Dimitris Nikolaou is the co-founder of Wondercraft, a startup that has created a platform for creating ads, podcasts and audiobooks using AI.
Founded in mid-2023 by Nikolaou and Youssef Rizk – both former Palantir engineers – alongside former Spotify executive Oskar Serrander, Wondercraft lets people create “hyper-realistic” AI voices from text input.
The startup operates globally from offices in London and New York. In February 2024, Wondercraft announced a $3m Seed round led by Will Ventures, Y Combinator, ElevenLabs, Steven Bartlett and other angel investors.
In this week’s Founder in Five Q&A, Nikolaou explains why you should hire a designer early, the benefits of working as a startup’s chief of staff, and why he’s excited by “likeness IP”.
1. Which role was the most important early hire you made?
Dimitris Nikolaou: I’ll cheat here and I’ll actually give you three.
One of our most important early hires was our founding engineer/engineer lead. Even though both myself and my co-founder come from an engineering background, the amount of work in the beginning would have been unmanageable for a CTO alone.
Another really important hire was our founder’s Associate. This is highly contextual as the FA we hired is an absolute star and it’s critical to hire the right person into this role. We’ve been incredibly lucky with our FA and she has taken over a lot of the operations work that would otherwise fall to us as founders.
Our founding designer has also been a critical hire. The reason this makes this list is because I have the counterfactual: we did not hire a designer until a year in and it hurt us. We’ve had a designer with us for two weeks now and the impact is massive. Hire a designer early!
2. What advice would you give to a first-time founder?
DN: Work as a founder’s associate or chief of staff for a year or two before setting out on your own. It’s like paid college.
3. Who’s a leader you admire in your industry?
DN: Melanie Perkins, the CEO of Canva. At Wondercraft we’re building Canva for audio which effectively means we’re introducing the simplicity and collaborative nature that Canva brought in for graphic design, but for audio production.
I have been studying Canva a lot and have read and listened to everything about Melanie that I can find. Her passion, creativity, vision and above all, humility are what I admire in Mel the most.
4. Do you have a productivity hack?
DN: Nothing groundbreaking here, but planning your day in advance into concrete actionable items and waking up early so you can be less reactive is what works best for me.
5. Excluding your sector, which nascent technology holds the most promise?
DN: I hear a lot of whispers around robotics, but I don’t know enough about it. I’m excited about the likeness IP space and how this could scale. For example, a marketplace of verified voices which flags the voice used for a piece of content when the content is consumed.
So basically better provenance of likeness IP – as that would prevent deep fakes.
Founder in Five – a UKTN Q&A series with the entrepreneurs behind the UK’s innovative tech startups, scaleups and unicorns – is published every Friday.
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