“Mr. Kassianides is taking a phone call,” explains the receptionist, so I sit down in the waiting room of Hyperion Systems Engineering’s dedicated headquarters in Nicosia. When the CEO of an $18 million business needs to talk business, it seems only fair to let him – especially when his company is spread out over most of the world, from America to India.
I kill time by wandering around a nearby conference room, looking at a trophy case of accolades – plaques, cups, certificates – won by Hyperion; here’s the Cyprus Export Award 2000, handed out by the Cyprus Chamber of Commerce and Industry. There’s no doubt Symeon Kassianides is part of the business Establishment in Cyprus, well respected by his peers. He’s spent six years on the Board of Directors of the Stock Exchange, and almost as long on the Board of the University of Cyprus. He’s also on the Boards of various companies as well as the Council of Management of OEV, the Employers and Industrialists Federation. At 47, he’s been a successful entrepreneur for almost two decades.
Yet he’s not just that solid, rather forbidding thing, a ‘pillar of the business community’. For a start, he’s played guitar in a rock band (more on this later). He also seems to try very consciously to be a force for Good, giving back to Cyprus and helping others on their way. He collects art – like many wealthy businessmen – but not just any art: his collection is of Cypriot modern art (the walls of his office are festooned with paintings by the likes of Yiannos Miltiadous, Loizos Sergiou and Demetris Michlis), supporting not just local painters but specifically those trying to do something cutting-edge and innovative. He also “helps companies start,” he says vaguely, “in an advisory capacity” – and is also Chairman of the Diogenes Business Incubator at the University of Cyprus, an organisation “aimed to support the development of entrepreneurship and start-up companies in Cyprus”.
Maybe it’s because he himself could’ve used the help 20 years ago, when he spent two and a half years (August 1991 to December 1993) trying to launch a company in Cyprus, meanwhile working a consultancy job in the UK and travelling back and forth, working for two weeks then coming back for one week trying to raise money. He had a degree in Chemical Engineering from MIT and a PhD from Imperial College London. Even better, he had offers from companies wanting to commercialise the product of his PhD thesis. He’d been “heavily recruited” and also offered jobs in academia, “but I guess,” he says, “like a good, uh…” – he laughs, and decides to rephrase it: “raised in the way I was, I thought I should come back to Cyprus to see if I could do anything here.”
Trouble was, no-one in Cyprus had any idea what he was talking about. His thesis, he explains, was on the “design of an integrated system for training and decision support in chemical plants” (I nod, looking utterly blank). This was the early 90s; the internet barely even existed; computers were the province of brainy geeks talking gobbledygook; even words like ‘system’ and ‘software’ weren’t in everyday parlance. Symeon had a good CV but he was young, didn’t want to put up any land as collateral and resisted taking out a loan, instead offering equity participation – almost unheard-of for a Cyprus start-up – to potential lenders. His proposal was “in an area they didn’t understand,” he recalls, “for customers they didn’t know, for a product that would never be used here, and it wasn’t tangible or material. This kid is saying it’s going to work, [but] he doesn’t want to put any of his parents’ land as collateral, and he doesn’t have anybody else working with him. If you take a checklist of 20 reasons why not, I think now in hindsight there were maybe 15 or 17 ticks.”
What made him persevere? Maybe just that he knew he was right. This was a “pioneering idea”, he points out; he was just waiting for the future to catch up with him (admittedly, that doesn’t explain why he stayed in Cyprus). But I suspect the influence of Axe played a role as well – if only in making him more confident, less afraid of being unconventional.
Axe was the project of Symeon’s teenage years – not just a rock band but a wildly successful rock band, by the standards of early 80s Cyprus. In a place without rock clubs (only bouzouki), no Facebook to spread the word (only word-of-mouth), no facilities for making records, barely anywhere to record in the first place, five high-school kids nonetheless played to around 1,600 people at their peak, regaling eager fans with classic-rock covers and a few of their own songs. Even more importantly, they did everything themselves: rented cinemas for concert halls, printed tickets, found equipment, even designed the T-shirts. “You learn to work with other people,” he recalls, “you learn to deal with conflict, you learn to deal with fund-raising. It was like running a small business.” He smiles: “And it was profitable!”
In a different life, he might’ve stayed with music. When he went to Florida (he did his freshman year there, before moving to MIT) he auditioned for a college band and got the job – but the Yanks were a bit too committed, planning to tour the Deep South and forget about school. “I couldn’t see myself telling my parents ‘I’ve come to the States and by the way I’m putting the studying on hold, and we’ll talk in a couple of years’,” he jokes – so instead he quit the guitar and became a businessman, leaving Axe as a fond memory (“I do still meet people who say ‘Oh, aren’t you the guy that used to do…?’”). He’s recently started playing again, he adds by way of postscript – he never stopped listening to music, his latest “discovery” being Mexican acoustic-guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela – but playing with a band is almost impossible, because of all his travelling.
