Xenios Thrasyvoulou has followed the Silicon Valley rule book when it comes to ambitious tech start-ups. Barely a year after launching his freelance jobs website, PeoplePerHour, the London-based founder secured a ￡500,000 investment from a group of angel investors, including Michael van Swaaij, creator of eBay’s European operation.

This in turn attracted the interest of the venture capital industry and negotiations soon opened with a group of firms. By October 2012, five years after Mr Thrasyvoulou had launched his company with a few thousand pounds of his own money, he was sitting on a funding pile of $10.5m.

Success? A cause for celebration? Not according to Mr Thrasyvoulou. “It was total chaos,” he recalls. PeoplePerHour’s headcount grew from a band of six people to 50 in a year and he hired a board of executive directors on six-figure salaries – all in an effort to have the scale to hit a target imposed by investors of sixfold year-on-year revenue growth.