From an idea to a company or how REOR20 started!
An article by Raluca Maria Nedelcu
I sit across from Iordanis (Danny) Chatziprodromou and I set my laptop on top of the table, ready to listen and type.?
“Good!” I say to jumpstart our chat. “So, let’s talk about how you came up with the idea for REOR20 ”.??He looks at me and then away at the lake and I can tell he’s mulling over his words. Not out of caution, but out of warmth for his beloved idea. He’d hate to play it down.?
“While I was working as Head of an Innovation team in Swiss Re ” – he begins – “I felt like something was missing, I wasn’t being challenged enough. I know, I know! A tale as old as time: the corporate employee was not challenged enough.” He chuckles ironically to himself and continues.?
“Having interacted with start-ups through my role, I sensed that this would be something I’d want to try. I longed for the freedom to innovate and build a venture from scratch. Ideas I had plenty so what was the harm in giving it the old college try, right? Plus, I thought running a start-up is easy.??Boy, was I wrong!” – he breaks out laughing at his own long-gone gullibility. I take a sip of my water and I smile waiting for him to go on.
“So, I decided to resign and took a small hiatus to regroup. I visited my parents and took my time swimming in the blue Greek waves that Summer, thoughts turning in my head. The concept that kept recurring to me, back then, stemmed from my fluid dynamics background. I kept ruminating over the incompatibility between what I knew and what I imagined being possible and what the industry was using at the time to understand flood. Finally! - I thought.?After studying computational fluid dynamics for years, during both my master and my doctoral research, I decided that it would be great to start a tech venture that would break the limits of the very same science. There was no solution that could solve the flood risk understanding problem globally once and for all, at the level of precision required. We needed to develop high resolution, high accuracy models that would give results at large scale and would run at warp speeds at low costs. In other words, we had to develop something impossible.?”
“I brought my thoughts to Christos Altantzis over beers one evening. He was an old friend, brilliant scientist and had been with MIT as a senior scientific researcher for?years. If anyone was to buy into the madness of my idea, it had to be him.”?
“Ha-ha! What did he say?” I ask, my fingers hovering over the keyboard, waiting.
“He said – and I quote –?Are you drunk??
He could not fathom what I had in mind, which – in all fairness – was a reasonable reaction knowing that the advances in science and tech could not support my idea.”?
“So how did he end up not only supporting you, but actually joining you?” I asked.?
“Well, about that time his contract with Swiss Re was coming to an end, so he decided to give it a go. What followed were some very interesting late nights when we discussed about how we can develop something that would push the limits of science. We were literally playing around with almost science-fiction ideas from discussions he had during his time in MIT. Our main question was?Can we teach AI to do advanced physics??We spent about six months like this, enjoying our newly found start-up bliss, convinced we are building something cool. We were having the fun start-up life I had imagined. Like two suckers who didn’t know what they had coming.” He burst out laughing again and I join him this time.?
“Soon we had no choice but become serious, so we started talking to Georgios Giannakopoulos . He was what we needed: a powerhouse of knowledge, work ethics and innate ability for complex problem solving.?He could help us build a state-of-the-art?computational fluid dynamics - high fidelity - engine. This was the necessary step that would allow us to play around and try to find what an AI can really learn. Most importantly we needed the engine to validate any result that would come out of our futuristic new AI.?
Meanwhile, we started renting desks at Impact Hub Zürich and work out of there, tapping into the community. Then - almost 2 years after leaving my job - the competition of ESA BIC Switzerland came to our attention. Every year they look for technologies that promote or use space tech or data coming from space. We ended up in the ESA BIC Switzerland incubation program, which in addition to a 200,000 Euro prize, also brought José Achache ?into the picture. Shortly after, via a Venturelab 's course we met Christian Schaub . With Jose as our chairman and Christian as an advisor, we finally incorporated our company – and in November 2019?there was? REOR20 ! What a great moment for us.”
“So… tell me again – what does REOR20 actually mean?”?
“Right… this is where it gets really geeky! In Latin?reor?means think and compute; the %20 is the URL encoding for the white space. So REOR20 means think and compute in the white space - a metaphor for creating something from thin air. Which is what we pride ourselves to do when it comes to the technology we built.” He smirks proudly and I smile back thinking to myself how geeky that is indeed.?
I type up my last thoughts and I look up from my keyboard. We agree on the topic of the next article:?The first years of REOR20: from initial stage to today, how did the team grow and how did the idea develop and, at times, pivot.?
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