Dimitris Tsingos

Dimitris Tsingos at the European Young Leaders
(EYL40) Program Lisbon Seminar in March 2017

Hi! Let me, first and foremost, wholeheartedly welcome you to my blog. I am Dimitris Tsingos, a technology entrepreneur from Aspropyrgos, Greece.

I am the Founder and CEO of Starttech Ventures, a privately-owned venture builder and pre-seed investor headquartered in Athens, Greece. I'm particularly interested in entrepreneurship development and growth models which provide for repeatable success in a capital-efficient manner. In this framework, I study Lean Startup, Customer Development, Agile and Design Thinking while I also work on pertinent team culture, communication and dynamics.

In my capacity as Starttech Ventures CEO I currently serve as President at our venture-building portfolio companies: Epignosis, Yodeck, DreamClass, Cycleops, TraitForward, Veturilo, ScienceTraining and Qurio. Moreover, I used to be the President at AbZorba Games, a mobile gaming company (actually, my only non-B2B venture) which was acquired by Novomatic in February 2015. 

Identifying as a European federalist, in April 2020 I founded a pan-European peoples' movement for advancing this cause, the "Movimento Insieme" for the European Federal Union. Earlier, in March 2017, I was one of the Rome Manifesto co-authors calling for Europe's federal integration. 

In 2021 I made my first step in the domain of non-for-profit entrepreneurship, creating the Tsingos Foundation for Education, Research and Cooperativism. This foundation honors the loving memory of my grandfather Vassilios Tsingos and, in his face, the memory of the hundreds of thousands anonymous Greeks who gave their lives in the fight against Fascism and Nazism in world-war II. 

I have been an active angel investor since 2009, being a member of EBAN - European Business Angels Network since that year. I have also served twice as member of the EBAN's Board of Directors [2013-14 and 2016-18] and in 2015 I co-founded HeBAN - Advocates for Growth, Greece's first formal angel group.

From November 2010 till January 2016 I served as the President of YES for Europe - European Confederation of Young Entrepreneurs . In this capacity, I was leading the EU Delegation to the G20 Young Entrepreneurs' Alliance during the same period. 

I was the Founder and first President of the Hellenic Start-up Association [2011-14], actually one of the first start-up associations in Europe. Earlier, I used to be the President of the Hellenic Federation of Young Entrepreneurs Associations [2008-11] and the President of the Hellenic Informatics Union [2007-10]. Moreover, I used to be a Board Member at the Hellenic Association of Mobile Application Companies from 2017 until 2018 and, last, as of January 2019 I have launched and curate the Scale-up Greece community.

 

In 2018 I became a Marshall Memorial Fellow and then, in 2019, a Fellow of "L’Institut des Hautes Etudes pour l’Innovation et l’Entrepreneuriat" of the PSL University in Paris. I am an alumnus of the US State Department International Visitor Leadership Program - IVLP [2013] and an alumnus of the European Young Leaders program ("EYL40") [2012-13].

I received my Computer Science diploma from the University of Crete in 2002. As a student, I was the President of the University's Student Union in 1999 and 2000. Earlier, in 1998 while participating to the Erasmus student exchange program at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, I was an undergrad guest researcher at Computational Vision & Active Perception Laboratory. After that, I was an undergrad member  of the Networks & Telecommunications Research Group at the Institute of Computer Science, FORTH [1999-2000].

In September 2000, as an undergrad student and with four more fellow undergrad students as co-founders, I launched Virtual Trip, considered as the first student startup in Greece, at the Science and Technology Park of Crete. Later, in 2005, I received my MBA from the Athens University of Economics & Business and in November 2009 I published my definition of an "Entrepreneurial Ecosystem", as a venture development and growth model on which I had been working since 2003 and which has been the foundation of the venture building program implemented later by Starttech Ventures.

I am native in Greek, fluent in English and conversational in French. My parents were bilingual (and, to the best of my knowledge, that was the case fort their parents and grand-parents, too) speaking Arvanitika, on top of Greek. Unfortunately, however, I only know a few words and phrases in this beautiful language. 

I love Computer Science, Mathematics and Contemporary Management while I also identify as a Philosophy and Psychology aficionado. As of January 2016 I abide by the rule of reading at least one book per month, ranging from business books to mathematics and from programming to poetry.

As a teenager, I used to be a Judo athlete, having won a bronze medal in a nation-wide championship in 1993 at the age of 16, while also practicing weight-lifting. Around the age of forty, I became interested in aerobic exercising and in endurance training. I managed to finish the Marathon de Paris in April 2018 as well as the Athens Authentic Marathon in November 2018. Between those races, in August 2018, I successfully completed an 180 km cycling race as a relay-team member at Tallinn IRONMAN 2018.