Spiros Xanthos, RESOLVE AI: The Greek Bringing Artificial Intelligence to Developers’ Hands

Panagiotis: Hello Spiros.

Spiros: Hello, Panagiotis.

Panagiotis: Thank you very much for being with us today.

Spiros: Thank you for having me.

Panagiotis: I’m very excited about this discussion. You are in Greece for a few days and we’ve seized the opportunity to have a nice conversation because, for those who don’t know, you’re a founder of many companies in San Francisco, with very successful stories, and certainly right now you’re at the helm of a company that’s very, very interesting, with lots of discussions, lots of great things we can talk about together. In a sentence or two, what does Resolve AI do, so that we at least give that context—that Resolve AI is what it does today.

Spiros: At Resolve AI, we build agents for software engineers. So, think about it—we're trying to automate a lot of the work that software engineers do. But we didn't start out by building agents that write code. We started out by building agents that help you run an application, a software system at scale. First of all, the work of a software engineer includes all these things—it's not just coding. And secondly, this is usually stressful work; it's not necessarily work that people want to do. And also, to truly understand a software system, you need to know code, you need to know how to run production, and you need to know all the tools a person uses to operate it.

Panagiotis: Before we dive into all that and how you ended up in America—and I think the whole story including where you studied is really interesting—tell us a bit about where you were born and where you grew up.

Spiros: I grew up just outside Thessaloniki, I have two siblings, I'm the youngest in the family.

Panagiotis: The youngest.

Spiros: Yes, which probably has something to do with my personality as well. Well, my siblings are six and twelve years older than me. 

Panagiotis: What do they do? Are they in Greece? 

Spiros: They live in Greece, in fact my mother and my siblings all live very close to Thessaloniki. They're not involved with technology, but being the youngest in the family, if you're the youngest child—I don't know if you have siblings... 

Panagiotis: I do. 

Spiros: Parents nowadays trust blindly, so it creates, it has some negatives, but it also gives you confidence, maybe you also become more independent. And I think...

Panagiotis: The older ones have taken the brunt of it...

Spiros: Exactly, that's what happens, you understand that nothing really bad is going to happen. So, I think that's what made me very independent. And it's somewhat related to my later career, let's say. 

Panagiotis: How does all this connect with the choices you make, which lead you more towards the University of Macedonia and TEK? 

Spiros: When I decided to study computer science, in my case, obviously I really liked mathematics, I liked physics, and to be honest, I was considering becoming a physicist. If I had chosen without thinking about my future career, that's what I would have studied.

Panagiotis: Okay.

Spiros: But probably computer science was very close, with much better career prospects. Obviously, it was something I had an aptitude for, you could say. But it's not like since I was ten, I was writing code and stuff.

Panagiotis: You enter the University of Macedonia, you study computer science, something happens there, because after that you leave for America. So, are there childhood years, junior high, high school, university, are there professors or experiences that contributed to this? 

Spiros: Look, the truth is that I started studying in 2000. That was kind of the early days of the internet, you could say. We still didn't have the information we have today. Actually, it was the opposite. Meaning, even when I was in my second or third year at university, it wasn't clear that someone could just go study in America, or do a PhD, like I ended up doing. There was essentially no information available. Okay, the truth is that I kind of discovered it on my own. And at university I was a very good student. In fact, I even wrote one or two papers with some professors during my undergraduate studies. From there, that's basically where I started with the idea that maybe I wanted to become an academic, so to do a PhD. And, since I thought about doing a PhD, by researching a bit more, I concluded that maybe I could go to America, to one of the best universities in the world. Obviously, to do that, it's not like I could afford to pay the tuition to go to America, but if you manage to get accepted into a PhD program in America, usually everything is covered. Scholarship. So, I apply without knowing much and I get a scholarship to go do a PhD at the University of Illinois, which is one of the top 5 engineering schools in the world, at least in America, and to study Computer Science.

Panagiotis: How do you feel when you land in America? How do you feel when this journey begins, which very few people take, PhD, we’re entering a very...

Spiros: If you’re—first of all, if you’re an overachiever, when you achieve something, you never feel that it's a big deal. Obviously, if achieving a goal did actually satisfy you, you would stop there, you would never go the first time. So, you know, nothing really changes, okay, we did it. What's next, essentially.

Panagiotis: Alright, we've started to get into it a bit of what is the mentality of a serial entrepreneur who has done four startups?

Spiros: Yeah, probably. And the truth is, when I started my first company, my wife was complaining that I’m always thinking about this. But, then my own answer after three companies was that if I wasn’t like this, I wouldn’t have started the first, I wouldn’t have done the second, I wouldn’t have done the third. And everyone eventually ended up accepting me, and I accepted myself for who I am. It's not that you're satisfied that you achieved your goal. You're more satisfied with the journey, I think, if you're trying to accomplish difficult things or solve tough problems or anything like that. That is, you do it more for the journey, not for the destination.

Panagiotis: You study for your master's degree at the University of Illinois. Did you start your first startup right away?

