Yiannis Eftychiou

[Yiannis Eftychiou @yiannise]

@dudufolio Had 2 of them yesterday! Try the wings as well

[33 East @33eastvc]

🎉 We’re officially launched! Watch this 60-second video to see highlights from the launch of 33East🚀🇨🇾

#Cyprus #Innovation #Startups #33East #VC

[Nicodemos Damianou @NicDamianou]

Happy to join policymakers, founders, investors, and key ecosystem stakeholders at the #33east launch event.

Our #research and #innovation ecosystem is growing fast. Creating an environment that is conducive to building more #startups and enabling them to scale and succeed internationally is a key pillar of our governmental strategy.

Access to funding is one of the most important aspects of doing that - keeping our entrepreneurs and our startups on the island and attracting new startup investments in #Cyprus.

The #CyprusEquityFund is a crucial milestone, a much awaited initiative towards that direction and I am happy to see this kicking off.

@dzoppos @BankofCyprus_ @yiannise

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Highly recommend watching this talk by @karpathy to build an understanding of how LLMs work
https://t.co/clo6iaA12X

[Mantel @onMantel]

A trader sold a fake Giannis jersey to the real Giannis at a Balogun market 😂

Giannis even tried bargaining with the trader who didn’t realize who he was 😂👏

[andrew chen @andrewchen]

The “Dinner Party Asshole” test is a solution to a common problem:

Startups often struggle at pitching their team, even though for the earliest stage companies, it’s incredibly important to do it well to raise capital — as I’ve described it below

Pre-seed- Bet on the team 👨‍💻
Seed- Bet on the product 📱
Series A- Bet on the traction 🏒
Series B- Bet on the revenue 💸
Series C- Bet on the unit economics 💰

To figure out if you are properly pitching yourself in your team, run the thought experiment of describing yourselves at a dinner party. If you are pitching yourself hard, then if you are a kind human, you will turn red and blush with wild embarrassment. The reason is that a proper pitch includes many of your credentials, your achievements, the ways in which you and your team are highly unique, and we simply don’t talk like this at dinner parties. And yet this is exactly what you should do when you talk to investors, partners, customers, and potential employees.

Be the dinner party jerk, pitch yourself hard. Don’t hold back. Your shyness and cordiality is not helping.

I find that most founders tend to focus, primarily on describing their idea to the exclusion of everything else. I’ve heard thousands of “elevator pitches” and they generally focus on the idea and not the team, the market, differentiation, or anything else. And they downplay their achievements or omit them.

Of course what you emphasize depends on your background. It’s often described that there are repeat founders and first time founders, but furthermore, there’s another axis, which is about obvious credentialing versus not. For first time founders that are starting a gaming company, for instance, but have already spent years at a top company in the field, a quick modification to the elevator pitch, mentioning that, is both beneficial and quite obvious. But what do you do, you’re an uncredentialed first time founder?

Then the question becomes, what is your “earned secret“ behind the idea? Having a pithy story about how you were a Shopify seller, and that’s how you got to building any commerce product, is incredibly helpful. And if you have some metrics or an observation about the market that’s non-obvious, showing your expertise in the field, is even more valuable. If you have various credentials either professional, or academic or open source, achievements, it might be worth working those in even if not directly related.

The other very awkward thing is to use facts and figures to describe yourself. If in your previous work, you worked on an app that served millions of people, or for your current company, you recently launched and got your first 10,000 users, you should save these numbers. Any traction and any validation is incredibly helpful proving your case. And of course, this is another thing that would make you a dinner party jerk.

You might be going through a moment of introspection now and asking why am I like this? Why do I downplay achievements when I should be amping them up?

My answer to this, is conformity. In real life, we often subconsciously conform to the people around us. If you go off at a friendly gathering about all the cool stuff you’ve done, and why you’re going to be great, there’s a fear that you’re exaggerating the differences between yourself and others. There’s a fun theory from evolutionary psychology that shyness is an evolved trait to keep us safe in a world where we grew up and tribes of a few hundred people, and a few wrong words might follow us around for our lifetimes.

This is also my theory for why people are reluctant to engage on social media and share their knowledge, when it’s obvious that it might be very helpful to them professionally.

TLDR; there’s pitch mode and dinner party mode. Learn to turn the former mode on!

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

Marlon Brando's response to being called 'the greatest' actor ever

[Daniel Ek @eldsjal]

After sitting with our legal team to parse through the fine print of Apple's DMA announcement (that took a while), which is, at best vague and misleading, I wanted to share my thoughts. 

While Apple has behaved badly for years, what they did yesterday represents a new low, even for them. See more info here: https://t.co/2lznqwYujY

[Yiannis Eftychiou @yiannise]

Ισως την επόμενη φορά που θα πάμε στο αεροδρόμιο για να αποχαιρετήσουμε τα παιδιά μας, να το κάνουμε και με ένα χαμόγελο. [...] Για να επιστρέψουν και να μεταλαμπαδεύσουν μια κουλτούρα αυτοπεποίθησης σε ολοένα και πιο πολλούς Ελληνες.

https://t.co/1d8kOqvE98

@ghadjigeorgiou

[Chief AI Officer @chiefaioffice]

BREAKING: AI Startup ElevenLabs reaches unicorn status (up from $100M) with an $80M Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross.

Congrats to the team!

> Here's their seed pitch deck

[Brent Toderian @BrentToderian]

The most important thing about this amazing Paris transformation is how fast it happened — how fast people on bikes “appeared” — once streets were transformed. You can’t write this off as “#Paris was always this way,” because it wasn’t. It took leadership.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

We're 20% of the way through the 2020s. Can we start the roaring part soon?

[Yiannis Eftychiou @yiannise]

@Basti Yes we are @Listalpha1 and we’re just getting started @IharValodzin

[Yiannis Eftychiou @yiannise]

@emiliapaps That’s Cypriot summer for you. Wouldn’t happen in London

[Yiannis Eftychiou @yiannise]

@FT @sjhmorris @FTJFranklin @GSElevator @litcapital @ParikPatelCFA @RampCapitalLLC @alifarhat79 @efc_global

[Yiannis Eftychiou @yiannise]

Inspired by a recent piece in the @FT by @sjhmorris & @FTJFranklin on @GSElevator junior banker salaries, I run some analysis on the profiles of 390 Private Equity Associates and found that GS is a clear #1 feeder into large cap funds. Full analysis at https://t.co/CMSOJJxwoE

[Mashable @mashable]

Not everything on Google Maps is what it seems

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

All global fires burning in the last 24 hours, per NASA’s fire map