Elias has an engineering degree from the University of Waterloo in Canada and an MBA from INSEAD in France. His early career was with Nortel where he worked in product marketing.

He started working with early stage technology companies when he joined videoconferencing pioneer PictureTel’s reseller in Canada, with responsibility for sales and marketing in central and Eastern Canada. He later joined PictureTel, initially responsible for helping set up and support PictureTel’s reseller channel in the Far East and acting as liaison between newly established offices in Hong Kong and Japan. He came to the UK in 1992 to run PictureTel’s European marketing operations, and has been here ever since.

Since then Elias has worked exclusively with early stage, VC funded technology start-ups covering areas such as online advertising, mobile marketing, ecommerce, social media and enterprise search. He has an excellent understanding of the needs of early stage companies, and has hands-on experience defining, recruiting and running sales, marketing and business development teams. He has also worked closely with company founders in fund-raising and defining company strategy related to the product offering and go-to-market strategy.

Elias is also a non-executive director of a marketing company and investor in an early stage online advertising company.