Alex Patelis is chief economic adviser to Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. He has over three decades of experience as an economist, analyst and strategist, working in a variety of positions in New York, London and Athens. Alex started his career with the US economics research team at Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York, where he worked under Bill Dudley, Chief US economist as well as a proprietary FICC trader in the same firm. In London, he joined Citigroup Asset Management as a quantitative economist. At Merrill Lynch, he held a variety of positions, including Global head of FX & Debt strategy, as well as Managing Director of Global Research, Head of International Economics.

In this capacity, Alex managed the research teams responsible for the firm’s outlook on all economies outside North America, including developed and emerging countries in EMEA, the Pacific Rim region and Latin America, as well as foreign exchange, local currency and external debt bonds. For their research, Alex and his team won a variety of awards, including from Extel and Institutional Investor. He was also Chief Economist at PSQR, a global discretionary macro hedge fund. More recently, Alex was President of Patelis Macro, an independent research boutique he launched in 2010, which focused on global macroeconomic analysis to select clients around the world.

Alex earned a Ph.D. in Economics in 1997 from Princeton University, USA, where his thesis advisor was Professor Ben Bernanke. Titled “Asset returns and monetary policy”, part of his thesis was published in the Journal of Finance. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and Mathematics from Sussex University, UK.

Drew Delis is Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Orfium. He has a Masters in Law specializing in Intellectual Property rights and digital exploitation, with 7+ years experience in the music industry.

ORFIUM is a music rights management company with deep domain experience in technology, data engineering, and the music industry in general. ORFIUM’s mission is simple – build software that maximizes the commercial value of intellectual property, and ORFIUM’s product offering includes solutions for catalogue management, licensing, matching, UGC monetization, royalty allocation and distribution, reporting, and analytics.

Nico started his career in Pfizer Italy 16 years ago, serving as Brand Manager of peri-LOE products, Commercial Effectiveness Manager, Business Intelligence Advisor, Supply Policy Specialist, and Junior Analyst. He has since held roles of increasing local, regional and global responsibility.

Most recently, Nico was Global Capability Lead for the healthcare provider portal experience within the Customer Experience team and prior was Senior Director, Global Lead for Customer Engagement and Content Strategy for Pfizer Essential Health. In that role, he managed the team responsible for creating enterprise customer engagement strategies (digital and face-to-face) that supported commercial, scientific and business goals, based on an omni-channel approach and content marketing strategy.

Nico earned his Bachelor of Business Administration degree from La Sapienza University in Rome.

Nick Kanopoulos has over 30 years of experience in creating and managing large teams of development, mass production, and marketing of semiconductor and nanomaterial products for the global market.He is the founder and CEO of Brite Solar Technologies. Before founding Brite he was Managing Director for Channel Development in Europe / Africa / Middle East for the Solar Business Unit of Applied Materials. He was Director of the Multimedia & Communications (MMC) business division of Atmel Corp. managing product development groups based in the U.S., Greece, Sweden and China.

He was founder and CEO of Data Communications Technologies, which was acquired by Atmel, Director of the Integrated Electronics Group at RTI International (one of the largest independent research institutes in the U.S.) and for 10 years adjunct professor at Duke University in North Carolina. He has been a special advisor to the Minister of Macedonia & Thrace in Greece for matters of technology and to various semiconductor companies. He is an Electrical Engineering graduate of the University of Patras, Greece and holds MS and Ph.D. degrees from Duke University. He has published one book and over 100 papers in journals and conference proceedings, has nine patents (issued and pending) and is a member of several international trade and scientific organizations.

Michael Tzannes has spent his career with companies that improve the way people process and communicate digital information.  

From 1990 to 2012, he was with Aware, Inc. (NASDAQ: AWRE) as Executive Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Technical Officer. After a successful IPO in 1996, Aware became a widely recognized communications technology pioneer and the leading supplier of silicon intellectual property to the digital subscriber line (DSL) industry.  Michael also founded Aware’s patent management operations and led the sale of DSL, networking and signal processing patents to Intellectual Ventures, Intel, Techquity and others.    

Since 2012, Michael has been active in the start-up community in Greece as an angel investor and adviser.  He is currently Chairman and Founder of Accusonus, with locations in Patras and Athens, a developer of human-friendly audio software focused on democratizing the creation of content. He serves as a Board Member at Athroa Innovations, Irida Labs and Yodiwo.  He is also on the Advisory Board of the Phaistos Investment Fund and is the 2020 recipient of the Innovation Award from the Argo Hellenic Network.

Michael is a lifelong innovator and holds patents addressing core technologies in multicarrier DWMT communications, MP3 audio, DSL, Wi-Fi, LTE and IoT communications. His consulting firm, TzPM, offers advisory services in intellectual property assessment, development, licensing, and monetization. 

Michael was valedictorian at the University of Patras, Greece, has a Master’s Degree from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. from Tufts University, all in Electrical Engineering.