Last week, I interviewed Yiannis Gavrielides the CEO of Covve. I thought his platform was interesting because of his unique approach to business consolidation.
Mucklai: Can you briefly share your background with us please?
Gavrielides: I grew up in Cyprus and following military service, I moved to London and studied Chemical Engineering at Imperial College. I started my career with Deloitte Consulting. That is where I realized the value my address book has in finding business opportunities. Managing our contacts and our relationships is hard and social networks are getting colder and more impersonal than ever. I needed an intelligent contacts book, sophisticated and powerful, unlike the plethora of contact apps out there.
I continued a career in consulting and banking in London and Athens. I always wanted to make a jump to entrepreneurship but it took a financial crisis to get me to jump the career train.
Together with a childhood friend and career lawyer we quit and started a digital publishing business that grew to be the number one online publisher in Cyprus. Loving our new path, we started working with partners, talented individuals to build businesses, resulting in Fresh Target Theatre an award winning theatre production company, Stagedoor the leading theatre discovery app in London and Lost+Found Drinkery a proud inclusion in the 50 Best Bars in The World and our ‘office’ for after 19:00 meetings!
Mucklai: How did you get started?
Gavrielides: In late 2013 I raised an angel round to start my most ambitious project, to make contact and relationship management easy for everyone through an intelligent, intuitive, contact management platform. Joined by Alex Protogerellis an old friend, and by then Senior Manager at Deloitte Consulting, we put together a team with deep technology background and strong domain expertise to build Covve, a highly sophisticated, very intuitive address book solution.
Mucklai: What if any advice would you give to first time entrepreneurs?
Gavrielides: Surround your self with great people.
Mucklai: What is your firm focused on these days?
Gavrielides: On business: we are focused on partnerships with international telcos. On product: Covve has a powerful relationship management system to remind you to keep in touch with your contacts. We are now focusing on giving you the excuse to get in touch… stay tuned!
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