I grew up on Santorini, which is an unusual place to learn about business and a very effective one. The island runs on a season. Everything gets built, sold and shut down inside a few months, and almost everyone you know is either running something or working for someone who is. You learn early that revenue has a clock on it.

My father was the first model I had. He started with very little and built a life that gave me the thing he never had: options. I watched what that took — the hours, the patience, the years without a shortcut — for long enough to want the same result, and to want to reach it a different way.

Traditional businesses never pulled me. What interested me was the layer above them. A hotel gets booked because somebody answered the phone; software gets bought while you sleep. Systems keep working after you stop pushing them, and that difference has been the whole point for me since I was a teenager.

So I sat the Panhellenic exams with one target: Athens.

Not because Economics at AUEB was a dream, but because Athens is where the people and the ideas are, and I wanted to be in the same rooms as as many of them as possible. Then I found out how fast a degree stops being enough. Lectures teach you the theory of a market. Nobody in the room had sent a cold email that week, or shipped anything anyone used.

So I started teaching myself. Websites for island businesses first, because they paid and because real clients tell you the truth. Then software that runs a real company. Then the go-to-market systems around it — certifications on my own time, a hackathon we won, tools built because I needed them rather than because someone assigned them.

I'm 19. Everything on this page was built in the gap between what university handed me and what I actually wanted to know.

Alexandros Nomikos · Santorini → Athens