Spiros: I go to America with the goal of doing a PhD, of becoming an academic. I had already done research as an undergraduate, I was interested in it. What happened is that the first summer I was in America, during the first summer of my PhD, I did an internship at Google. In 2005. Now, we're talking about Google, it had just gone public. There were 2,000 people, they had all the founders. And what I saw there—I saw a real Silicon Valley company, perhaps the best ever, Google in 2005. I mean, the brand was even stronger than OpenAI is today. And I concluded that the work was perhaps more interesting than what I was doing in my PhD. I mean, it was less theoretical. It was, and the impact was perhaps even greater. How does a student from a university in Illinois end up meeting the founders of Google in San Francisco? I met them after I was accepted for an internship, I went there that summer and happened to meet Larry Page, because at some event I had received an award from the ACM, which they announced at one of the TGIFs we used to have on Fridays. I just want to say that it was a smaller company it wasn't what it is today.

Panagiotis: Still, I would say it was also impressive.

Spiros: If you settle for what you have, you’ll never grow, neither personally nor in your career. And what I maybe always did is I always tried to push myself, to challenge myself with what else I could create. And so, I'm at Google in the summer of 2005, the internship ends and Google makes me an offer to... To stay. Or to go back, basically, because I hadn't even gotten my master's yet. Well, to be honest, I naively thought about going back to finish my master's. I mean, having an offer to work at Google in 2005 was an incredible opportunity.

Panagiotis: Dropouts weren't in fashion yet.

Spiros: They were, but I thought, I'll go back and at least finish my master's, which didn't really make sense, I mean, if you had experience at Google in 2005, it didn't really make much sense, since I didn't want to continue on to do a PhD.

Panagiotis: Yes.

Spiros: In the end I do that, I accept, I tell them, I'll return in May after I finish my master's, I go back to the University, towards the end of the master's I tell the professor I was working with that I've decided I don't want to do a PhD; I want to leave and go to Google. She understood as well. And she says to me during this conversation, do you want to start a company together, since you’re leaving the PhD, are you interested in starting a company together? So, I thought about it for a month. It was a tough decision, because it was an incredible opportunity to work at Google in 2005. And in the end, I thought, what’s the harder path? Where, maybe, if I’m 70 years old, I would think I took the easy way—what would I have decided, in a way. So, I ended up starting the company; I called Google and told them that I had changed my mind, I would stay at the University. And I thought, I can go to Google next year if, in the end, the company doesn’t go anywhere.

Panagiotis: Many times, when you’re faced with a dilemma, you try to make the hardest decision. 

Spiros: Yes, always. 

Panagiotis: So, you start a startup.

Spiros: I'm starting a startup.

Panagiotis: With your professor.

Spiros: And two other PhD students, from the... Basically, it took us about a year to go from the PhD to something that was an actual startup. Practically, a year later, we officially launched and that was my first company.

Panagiotis: This is Pattern Insight.

Spiros: Pattern Insight.

Panagiotis: It went fantastically well; there was even an acquisition. A very quick snapshot of Insight—what it did, how the idea came about, how you developed it.

Spiros: What we were building in the research we were doing was—think tools, data mining for software code, at large scale. So, all of the Linux kernel code, trying to find patterns, bugs, security vulnerabilities, etc. So, that's where we started. And the truth is, although this is a very interesting problem, what we realized is that, while it was interesting, we saw that only a small number of companies were really interested in it. And mostly, we found out it interested companies that were hardware companies, like Cisco, Juniper, etc. And eventually, after working on it for one or two years, we essentially ended up doing a pivot, taking the technology and applying it to my structured data, logs as we say. And in the end, the first product we built was called Log Insight, which you can think of as a product that can collect data from software systems inside data centers and help you improve system reliability.

Panagiotis: And it mainly helps developers. It's...

Spiros: Or people who run those systems, let's say. Because we're still talking about 2009-2010, when there was often a separate IT or ops team from the software engineers who built things. But generally, yes, these are tools for software engineers, broadly speaking.

Panagiotis: That company was sold to VMware. 

Spiros: Right. 

Panagiotis: And it brings you to VMware.

Spiros: Yes, and in fact, the timing for this company was amazing, because essentially there was an explosion of data. It's just that since we didn't know and it was our first company for all of us, we couldn't see the opportunity, how big it really was. We did a round, three million dollars. The company was essentially cash flow positive within two or three years. And then we could have taken much more risk. We even had investors who wanted to invest in the company. And we decided not to take extra money and to continue by growing as much as we could.

Panagiotis: That is, linearly.

Spiros: Yes, linearly in a way. Which, okay, looking back, was probably a mistake. At the time, we didn't realize it. And ultimately, we had a good smart exit to VMware, which was a very good company. Especially back then, VMware was essentially the company that created virtualization, which is basically the first step towards the cloud. All data centers ran on VMware VMs, and essentially our product, Log Insight, was a tool that anyone with VMware virtualization could use. Another mistake we made is that when we started the company, at first, we didn't actually believe that we, having just been students, could run a company. And especially my advisor, to tell you the truth. So, we ended up hiring a CEO. But now, a small company. It's very difficult to bring in someone from outside to run it.

Panagiotis: And perhaps very expensive too.

Spiros: Both expensive and maybe you can't find the right person. And basically, we didn't trust ourselves to do that. In the end, this created a lot of problems for us in execution. And eventually I convinced my co-founders to let me become CEO. Not because I wanted to become a CEO, but just because I saw that anything else didn't lead to something successful. And eventually I became CEO of the company, essentially for the last two years. It really helped a lot, because as a founder I understood the problem very well, I knew the team very well, and I cared deeply. That is, I could take on more risk and basically, I worked a bit more on...

Panagiotis: Which I think is something you followed in all your other companies as well. You have the CEO role.

