposed task was quite specific.
Employers needed help keeping track of candidates. Applications, interview arrangements and judgments about people had become a job of their own. Smaller businesses could find themselves running that job through email and spreadsheets, with the process distributed among whoever happened to remember the last conversation. Moraitakis had been on the employer’s side of that mess.
Fourteen years later, Workable reports that more than 35,000 companies have used its platform. The distance between that number and the early blog title is pleasing. Still, his career becomes more interesting when you look past the punchline. Before he started a company about hiring, several encounters had taught him what working with other people could make possible.
The apprenticeship before the startup
Born in Athens, Moraitakis studied computing at Imperial College London. His early career included an internship at Planet that became a consulting job; the business later became part of Ernst & Young. He spent five years in IT consulting. He had an education in software and a working introduction to how organizations actually behaved.
His route into Upstream included an encounter that would be difficult to reproduce through a carefully managed networking strategy. On a mountain trip, he found himself waiting in a chalet with Marco Veremis, whom he did not know. Other people were absent. The two talked, got along, and Veremis suggested he come work at the small company he had helped start.
Moraitakis joined Upstream, eventually becoming its vice president of business development. His work took him to Dubai and into international expansion. He also met Magiatis there. Before the two became founders together, they had already spent years making things and watching a technology business grow. They knew each other’s work before they had to divide responsibility for their own.
That history matters to his account of taking the leap. He has described the founders as experienced executives with savings, which gave them room to begin. The opening stretch could feel playful. It took time for the enterprise to acquire the weight and obligations of an established business. He remembers a beginning with fewer thunderclaps than the standard startup legend requires.
Two screens, then a business
Workable’s first design exercise was modest: Moraitakis and Magiatis sketched the two screens they wanted on paper. Their experience as users supplied the brief. Hiring mattered, the existing tools frustrated them, and they suspected other employers might have the same complaint. A sheet of paper was enough to begin making that complaint concrete.
The intended customer was often somebody with a company to run and little appetite for becoming a recruitment-systems specialist. Software had to be understandable without a lengthy ceremony. A business needed to advertise a role, gather applicants, assess them with colleagues and arrive at a decision. Each additional obstacle competed with the ordinary work waiting elsewhere.
Workable’s early commercial model gave that idea a demanding test. People could discover the product online, use it and buy it themselves. Moraitakis later described reaching $10 million in revenue without a sales team. A product sold that way has to explain a good deal through its own behavior. There is no salesperson beside every puzzled customer, translating an awkward screen into a promise.
Growth brought financing as well as customers. A $1.5 million round came in 2014, followed by a $27 million Series B in 2015. Zouk Capital led a further $50 million financing in 2018. Those are company milestones, rather than measures of Moraitakis’s personal wealth. Their significance here is the larger operation he and Magiatis were learning to run.
Boston, without the pilgrimage
The United States became part of Workable’s geography because it was already part of its business. Many customers were American before the founders established themselves there. Boston offered a market for talent and a tradition of business software. Moraitakis liked its business culture, too. The choice had an appealingly practical starting point: go closer to the people buying the product.
He had been urged to consider San Francisco. Boston suited him better. That preference fits a recurring habit in his public remarks: he is willing to explain why the expected answer does not appeal to him. The city acquired the headquarters; Athens remained part of the company’s working life. He now lives in Greece.
There is a useful distinction between an international business and a business that has forgotten where it began. Workable’s founding partnership came out of a Greek technology company. Its customers could be elsewhere. Engineering, commercial experience and customer understanding did not all have to arrive from the same postcode. His career had already given him practice crossing those boundaries.
A low tolerance for folklore
Read Moraitakis’s writing about recruitment and a more argumentative voice appears. He objects to the assumption that candidates actively looking for jobs must be inferior to people who need coaxing away from another employer. He questions the habit of mistaking the effort spent on a recruiting channel for the results it produces. An arduous search can feel productive even when the eventual hire comes from somewhere simpler.
His treatment of metrics is similarly concrete. Before deciding what to measure, he wants a manager to know what needs explaining. How many qualified candidates does a hire require? How many interviews will the team conduct? How long does somebody wait between stages? A number becomes useful when it exposes a constraint that can be acted upon.
In one worked example, he traces a hiring funnel backward from the desired outcome to the people needed at earlier stages. It is a planning exercise. The point is to make the work visible before a hiring target becomes a missed promise. A spreadsheet full of impressive-looking totals is less comforting when nobody has time to conduct the interviews those totals imply.
The same independent streak appears in his remarks about management. He dislikes trying to prescribe company culture from above, comparing the exercise to organised fun. “We don’t take ourselves too seriously,” he has said. That is an enjoyable sentence from somebody selling business software. It also leaves colleagues a little room to be people.
“Culture is an emergent property - you don’t get to dictate it.”
Nikos Moraitakis
The software starts doing the work
The brief has expanded. Workable now combines recruiting with HR software, extending the relationship from candidate to employee. Moraitakis announced the two products as available separately or together, allowing employers to choose the combination they needed. The offer letter had become a place for the software to continue, rather than a reason for it to stop.
By April 2026, his attention was on a different limit. AI features could help an individual finish a task faster without changing how an organization hired. In a conversation about recruiting’s future, he drew attention to the space between those outcomes. Better individual productivity could leave the overall process looking much as it had before.
That observation raises an awkward question for a software company. Adding helpful buttons may satisfy the person clicking them while preserving all the old handoffs. If the work is going to change, somebody has to reconsider how those steps fit together. Moraitakis was arguing for that larger change, with agents taking on more of the work before the interview.
On September 14, Workable announced general availability of four recruiting agents: Job Brief, Sourcing, Screening and Engagement. They cover defining requirements, finding candidates, evaluating applications and following up for information. The company describes recruiters retaining judgment over final decisions. The intended outcome is a usable shortlist and more time for the conversations that require people.
The ambition has a recognizable connection to the original sketch. The employer still has a vacancy and a pile of work between that vacancy and a colleague. The computer is being asked to carry more of the load. Whether that makes the whole experience better is the practical test Moraitakis has set for this next chapter.
Workable’s reported cumulative reach, checked October 2026. Companies served is not a count of current paid subscriptions.
Three things worth being known for
There is a less fashionable way Moraitakis has described the assignment. He and Magiatis wanted a software company known for product quality, its treatment of employees and its treatment of customers. Those ambitions are easy to state. They become more expensive when the company has enough people and customers for its mistakes to travel.
His wider connections include investing in Taxibeat and serving on Endeavor Greece’s board. He has become part of the network from which other businesses can begin, much as Upstream supplied experience and a working partnership for his own. The early advantages were human ones: somebody offered a job, colleagues learned together, two of them decided to build.
The Drachma Start-up title belongs to the beginning. The useful question it left behind still applies: what can you make while the surrounding circumstances refuse to become convenient? Moraitakis chose hiring software. Years later, the work still involves candidates, colleagues and decisions somebody has to make. There is plenty left for a computer to do, and plenty left for the people running it.