Marina Hadjipateras, the dashing American venture capitalist, has only one word of derision. She speaks it softly and rarely. Conservative. A family can be conservative. An investment, a choice. The way she uses the word, it’s never political. It’s also never a good thing. The first time I hear Marina deploy her tender curse is during lunch with her brother Alex on the harborside deck of Zephyros, a seafood restaurant in the fifth-century-BCE port city of Piraeus, near Athens.
But the rest: Was it greenwashing? I wondered. ESG posturing? Maybe the jargon, for Soraya, was reassuring. For me too. Now here was a VC. I wished her well, and left intrigued by Marina, whom I came to consider a gorgeous throwback, a woman with a jet-set air of mystery, the kind of figure for whom Coco Chanel once designed airplane-ready bouclé suits. As we float from one stunning Athenian setting to the next, there is talk of chartering a boat or plane to Oinoussai. But the idea fizzles.