Spiros: From then on, I was always the CEO. And I think founders are great CEOs, because they care about the company so much more. And you feel a huge responsibility for all the people you convinced to come onboard. You feel a huge responsibility for the customers who bought your product. And I've seen it at scale, even in public companies I've worked at, that as founders grow distant from the company, you lose the ability to take risks, you lose the ability... No one else has what we call moral authority in America, to make tough decisions, many times. So, the company ends up not being able to innovate, to make tough decisions, etc. So, I'm a huge believer that founders should run the company.

Panagiotis: I completely understand what you're saying, but I can also imagine a scenario where the founder doesn't need to be the bottleneck or the prerequisite for a company to grow.

Spiros: Agreed. And there are also fair successful examples, like Snowflake. But what happens is that founders definitely have the traits needed for someone to run the company. It's just that often founders are terrible managers. They don't know how to do management, they don't know how to scale, etc. That's what gets in the way, but the fact that they care more about the company and that they can take more risks and make tougher decisions, I think always holds true. And so, the opposite is also true. I mean, sometimes you have CEOs who execute as founders. We can see it even in very large companies, like Microsoft, SATI, Anadela, where tough decisions really changed the company.

Panagiotis: You're taking on the role for the first time, how old are you when you become CEO?

Spiros: We're talking about around 2010. I was 28.

Panagiotis: Very young.

Spiros: Yes.

Panagiotis: And you stay there.

Spiros: And I stayed there for two and a half years.

Panagiotis: Two and a half years. I imagine that's part of the contract, but I would like you to tell us a bit about what decisions you made there and what experiences you had.

Spiros: First, I saw how a big company operates. For the first time, I understood what it means to delegate. That is, if you have a big team, you can't do all the work yourself. You have to properly delegate work to others. And basically, I learned that there for the first time, which is a management skill. The other thing I saw is that we were acquired by VMware, and I thought VMware had a specific plan for what it would do with our product, what it would do with the team. That's when I realized that if you're not proactive in saying, as CEO of the company or as whoever is making the decisions, what needs to be done, someone else will make the decisions for you. And you might like them, and you might not. And basically after 1.5–2 years, we disagreed with many of the decisions. I wasn't happy, but I eventually realized that it was my fault, not someone else's. Because I wasn't proactive in influencing the decisions.

Panagiotis: Proactiveness is everywhere.

Spiros: If you expect the person who acquires you to make the decisions you think are best, it's a mistake. You have to make it happen. I was quite unhappy, so I decided to leave. The job I had at VMware was interesting. I was director of engineering, I had quite a large team, but I was also a little impatient. That is, I wanted to do more things and they weren't happening at the pace I would have liked. So, that was one of the reasons that led me to leave. And obviously, I wanted to start a company again. I had a friend with whom we would discuss ideas. Because, in the end, for me there are two ways to build companies. Either you have an idea that you're really passionate about, or you have someone you really want to work with. And in this case, it was that I had a friend and we wanted to work together.

Panagiotis: Tell us a bit about him. Odysseas Tsatalos. He is the person with whom you build the next company. And you choose to start a company not because you have an idea, but because Odysseas is by your side.

Spiros: Yes, we were friends and we wanted to work together, we brainstormed many ideas, but yes, in the end, we started mostly because we wanted to work together, rather than having a specific idea we wanted to pursue.

Panagiotis: This company still exists, it's running, it has grown, it's called EasyHome.

Spiros: The company has changed its name, I am no longer involved, because I essentially left after 2.5 years. 

Panagiotis: Odysseas is still there. 

Spiros: Odysseas, yes, is the CTO of the company and is still there.

Panagiotis: Tell us a bit about this company. Did you start it immediately after leaving VMware? 

Spiros: Yes, I left and we started right away. Basically, we're building a marketplace, a full stack marketplace for home services—imagine being able to order any home service from your phone. It grew really quickly; the company is very operational. I never believed I could be the best CEO for this company in the world. I mean, it's not that I necessarily am now, but I believe I can do it better than anyone else. Because for this company, being consumer-focused and being a service where people came to your home to do some work, there were a lot of real-world difficulties that you couldn't solve just with software.

Panagiotis: Yes. When do you decide to leave? What difficulties did that have? Were there any difficulties with Odysseas?

Spiros: At some point, I concluded that we had some disagreements, founders among founders and Board, nothing serious, but I ended up realizing that I wasn’t the right person to be the CEO of this company and I essentially left voluntarily.

Panagiotis: But you still remain involved, I imagine.

Spiros: I was basically on the Board for a year, but then the company essentially recapitalized, so the previous shareholders and investors left the company and it changed its name and basically, it's a new company going forward. 

Panagiotis: How does the next step come about, do you start a third company? 

Spiros: I left EasyHome without having any plan about what I would do next. And actually, when you leave a company you built, it's not exactly pleasant.

Panagiotis: Yes.

Spiros: So, I think to myself I probably won’t start another company, that’s it. 

Panagiotis: That's it. 

Spiros: I spoke with a friend of mine who was a CEO and he told me - the advice he gave me was wait. When you're ready with what you're going to do, it will come to you. The truth is I didn't know what I wanted to do when I left EasyHome. I practically left in the summer of 2017 and started with Omnition in April, May of 2018.

Panagiotis: Okay, almost a year.

Spiros: Almost nine months later. Yes. So, Mayank called me, who is my co-founder now. Mayank and I were together during our PhD.

Panagiotis: Okay.

