At the age of 23, many of us are either still studying, just finding our feet in the professional world, or perhaps even still trying to figure out exactly what we want to do career-wise. Nikolas Ioannou, however, at that very age, has just had the tech company he co-founded acquired by US giant American Express.
Speaking to CBN and InBusinessNews from New York in a Zoom interview, the entrepreneur recently shared the story of his somewhat unusual and certainly inspiring professional path so far, and proved to be proud of his Cyprus roots and excited about what the future holds.
Ioannou’s grandfather, whom he is named after, and who died last year at the age of 88, was one of the island’s most pioneering doctors. The first in his family to attend university, he was an early and significant supporter of the General Healthcare System, becoming the first President of the Health Insurance Organisation. He also served as President of the Cyprus Medical Association and was recognised for treating hundreds of soldiers during and after the 1974 invasion without accepting any compensation from the government, as well as for his deep humanity throughout his lengthy career.
Now, the younger Nikolas Ioannou is making his own professional mark, most recently after American Express earlier this year announced the acquisition of HyperCard (Hyper), which was co-founded by Ioannou and in which the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, was an early investor.
Hyper, founded by Ioannou and Marc Baghadjian in 2022, transforms expense management from a manual process into more autonomous workflows, successfully developing native AI agents.
Ioannou’s early start as a tech company founder
The story leading to this particular professional success is somewhat different from the one most successful businesspeople typically tell, and began some years earlier when Ioannou, at the age of 15, decided to leave school for early admission to university, soon after also leaving his formal studies behind to concentrate on his entrepreneurial pursuits.
“Despite both of my parents having a very credentialed journey and career, they were extremely supportive of me taking a different path,” he tells CBN, continuing, “I left school when I was 15 years old to go to university (the University of Washington), and then I left university to work on my first company. And so today I do not have a college diploma, a university degree. I do not even have a high school diploma. This is in a very stark contrast to the path that my dad, a physician, took, and the path that my grandfather and many other folks in my family took.”
Ioannou notes that, “Their trust that I was making the right decision, even without them sometimes fully understanding the decision I was making, meant a lot to me. I do not think I could have done it without their support.”
With a Cypriot father and Norwegian mother, who met while studying at Oxford University, Ioannou is the first US-born member of his family but says he also considers himself to be Cypriot. He is working on improving his Greek and visits the island as regularly as possible, underlining, “I'm very close with my family on both sides of the world, and I would like to think that I have Cypriot values, even though I didn't grow up in the country.”
Ioannou also shares his view of the island’s potential as a tech hub, noting, “From what I have seen, from my friends and my buddies in Cyprus, everybody is very inquisitive, everybody is very respectful, everybody is very sharp. And now that everyone in the world has access to this amazing resource, which is the internet, which is AI, we all have access to the same tools to leverage, to build things and learn things. I am proud to be Cypriot, and I am proud to be part of the community.”
Hyper’s development and road to success
Returning to his most recent professional success, Ioannou also told CBN how Hyper was developed.
“We started it about four years ago, and the key thesis, the problem that we were solving, was that we noticed that many business processes, including expense management, were very human-oriented. There were lots of people involved in these processes. And what we found is that now, with the introduction of AI, we can have AI go over some of these processes that, quite frankly, nobody wants to do in the first place,” he explains.
There is a lot more to the story than coming up with a good idea, though.
Hyper had originally started as a credit card product, Ioannou reveals, adding, “That's why the first name of the company was HyperCard. And we worked on that for two to two and a half years. And after two and a half years, we had spent millions of dollars. We spent 80 hours a week working on this, seven days a week, 10 hours in the office every day. There were many sacrifices, things like I could not see my family, go to Cyprus when the rest of my family went.”
Despite all the sacrifices, the initial version did not work, Ioannou goes on to note, elaborating, “I will not say it went to zero, but we had to restart. And so, about a year and a half ago or two years ago, we had to completely restart and say, ‘Based on all the learnings that we had from this credit card product, what do we think we can do now?’ That is when we landed on this concept for what Hyper became and what worked really well, which is this agentic or AI-powered expense management software.”
The challenges of developing a startup
Ioannou shares that, when it comes to building a startup company, two things emerged as the most difficult.
“Everybody talks about one of them, which is how hard you have to work and the sacrifices that you have to make and how many hours you have to spend, things that feel impossible. But the hardest thing is also that you did work all these hours and you put in all this time and you made all these sacrifices, and still wonder if it will even amount to anything,” he reveals, noting that keeping up his own and the entire team’s morale was crucial.
“I think that was one of the largest mental challenges,” Ioannou says, noting there were a handful of challenges, “A good example is that when we started the company, I had no prior background in the sector. I think that what's kind of interesting about this is that I see it in two ways now. On the one hand, I think if I were to start another finance company now, I would be much better poised to do so. On the other hand, building every company you build is so different. By definition, especially for startups, it is something unique.”
He continues that, “No prior experience can exactly prepare you for the company you aim to start. And so, the only way to go and learn is to just go and do things. When I started Hyper, we had this unique concept for a credit card that could be used for both personal spending and business spending, which was the initial concept. On the one hand, I thought, ‘Wow, I have no idea how to do this, how to build a credit card, and how to make it work for personal spending and for business spending.’ Then I also realised, well, no one has even tried this idea. No one else would know how to do this, right? The only way that I became an expert in this exact topic of the company I wanted to start was by actually starting it and doing it.”
This was achieved through extensive research, both online and through books and speaking to experts and was something Ioannou also did while creating another of his successful companies, Spira, which was focused on the healthcare sector.
