Why Do People Problems Take More Time at Arena?

Anastasios Angelopoulos loves the chief executive role at Arena because it puts him with people from every kind of work, and because the job is to deal with their problems.

As a PhD student he mostly met technical experts: honest, brilliant people with little sense of how to turn an idea into something people use. He still loves that group, and calls it a tiny slice of the world. The circle now includes people who treat everything as a negotiation, plus lawyers, investors, engineers who turn an idea into a product people love to use, and marketing. The people at Arena are best in class, and they have built generational companies before. People problems take more of the time as time goes on, because everything is ultimately a people problem. You design the company, and the company builds the products. He stays in the details, but the lever is the right people in the right place at the right time, pointed in the right direction and clear of pointless messes. He relishes the emotional side too: an insecurity, or an argument that started over something stupid.

The part he does not love is the calendar. He does 10 hours of meetings a day, goes home, finishes the work the meetings left undone, and repeats. Meetings are not always pleasant.