Spiros: We met on the first day of the PhD program, because he grew up in India, and I obviously in Greece. There was an international student orientation and we happened to meet there. In fact, he was also my teaching assistant in one of the courses, in Computer Architecture. So, we’ve known each other since 2004, 21 years now. We didn’t work together immediately, we just knew each other in the PhD program, and I always remembered that he was brilliant. Basically, when I started my first company, I tried many times to convince him to come and join. And I never managed to succeed. Eventually, he finished his PhD and went to Microsoft. While he was at Microsoft and we were acquired by VMware, I convinced him and he joined us at VMware.

Panagiotis: Okay.

Spiros: So, the first time we worked together was in 2012. I eventually left VMware, he stayed there, I tried to convince him again to come to EasyHome, but I didn't manage to. But when I left EasyHome in 2017, he called me and said, I have an idea for a company, are you interested in doing it together? I told him, Mayank, I'll help you, but I don't think I'll start another startup. But I'm going to help you, alright? And we essentially started talking. His idea was that since many of the new applications we're either moving them to the cloud or they're being written to run in the cloud, you face very different challenges compared to what you traditionally have with running software. For the last two and a half years, I was in consumer; I wasn't really dealing with a lot of technical, very deep technical problems. But I spent three- or four-months helping Mayank and gradually it seemed much more interesting to me as I learned more about what was happening. So, at some point, in March 2018, I told him, Mayank, I believe the idea we ended up having together is really great, we should start a company. And he said, look, I have a really good job at VMware, I'm not sure if I want to take the risk. He started having second thoughts. So, I told him, Mayank, either you resign and we do this together, or I'll start the company myself. And I really believed it. In the end, he resigned and we started the company together, in April 2018.

Panagiotis: How difficult do you think it is for a person with a great idea and a really good partner to leave a path that's quite safe, mainstream, lucrative, at a large multinational where everything is set up?

Spiros: It's very difficult. And the truth is that, over the years, I’ve met many incredibly smart people who essentially don’t take risks. And the more risk you take, I think the better the outcome eventually. And the younger you do it, the easier it is.

Panagiotis: That's what I was about to say. I have the sense that the faster you do it as well, the faster it happens.

Spiros: Yes, and it's something you learn to do. I mean, when I started the company with Magiakos, I believed in myself, you know? I believed, but I didn't think it would be easy. It was going to be very difficult, but I was comfortable with the risk and with the challenges of the company.

Panagiotis: I like that, despite everything, at every moment, at every step of your entrepreneurial life so far, you call him and try to bring him along with you. From what I understand, you focus on people, you truly believe in the people around you to build things. And you try to talk to them; I see a kind of persuasion and an ability to convince people to do things that wouldn't naturally or spontaneously come to them to do.

Spiros: The hardest part in a company is the first 6 to 12 months. Because often you don't have a product, many times you don't have money. It's extremely difficult to convince someone. So, it's a bit unreasonable for someone to come and join a company at this stage. So, first of all you have to believe in it yourself very strongly. You can't convince someone else if you haven't convinced yourself first. So, when I'm trying to convince someone, yes, I personally believe in it, and I believe it's the best thing for them too. But nonetheless, that doesn't mean it's easy.

Panagiotis: What do you do differently at Omnition compared to Pattern Insight? What lessons do you apply to Omnition? First of all, I think you're growing it more than Pattern Insight.

Spiros: At Omnition we had six in record time, in 15 months. So yes, you could say the aggression, the scale, the slopes, which were more aggressive, but in the end, we ended up having offers quickly. We did many things differently. First of all, the idea we had was much more well-developed. So, we started an open-source project together with some people from Google and Microsoft called OpenTelemetry, with the idea that we need to move to open source and open standard ways of collecting data; we gather data from cloud software systems. And we're going to build a backend for all of this, which will be able to collect much more data, be much more powerful and useful for these applications.

Panagiotis: With the aim of detecting errors and helping...

Spiros: Yes, helping software engineers run applications at scale in the cloud. The open-source system we developed, called OpenTelemetry, has become the de facto standard since then. There's a foundation, the CNCF, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which is a spin-off of the Linux Foundation, and it basically incubated Kubernetes and many other open-source systems. OpenTelemetry is part of this foundation and is the second most popular open-source project, after Kubernetes. It's the way we collect data, meaning metrics, logs, traces—technical data—from systems today. We essentially built a backend for this, called Omnition. In the end, within a year, we had a lot of traction. Large companies like Spotify, Roku, started using Omnition, Strava. And what happened was that big companies of the time, Datadog, Splunk, and others, approached us to acquire us. Having gained traction, we said no. In the end, this happened three times. And finally, we got an offer from Splunk which we concluded might make sense to accept because we believed, it wasn't just about the money, we believed that by being part of Splunk what we do could have much greater impact and grow much faster. While there was a lot of risk still in doing it on our own. And so, we ended up selling the company to Splunk.

Panagiotis: And usually that's also the reason we see many founders staying for many years and excelling afterwards at Splunk. Because... You crushed it afterwards. At Splunk, you end up being Senior Vice President. You stay for years. And it doesn't seem to me that you stayed for the contract. It doesn't seem to me that it was contractual.

Spiros: Look, having the lessons from VMware now, a second acquisition, we arrive at Splunk.

Panagiotis: You're proactive.

