Demetrios will take us though his personal experience of going from nothing to something and walk us through the path of difficult but successful entrepreneurship. He will show us how to turn a good idea into a viable business model.

He will unveil the story of onefinestay a pioneering start-up in the business of hand-made hospitality which offers guests the chance to stay in the finest homes in the world’s greatest cities while the owners are out of town. The start-up currently offers around 2,600 homes – worth a combined £4bn – in destination cities including London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Rome. Demetrios Zoppos, Greg Marsh, Tim Davey and Evan Frank launched onefinestay in 2010. More recently, AccorHotels – the hospitality giant behind the Sofitel and Ibis brands – acquired onefinestay for £117m and pledged to invest a further £50m as part of an ambitious growth plan. Accor announced that it aims to expand onefinestay into 40 new cities over the next five years.

DEMETRIOS ZOPPOS

Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of “onefinestay”
Demetrios is a London-based Cypriot entrepreneur and early stage tech business leader. Before founding onefinestay in 2009 , he was founding CEO of GradFutures, a web community site and co-founder of GF-X, the leading airfreight trading platform, which raised £50m, and was acquired by Descartes. Previously, Demetrios was a consultant at McKinsey & Co. where he specialised in e-commerce, and was an associate at the World Bank. He earned his MA with First Class Honours in Economics from Robinson College, Cambridge, and his MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a Fulbright Scholar.

Demetrios is currently launching Klevio, a start-up in the “Internet of Things” space and will walk us through the path of turning an idea into a business.