Constantine Nikolaou

The Journey

🇱🇧 مرحبا, I'm Constantine.

I grew up between languages and countries, Lebanese, Greek, French, and English around the dinner table, and I've been navigating between worlds ever since. I carried that through the startup world, across multiple places and countries, and into Booking.com, where I've been for seven years. Somewhere along the way I learned the real lesson. The hardest systems aren't the technical ones. They're the teams and organizations behind them, and that's the thread that runs through my whole career.

After years as an individual contributor, in the startup world and later as a Solutions Architect at Booking.com, I was ready to level up. I wanted to operate strategically, not just technically. The EMBA at the University of Amsterdam gave me the frameworks, the knowledge, and the space to shift from execution to strategic thinking, to shape direction instead of just delivering it. It validated what my years as an IC had taught me, and it prepared me to lead multidisciplinary teams with real impact. My thesis, Balancing Profitability and Sustainability: How multinationals manage their dual mission tensions, explored how multinationals pursue two strategic objectives at once and the cultural tensions that come with it.

Today, I lead the Professional Services Connectivity Partnerships, EMEA team at Booking.com, based at the headquarters in Amsterdam. It's a new team, built to help partners connect to Booking's platform in the best way possible, so they perform at their best and run at scale. The thing my thesis was about, multinationals balancing dual missions and cultural tensions, turned out to be my day job. As for what's next, I'm building the Professional Services function to scale across EMEA, and designing how Booking.com supports partners at the strategic level.