Spiros: I'm proactive, exactly. And first of all, I very quickly understood that the company wanted to... They acquired us and another company called SignalFX. They wanted to modernize the cloud offerings, but they didn't really know how exactly. So, I ended up developing the strategy for them on what we needed to do, being much more proactive. I didn't wait for someone to tell me what to do. This time, I told them what needed to be done and it actually worked. Because I understand the problem much better than anyone else, having worked on this for the past 1.5 years, every day. And the company believed in what I suggested we should do. Essentially to go and build an observability platform. And that's how I basically ended up being the GM and SVP of the whole business.

Panagiotis: Help us understand a bit the scale, the size of the role you finally played until your last day at Splunk—how many people you managed and oversaw.

Spiros: Splunk essentially has two major businesses: cyber security and observability. Basically, observability was my business, which I essentially shaped myself; we transitioned traditional Splunk to this. I managed the product and engineering teams, which at one point were 400 people. But I also had responsibility for the business overall. Splunk was generating 4 billion in annual revenue. A large part of that was observability. So, it was quite a large team and quite a large business in terms of revenue. What happened is that Cisco came to acquire us, and I resigned when the acquisition by Cisco was announced. Splunk was acquired for 30 billion. Even though my job was very interesting, even though I learned a lot, even though I managed a large team and a big business at a public company, I realized that I was solving big company problems. Any given day, whatever I did would have minimal impact on the company. After a year, all this work might have helped improve the company to some extent, but I ended up feeling that it doesn't satisfy me. Solving problems doesn't satisfy me.

Panagiotis: Makes perfect sense.

Spiros: And your personal work doesn't really have any impact. When you're managing so many people, you have impact through the team, but not through your personal work.

Panagiotis: I think that by the third company, you should have started to realize that you're mainly a founder.

Spiros: Having worked at a big company, having seen what that's like—and to be honest, when we sold Omnition, I said I wouldn't start another company.

Panagiotis: Again.

Spiros: Again, yes. And I meant it; I really meant it. Because it is very difficult. Being a founder is very difficult. When you end up with some exit, everything is pleasant, but during the process it is very...

Panagiotis: You know what's funny? That you've said the same thing about Resolve AI. 

Spiros: I think this time I believe it. Because, for other reasons too, but I think at Resolve what we have is that due to AI, since the market is changing so much, we have the opportunity to build a very large company. In my previous ones it wasn't, maybe the first had that potential, but we didn't recognize it. At Omnition it wasn't clear that there was the path to build a very large independent company from where we started. Whereas at Resolve I think it exists, so we can do it for the next 10 years maybe. You never know, but...

Panagiotis: And you've talked about such a horizon. I think you've said that Resolve is your last company and that you'll stay for 15 years.

Spiros: Yes, for as long as it goes.

Panagiotis: For as long as it goes. And moving a bit to Resolve, I'll assume that you didn't leave Splunk with Resolve already in mind, because if its exit triggered your own exit, you leave again just like last time, without having something lined up.

Spiros: The truth is that for the first two years I wasn't thinking about starting a company. But eventually, I realized that I was much happier building things; I was much happier having control over the team's culture, who the team is, etc. Which, in a large company, you don't have as much control over. So, in the end, after the third year, I decided to leave. It actually took me a year to leave, and I decided that if I was going to do something, I'd start my own company again. In the end, both I and Mayank resigned, and we started brainstorming, and within six months we ended up with the idea for Resolve.

Panagiotis: And we've already entered 2023-2024 now. 

Spiros: Practically, Resolve started at the beginning of '24. A completely different scene.

Panagiotis: I imagine you're experiencing it; first of all, you're now at the center of it. You're in San Francisco, you have one of the strongest and fastest-growing AI companies, backed by the most prolific AI investors in the world. So, you're at the heart of this, and I want us to discuss a lot around it. I want you to tell us what Resolve does, so we can understand what's happening with AI right now, give us a bit of the pulse of SF, all that.

Spiros: Yes, and having gone through COVID as well, during which Splunk went from being an in-person company to being fully remote. And for me, to be honest, in the end, I really didn't like working remotely, working from home, and I believed it was also much harder for innovation and much harder to build trust, for trust to exist among people working together.

Panagiotis: So, you believe in in-person.

Spiros: Yes, so when starting Resolve, our bet is that software engineering will change through AI, which we have already seen happen to a large extent. And that we can build AI agents that do the work of humans. And in fact, in software engineering, our thesis was that we could start with many of the tasks that a software engineer does which are less pleasant. Being on call, for example, and often waking up in the middle of the night because something goes wrong and you have to figure out how to fix it. Mayank and I started by self-funding the company, without taking money from anyone else. We also convinced some people we've worked with at Omnition. Basically, the first four people at Resolve are me, Mayank, and two of the early engineers we had at Omnition. One of them, in fact—me, Mayank, and him have been working together since 2012. We are self-funded and basically what we see is that very quickly the demand for what we’re building is much bigger than even we expected. So, we end up doing a seed round last summer, 35 million from Greylock. These days, we have experienced founders and a market that is changing really fast.

Panagiotis: It was mind-blowing. In the meantime, since you announced it, a couple more seed rounds have come out and one has even reached 100. We're talking about numbers that we couldn't even imagine back in the day. Back when seed rounds used to be 200-300 thousand euros. 34 million backed by Greylock. 35 million backed by Greylock, which is Reid Hoffman, who is also an Endeavor Global Board Member. And maybe the number one investor in AI globally. I'm just wondering a bit how you see this whole pace and all this fast tempo. Has the landscape changed for a founder?

