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Next stop for The Recursive podcast is Athens, where we meet Athina Polina Dova, co-founder of Owiwi, the digital tool that combines psychological research with game design to help companies recruit the best talent (# women in tech).
Athina is joined by our wonderful host in Athens, the Social Impact & Communities builder in the Greek startup ecosystem Desy Karapchanska.
Athina Polina Dova combines several unique talents: legal background with business acumen and people’s skills. Apart from being a founder, she is the Vice-President of the International Union of Professional Trainers. She also serves on the board of directors of the first creative industries cluster in Greece Corallia gi-Cluster.
What makes companies work
In her conversation with Desy, Athina Polina reflects on the importance of mentors in her entrepreneurial journey. She also shares the story of how she and her co-founder found each other. An introvert and and extrovert, who didn’t like each other at first, they formed a great team eventually. “At the end of the day, what makes companies, friendships, and collaborations work is that we share the same values. We view the world with the same eyes”, she smiles.
“I put integrity very high because it has to do with everything that we do in our lives”, Athina Polina Dova says about the core values that shape her thinking. “Try to be the person doing the right thing when no one is looking”, she adds.
In the episode, Athina Polina Dova also talks about why she deems important not to mix your business identity with your personal identity. “Failure in business is not your failure as a person”, she explains.
Microlearning as the future of work
With Owiwi, Athina Polina and her co-founder didn’t have the typical startup journey. They focused purely on research for the first 2 years, while still having parallel jobs. But Athina thinks this is a healthy way to go to build a self-sustained business.
She shares how our work environment affects the development of our soft skills and why people are the driving forces of change on the job market right now. According to her microlearning, reskilling and upskilling, and web3 are three important trends that will shape the way we work in the next few years.
Watch the previous episode if you want to get an insider view into the crypto world. Jordan Stoev from Paysafe Group shares some useful tips on how to start in the world of crypto, how to stay at the top of your game in an industry that is changing so quickly and how to crack the culture codes of the crypto communities.