Becoming one of the first companies to partner with Amex
Returning to Hyper and how it was acquired by American Express, meanwhile, Ioannou notes, “We were one of the first companies to partner with American Express. We launched our credit card with American Express (Amex) as the network of our partners and so we have a long relationship with Amex. And as we continued having success with Hyper, the AI expense management software, we have always been on their radar. And long story short, we ended up joining forces on this.”
He reveals that even before the agreement had come about and while still developing the product, his team had American Express artwork in their office for inspiration.
“We wanted to create an experience like American Express has created. And so, it was a full circle- from the first day where we had art in our office to now, when the Hyper journey ends and our journey starts at Amex, we are joining this company that we aspire to be like.”
“With the learnings that Hyper has and with everything that Amex has done, we're in a great position to build something really valuable and really helpful for people,” he underlines.
Looking ahead towards recursive self-improvement
Alongside the work Ioannou is looking forward to doing with Amex, he is also excited about what the future holds more broadly, technology-wise.
“There are so many interesting things happening right now. I think the thing that everybody is gunning for is a concept called recursive self-improvement, where AI can improve itself by 1% consistently. And essentially what that means is eventually we will have AI continually make itself better and better and better over time,” he say, going on to point out the well-known phrase from Spider-Man, “With great power comes great responsibility."
He also goes on to underline, “I think that we all have a responsibility to build and use AI in ways that are helpful to humanity,” adding, “As you know, we raised money from Sam Altman. And I am very optimistic that these companies will do what is right for people.”
“But at the same time,” Ioannou continues, “this is all very new for everyone, even the foremost experts on the bleeding edge. I feel very lucky that in this time of history, when even 100 years ago, maybe 120 years ago, maybe even shorter, there was no travel by airplane, no cars on the road. And now, only 100 years later, we have artificial intelligence that I can open up on my phone, get connected to the internet, ask any question I want and get an answer that is tailored back to me. This is a crazy concept. And what I have seen on the bleeding edge is that technology is improving so quickly that I cannot even anticipate where it will be in 12 months from now.”
Ioannou adds that, “The great thing about AI is, as many people have said, it's a horizontal enabling layer, which means that every single industry will have radical improvements and radical changes because of AI,” going on to suggest that, “It's the same as, for many people in their lifetime, they might have also seen how electricity changed every single industry and how the internet then changed every single industry as did cloud.”
He also suggests that, “No matter what sector someone is in, I think they should be trying their hand at using some of these AI tools and getting more and more AI-native the people that choose not to adopt AI and start playing around with it, and I'm not saying it needs to take over your whole life, but, the people that choose not to adopt AI and learn about it, I think unfortunately are going to kind of get left behind in the same way that if you didn't adopt technology in the last 10 years or 20 years, life would look very different for you.”
Looking towards his own future, Ioannou was- at the time of the interview- enjoying a little bit of downtime, his first since the age of 15, and ahead of continuing to develop Hyper from within American Express.
“The last couple of weeks have been a unique time in my life because, since I was 15 years old, I have been working basically nonstop. And I think I am a little bit obsessive about my work. It is my passion,” Ioannou says.
This downtime has taught Ioannou that he enjoys having a challenge to solve and can definitely see himself continuing to work as he has been for the foreseeable future.
“Tactically speaking, my current sight is set on American Express, so I will be spending however long it takes there for me to feel like we have built and solidified a great product and a great experience in the market. I want to continue on Hyper in a division that is essentially dedicated to creating one of the first sectors where we have widespread and de facto adoption of AI. And I think we are in a good position to do that, so I am very excited about that,” he reveals.
The importance of moving forward
Ioannou’s advice to others interested in following in his footsteps, meanwhile, is to avoid getting stuck in what he describes as analysis paralysis and wondering if they are good enough, “Try to put together a prototype of what you want to build. Now with AI especially, software is so easy to build. You can watch a two-hour-long YouTube video, learn about cloud code, or learn about some of these tools, and you can have something, an application that you built running on your computer, a couple of hours later.”
Another piece of advice is to reach out to the people you would like to meet, “I have probably sent 100,000 cold emails in my life where they do not know me, I do not know them. At the beginning, nobody responded to me. And even now, probably one in five people will respond to me, but you'd be so surprised that of the people that reached out back to me, how many random strangers have taken the chance on me and given me an opportunity to have 30 minutes of their time and learn from them and meet them. And nearly everybody that I know and that I am close with today, I met by just messaging them online. They did not know who I was. And we hopped on some calls and became friends.”
He adds, “Some advice that I have that I would have given myself is, when you're building a company or when you're doing anything new, you have to completely set aside your ego because you're going to ask a lot of dumb questions The only reason that someone, say my colleague, is smarter than I am is because that person asked way more dumb questions than I was willing to ask. And so now, whenever I go anywhere, I am not afraid to go and ask dumb questions and look a little bit stupid for, you know, a couple of weeks. So, a couple of weeks later, I know everything that is going on. I have a complete understanding of everything.”
He once again underlines that, “The hardest thing is to just get started. And once you get started, you are kind of in a rhythm. You get into a rhythm and, you know, you have a better idea of what the next step is,” pointing out that successful companies were very rarely their founders’ first ventures.
Ioannou points out that Uber founder Travis Kalanick started 13 or 14 companies that all failed before he began Uber while the young entrepreneur himself has been creating businesses since his early teen years and not all of them went on to garner the interest Hyper has.
“I have probably built dozens of products that most of them never see the light of day. Some of them, I pitch people about them, and they do not like them. Some of them worked a little bit, and people used them, but they just were not big enough ideas for me. And so, the biggest thing is just to keep going and keep pushing,” Ioannou concludes.