Spiros: Look, first of all I don't believe that getting a big investment somehow improves your chances of succeeding. Obviously, it’s necessary in our case and in AI, but it’s also risky. I mean, one mistake I think founders often make is believing that success is raising money. In reality, it's not success, and if you actually celebrate it, I think that's the wrong thing to do. Success comes from building a useful product that users actually want to use. Now, in our case, the reason we decided to do it is that we realized what we’re building can be really useful. The whole stack is going to change because of AI. For example, a few days ago Mark Andreessen said in an interview that "Our thesis is that all the incumbents are going to get nuked and everything is going to be replaced." That's basically what we saw since last year and decided that everything will essentially be rewritten with AI, and maybe software engineering will be the first domain where it happens at scale because these are the problems we’re solving ourselves. So, we decided that it made sense to raise a big round because we need to move very fast. But that also makes it difficult, it doesn’t make it easy.

Panagiotis: What's very strong in my mind is the fact that you want to work with people, you want to build teams with talented individuals, and I have the sense that right now you've taken this to another level. So, I'd like you to talk to us a bit about the strategy you've followed now in team building.

Spiros: Yes, first of all, after all these experiences, what you realize is that creating something very useful and very interesting, and a good company, the main factor is the people. So indeed, both I and Mayank devoted most of our time to this thing, to recruiting. And I concluded that the company will be only as good as the people who make it, in a way. And to tell you the truth, in AI it's even more important because there's no blueprint for what we're building. You have to figure things out from first principles. Everything we're building is essentially being built for the first time. So, it's the people who will influence the outcome here. We ended up having some principles that we follow. First of all, we work at the office five days a week in San Francisco. Which for many people is not ideal, but in a way, it can also be a good filter for people who want to work in an office. They believe it's better to be in person. It creates much greater trust between people. You move much faster. I think it's easier to solve problems, difficult problems, because you can approach someone you work with at any time of the day and discuss something. You don't have to schedule a meeting. From the moment we started the company—and it was the fourth company for me and the second with Mayank—we wanted to solve a problem that is difficult and, in some way, important. And that's maybe strange, when persuading other people who are smart to come and work with you. So, with Resolve we have this combination. A technically difficult problem, a market that is very large, a moment in the evolution of technology which essentially allows us to rethink many of the tools and technology we have. So, all these brought us to a right place at the right time, in a way.

Panagiotis: Yes, and now I understand why you feel the need to be part of these interviews or to have a large part of your work focused on this, because the best person to sell the mission or the person who will convince you of the mission is the founder.

Spiros: Obviously, yes, and if the founders can't convince people to join or anyone to trust the company, nobody else can do it.

Panagiotis: Is the mission and what the company is trying to solve part of the value proposition, and, in the end, what helps people decide to join? 

Spiros: Yes, definitely, because Resolve essentially builds AI for software engineers, it's a bit easier to convince other software engineers to join, because they understand the problem, they understand the impact. And we've convinced quite a few people who had never worked in enterprise software. Generally, the best engineers would basically always go to some consumer company, like Google or Meta. For the first time, I see that we can convince people who have such a background, working in AI at one of those companies, to come and join an enterprise company, because in the medium term, I think the impact that AI will have in enterprise companies, where we take a role like that of the software engineer or the site reliability engineer and we can essentially automate a large part of their work and accelerate technology, accelerate how quickly we build software and solve problems. And for me this is—if I think about what the impact of AI is... Many times, in San Francisco, in tech in general we discuss, "Oh, I don't know, will there be fewer software engineers, will AI replace many of these jobs?" It could happen, but for me those are first world problems. In reality, what I believe AI will do is accelerate technological development and enable us to solve problems that are very difficult, which could have an impact on us and on many other sectors, like health, or access to services that we can't even imagine, those of us who are in San Francisco or Athens, wondering whether we have some disadvantage. Just think, for example, of people who might live somewhere on the planet who have never seen a doctor in their life, and suddenly, through AI, they could have someone who gives them a diagnosis they couldn't have received before.

Panagiotis: At the same time though—and I understand the mission, yes, and the purpose and what we’re trying to solve—at the same time, because this is happening universally across all industries, AI is now a platform that applies everywhere. And we see Zuckerberg and Meta now offering sign-off bonuses that are... At that kind of level. Has this affected you? How is there still, even after so many layoffs, such an abundance of talent? Why does this inflection exist? 

Spiros: First of all, I think right now it’s much harder for a software engineer to find a job. What we're saying about sign-off bonuses, etc. They are outliers, they are people who are essentially the world's experts in building AI models. In reality, and I know this, I see it myself, a lot of kids who are just graduating even from very good universities, have difficulty finding a job. Because the demand for software engineering has actually dropped somewhat. Now, of course, the people we're trying to attract are often AI experts and it's extremely, extremely competitive. And indeed, we see crazy salaries. What I've concluded is that I believe what Resolve and a startup like Resolve offers is very different from what a large company like Meta, or Microsoft, or Google offers. Sometimes it's a bit simpler and easier. Obviously, money affects everyone, but if you go to work for a big company like Meta or Microsoft, you don't have much freedom in what you'll do and you don't have much freedom in how fast you can move. And essentially, you're always at the mercy of someone else in terms of what you'll work on and what will happen. The advantage you get in a company like Resolve is that you can move much faster, you can you bet on yourself, in a way. For example, we recently hired a very senior person who had some huge offers, and essentially what I told him is that if you go to one of these big companies, your job may be interesting, but in reality, that company will be just as successful whether you go or not. In reality, nothing will really change with one person. Whereas coming to Resolve, you can make a huge difference to the company's outcome, and I think that's very rewarding if you want to bet on yourself. It's very satisfying in a way to know that the company succeeded because of me.