Ah yes, the travelling. That’s the catch when it comes to Hyperion. They specialise in software-related solutions for “process industries” – mainly oil, gas and steel – meaning almost all their business is outside Cyprus (they’ve only done three local projects in 18 years); right now they have projects from Brazil to South Africa, in addition to six regional offices. Symeon travels a lot, almost every other week. He spent 120 days abroad last year – an awkward lifestyle for a married man with three kids (all boys, aged 13, 12 and 9), but he tries very hard to compartmentalise his life between work and family.
“I do not work weekends,” he says flatly, “unless there is a major crisis”. He’d rather work longer days, making that phone call to Japan or Houston at 11pm on a Friday rather than let it interfere with his Saturday. Even when he travels, “I make a conscious effort that Saturday morning I always wake up at home. I will come back on Friday night – and if I have to leave I will either leave Monday morning or late Sunday night”. I assumed that an over-achieving small company like Hyperion would be composed of workaholics, but it seems relaxation is important too: “We try to respect people’s time,” as he puts it.
Fortunately, his travelling needs may be reduced in the near future – because, just like it did in the early 90s, Cyprus is now catching up with Symeon Kassianides; “Our industry is coming to find us,” he admits wryly. The hydrocarbons industry – ie natural gas – is now a reality, and (assuming the drilling companies find what they expect to find) will probably be bigger “than anything else that exists on the island today”, bigger than tourism and financial services combined.
How much of that will be run by Cypriots, though?
Maybe not much, he replies – but so what? It’s all about the related benefits. “The lawyers, the accountants, the hotels, the transportation, the food and beverages, the infrastructure, the servicing, the flights. Start from there!
” His own company, of course, will be more directly involved, this kind of large operation being exactly what their solutions are designed to facilitate.
Yes, but don’t all these foreign firms have their own solutions?
“Well,” he shrugs, “let’s put it this way. If we do work for Shell in Singapore, and Gazprom in Russia, and Exxon Mobil in the States, and Sasol in South Africa, and Aramco in Saudi Arabia… if these companies come here, they will not use us because we’re local?”
Natural gas is a game-changer, not just for Hyperion but Cyprus too. What impact does he think it’ll have on our society? He hesitates: “I think, if it is not managed properly, it can be…” He tails off, not wishing to sound pessimistic: “It can have very negative effects,” he says diplomatically, “or it can have very positive effects”.
The crux is how a country handles its good fortune: the point is “not to look [only] at the short term, which in my opinion is a characteristic of our recent psyche – which is a direct result of the war in ’74”. A generation that lost everything overnight tends not to plan ahead very much – taking out too many loans, sweeping problems under the carpet, thinking only “what is important today. So you need to have a good life today. Right? There might be a war tomorrow, and you may not have anything.”
Symeon doesn’t necessarily think we’ll mismanage our natural-gas bounty – but it’s also true that natural gas can’t solve deep systemic problems, which need to be addressed. Above all, he says (unsurprisingly), there’s a worrying reluctance to support local industry. “In Greece it used to be bad to be called a businessperson,” and Cyprus too seems to be succumbing to that tendency. Now, in the recession, politicians talk about taxing companies into the ground and employees threaten strikes in response to cost-cutting – “but who produces the wealth?” he asks rhetorically. “Smaller companies provide the backbone for the whole economy”. Cyprus, after all, is a trading country. “People are traders, we have this in the culture… it’s there. To solve the problem, this has to be encouraged. Supported, funded”.
Symeon Kassianides comes from a double-pronged background: his dad is a doctor – a cardiologist – but his mum owns an art-gallery (Gallery Gloria in Nicosia). Some of that duality comes through in his own personality. On the one hand he’s a CEO, a well-known businessman, an authority figure to 180 employees; on the other he’s an entrepreneur, a pioneer, a semi-retired rock guitarist. It’s no wonder that he likes to mentor new businesses – because that’s what he admires, the will to innovate and try something new. “A bad idea is one that says ‘Oh, I can do that as well’,” he proclaims. “A good idea is ‘That sounds like fun, I should try that’.”
Only once in our conversation does Symeon (a bulky, unblinking type) get excited or sound angry – when the conversation turns to politics, and we talk about the large number of voters who abstain from voting. He hates that; it cuts him to the quick. He can tolerate wrong or silly ideas, I suspect, but he can’t tolerate apathy. At least go and cast a blank vote, he rants at those sluggish voters; don’t just sit on the sofa and pretend it doesn’t affect you. Everything that’s allowed him to punch above his weight – to run a global business while based in Cyprus, to compete successfully against billion-dollar multinationals – rebels against that kind of passivity, laziness, indifference.
Maybe they just feel our problems are insoluble, I say in defence of the abstainers – but he won’t be swayed. “Who gave you the right to give up?” he demands, and I hear the persistence of two and a half years’ attempted fund-raising. “Life is not simple. Things are not easy.
“If you have a voice, and you have an opinion, express it!”
