Engineering startups: insights from George Katiniotis

From corporate leadership to entrepreneurship

Athens-based entrepreneur George Katiniotis is the first to admit he has had an unusual career.  Unlike many who build and exit businesses, he had a long career as a corporate executive before becoming an entrepreneur and investor.

At the start of the pandemic, in 2020, Katiniotis was CEO of a large postal company and had previously held executive roles at large corporates.

“Something was missing from my working life,” he says. His corporate roles left him spiritually unfulfilled. “Why was I here on this Earth?

He says that, during the thinking time created by the pandemic, he determined a new direction for himself. “I found my purpose. I am an engineer at heart, I realised I love building things: products and companies.”

Building engineering startups

Katiniotis is speaking from a side room at a conference he is attending. He is candid, reflective, precise. He says that, as a mechanical engineer by training, he knew he wanted to build companies making hardware products.

Two years before, he had met the founders of a robotics technology company. In 2020, as he was reflecting on his working life, Katiniotis was approached by them.

“They said to me, ‘Why don’t you leave that executive position and come join us as a startup entrepreneur? We can’t pay you much, but we can offer you equity and the opportunity to take part in this journey.’” So, Katiniotis quit his corporate role and became an investor in, and CEO of, the startup Myrmex. Two years later he and the co-founders sold Myrmex to a UK logistics company in a deal worth €12 million in what Katiniotis calls an “amazing exit”. Between 2020 and 2023 he also invested in and advised two other companies which were then sold.

He currently spends the majority of his time at Acromove, another engineering company, which he was invited to lead by the existing investors. Here, he says he noted that the founders were not suited to taking the company to its next stages and he “gradually had to remove the founders from their executive roles”.

Was this not difficult? Founders are often significant shareholders, after all. “At the end of the day, they want the returns. They keep their shares, but you have to make them understand that they are not adding value to the company – they are destroying the chance of the success of the company. So they should have some other position, maybe an advisory position.

Katiniotis says that in his experience many founders are unable to manage the company they founded through new stages of growth.  Building a management team is a soft skill, he says, unlike the engineering skills required to design a company’s products. And not all founders have these soft skills.

Challenges in Startups

Katiniotis lists a number of companies and organisations that he has either founded or invested in and built, or been otherwise involved with in an executive role, since 2020, in his new portfolio life. He also says he likes to spend time giving advice pro bono to founders who contact him.   

What is the common skill he brings to all these ventures? “Connecting everyone together toward a shared goal.” He adds bluntly that the main obstacle he has to manage is ego. “Everyone thinks they know better than the other. And in the end, it’s not ‘one plus one equals three’. It becomes ‘one plus one equals zero’. Instead of building on each other’s strengths, people end up subtracting from each other. So, my message is always the same: let’s work together. Forget about your ‘brilliant ideas’ or who’s right – assume everyone is right. Let’s move forward as a team.”

He says that he also has to identify those executives who fail to operate in a team structure, and ease them out for the good of the company.

Katiniotis is clear, calm and rational in his manner. Aside from his businesses, he is also a marathon runner and triathlete. He says his typical day is split between one hour training, two hours’ reading and listening to podcasts on his sector, approximately ten  hours’ work, and eight  hours’ sleep.

His next plan, he says, is to start a venture studio, for short holds. “I don’t want long-term responsibilities or [to have to keep] long-term promises to somebody else. I adapt quickly, I evolve quickly, and I finish my job. I don’t like the idea of committing to something for ten years. I enjoy starting things and finishing them in two, three, maybe four years.”

Typically, the early phase is helping them build the product, then going through pre-seed and seed funding, then stepping back ahead of the sale, “unless they ask me to become the operator and try to make the exit”.

Will there be another change of working life for Katiniotis? “Never. I will do this until I die.”