Panagiotis: A bit more technically, stock options—what is your opinion, how do you use them? That’s something I believe should be talked about a lot.

Spiros: In general, I really believe in transparency within the company. Both internally and externally, in a way. I think many founders -before I tell you about stock options- make the mistake of trying to protect the people they convince to join the company by somehow hiding from them all the difficulties. In reality, that's bad because it doesn’t help trust and secondly, if not everyone knows what the difficulties are, they won’t work to find solutions. And when something really difficult happens, everyone will panic, because it will be very sudden. So, I really believe in transparency. And this also applies to shares. That is, when we make an offer to someone, we always tell them what percentage of the company it represents. And actually, at the moment, we allow everyone who joins to do what we call early exercise on their shares. So, they can convert their options into stocks, into shares. And the way vesting works becomes reversed. Meaning, it's still four years, but essentially what we're saying is that if you leave after two years, the company has the right to buy back the shares at the price you paid, which is still very low at this point. And this helps, because if you have some exit in the future, you get long-term capital gains instead of income. And also, something that applies in America, because the company has less than 50 million in assets—we've raised less than 50 million—we're considered a qualified small business, which gives some extra benefits to the shares if you're a shareholder. And usually, these benefits are only for founders and investors. Because employees only have options, not stock.

Panagiotis: Yes, that's right.

Spiros: And we believe that since someone is taking the risk and joining the company at this stage, they should also have all the upside.

Panagiotis: Are the experts in AI the new stars of the world? I mean, I saw a really interesting—many articles comparing and contrasting the sign-up bonuses Zuckerberg is currently offering with the salaries of Ronaldo and even Antetokounmpo.

Spiros: Ultimately, artificial intelligence, as I was saying, its advantage is that it will change our lives for the better. If you look at it historically, what changed the standard of living for people was technological development. It's not anything else. And I think AI is one of the greatest, perhaps, opportunities we have to actually change people's lives for the better.

Panagiotis: What is your view on the impact artificial intelligence will have on creativity and innovation? 

Spiros: Look, I believe that the models and essentially the infrastructure for AI will be everywhere, will be highly accessible, and will be very cheap. Yes, probably some large companies will be the ones providing it, but it’s almost like the internet or electricity. And intelligence will end up being extremely cheap and very accessible. So, for me, yes, some large companies may become even more successful, but I actually believe it makes it much more accessible for a lot more people to be able to create something new from anywhere on the planet.

Panagiotis: Looking ahead to the next few years, firstly, where would you like to be? You’ve also set a horizon of 10-15 years and, surely, I know you have big ambitions for where this company could go. So, what are the next big bets for you?

Spiros: Look, at Resolve AI, we fundamentally believe we’re still at 1% of the technology for what we’re building ourselves and what’s being built more generally in the industry. I believe that if we succeed, almost all the work we do manually today as software engineers will become automated, and people will essentially exist to manage the agents who will do the work. And if we succeed, I believe that the technological output, as humanity, will be 10x, 100x. So, we’ll be able to solve many more problems much faster. Now, what does this mean for us? It means that we would like to be the company that has built Agentic AI for Software, which has the broadest use, has grown tremendously, and has a huge impact on the world. But it’s very hard to predict how this will happen, because things are changing extremely quickly.

Panagiotis: The pace is unbelievable.

Spiros: Unbelievable, yes.

Panagiotis: So, I think this is the right moment to play the game with the cards a little. So, each card has a word, and you'll pick a card and give us a little... All right, what does it say? Risk, okay, well, not even to... It's not rigged, they're different cards, they say other things like that. What we're asking here is for our guest to give us their own definition of the word. And the word that came up is "risk." So, tell us a little about it.

Spiros: I think we owe it to ourselves to take more risks. The earlier we do it in our lives, the earlier we do it in our careers, the more we learn to do it better. I mean, when you're in your 30s, your 40s, and you have kids and responsibilities, it's much harder to actually take a risk if you haven't put yourself in a position where you can do it.

Panagiotis: You've been in America for many years, since the moment you went to do your master's degree. 21 years. And I know that your family, you told us earlier that they are still in Thessaloniki, you come in the summers. Yes, I know that you are a mentor to founders connected with other Greek founders. You are around the ecosystem, very well-known but also approachable within this ecosystem. And I would like us to talk for five minutes about how you see Greece changing, how you see the ecosystem, how you see us moving forward, and what you think are Greece's strengths before we get to the weaknesses.

Spiros: I feel that I've been helped a lot by people. All these years, whether by investors or mentors, as you say. So, I see it also a little bit, and I think this is very true at least in America, I see it as a bit of 'giving back.' That is, if you can help someone, it's important to do it, just as I have been helped.

Panagiotis: At Endeavor, in fact, we say it and I like it much more, 'pay it forward.'

Spiros: Yes, exactly.

Panagiotis: Which is also pushing forward.

Spiros: And whether, you know, by helping someone or making an investment in a startup, etc. Also, my best friends are still Greek, even though I've been in America for so many years. It's not that I don't have American friends, but my best friends are Greek.

Panagiotis: One of them is Alexandros Chatzieleftheriou, who is an Endeavor entrepreneur, the very first one.

Spiros: Yes, Alexandros is a good friend of mine and I have several others too. And the truth is that if you're a founder facing all these difficulties, very few people can understand you, other founders. And I think that when I left Greece in 2004, which was still the good times, then the hard times came, it's completely different. Now, you can actually start a company in Greece and have almost the same prospects as anyone else, definitely in Western Europe and maybe even in America. That is, it's much simpler. There is know-how, there is access to money, to investments. I think people know what to do and now there is even, maybe, an ecosystem in Greece. I mean, because there have been quite a few companies that either had an exit or grew significantly, now there are quite a few people who have seen it happen.

Panagiotis: There is trust.

Spiros: And they've seen how it works. One advantage of Silicon Valley is that in reality there are generations upon generations of people who have seen companies, who have worked at companies, so there is this kind of know-how that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. And I think, gradually, a similar know-how is being created in America as well. Sorry, in Athens.

Panagiotis: In Athens. Do you see any strong selling points, any competitive advantages in Greece? I mean, when I go out and talk, or if I have to speak somewhere about Greece, I say we have world-class, at an outlier level, AI researchers, cryptographers, biologists. So, I know there are some really strong selling points for Greece, but I wonder—as someone who's on the other side, meaning actually at the center—if these things hold true, or if we're overselling it.

Spiros: Look, we can look at it a bit with data, you know. Let's take academia in America. Greece is the second country per capita in academics in America, after Israel. Yes, I think that's the case. And Greeks have always had education as a priority. So, I think we have quite a lot of people who are really good at what they do. Many of them don't live in Greece, of course; they live abroad. But, you know, Greece is perhaps the most beautiful country on the planet to live in. So, even that is an advantage. And always, both personally and for many people I know who are in America, we would like to live in Greece if we could, if our professional life could be as good as our personal life is in Greece. But honestly, I believe that it's much simpler and much easier, and as a country we have advantages when it comes to building a startup from Greece. What is the benefit for the country? I would say that it's to everyone's personal benefit to do something like this. It is now a much better path for someone to take, even if you are in Greece, even if you have finished university, to take some risk and either try to build a company or work remotely for a technology company. That is, regardless of what is good or not good for the country, I believe it is very good for each person individually.

Panagiotis: Looking a little ahead to the next few years and speaking about artificial intelligence and everything else being built around and on top of artificial intelligence, are there any predictions, things you expect, things that worry you, things you would like us to keep in mind? 

Spiros: First of all, the way we work—we are still at the beginning—will change tremendously. Artificial intelligence will do many of the jobs that people do today, and people will essentially work at a higher level in some way. So, creativity and perhaps the ability to delegate correctly are much more important. I also believe that, you know the saying, you won't be replaced by AI; you'll be replaced by somebody who's using AI. I believe that, ultimately, the impact on the world will be very positive. And in general, my view is that for many problems we face as humanity, the way to solve them is essentially more technology. It's not about slowing anything down. Whether it's the planet's population, energy, medicine, whatever. I believe the solution will never come from slowing down. It will come from accelerating as humanity. And technology is probably the most important way to do that.

Panagiotis: Now we'll move on to one last section, which is quick questions to maybe understand two or three little things that we're missing about your personality. Are you a book person or a podcast person? 

Spiros: I think podcast, especially these days.

Panagiotis: Are you a morning or a night person? 

Spiros: Both. 

Panagiotis: So, you don't sleep at all.

Spiros: Out of necessity. Look, I used to be a night person, but now I’ve also become a morning person.

Panagiotis: Coffee or tea? 

Spiros: Coffee. 

Panagiotis: If you could choose a historical figure to have a meal with? 

Spiros: Probably someone contemporary, a person I would like to meet is Peter Thiel. I find his ideas fascinating. 

Panagiotis: What is one technology you can't live without? 

Spiros: Internet. 

Panagiotis: Do you have a city that's your favorite mostly for business trips? 

Spiros: I consider San Francisco to be the capital of technology. I also really like New York because it's a very lively city, very diverse. I also really like Athens. In fact, when I'm in America, I tell everyone that if they come to Greece, they have to spend time in Athens, and especially if they know where to go and don't just visit the tourist spots, it's perhaps the most beautiful city in Europe.

Panagiotis: Have you ever received a piece of advice that stood out to you and has essentially become a quote for you? 

Spiros: One piece of advice I've received is that in moments of uncertainty, you don't need to do anything. So, whenever I wasn't sure what I should do, if I give it enough time, after a while I think it comes to me. And many times I say this to others as well, that you'll know what you have to do, let's say. 

Panagiotis: If you weren't a founder, what do you think you would be? Is there another career you might have followed? 

Spiros: I believe that maybe I admire people who are builders, who have built things in their lives. Like Elon Musk, as opposed to someone else who may have equivalent wealth but obtained it because they're in finance. You know, Jeff Bezos, Amazon or whatever. I admire those people much more than others who are successful without having created something. 

Panagiotis: Last question. We've been asking it consistently for three years now to all our guests. What do you think makes an entrepreneur an outlier? 

Spiros: There are probably several characteristics. Two or three that come to mind are persistence—not quitting, not giving up—the ability to take risks, and third is conviction; meaning being able to believe in what you're building before anyone else. Panagiotis: Spiros, thank you very much.

Spiros: Thank you. 

Panagiotis: Take care.