Xenios Thrasyvoulou was initially an engineer working for a FTSE 100 company. Within six months he realised he was allergic to the bureaucracy of large corporations. Inexperienced and utterly unemployable, at the age of twenty-three, he began creating a service that allowed time-starved individuals to outsource work to multi-skilled individuals on a 'per hour' basis. Three years later, PeoplePerHour.com was born.

Responsible for the overall vision and direction of PeoplePerHour.com, Xenios' passion for product, relentless pursuit of innovation and deep obsession for customer service and user experience are very much defining points of the company's culture and ethos.

The company has recently launched a new service, SuperTasker.com, focussing on solving one problem really well: producing and editing high touch digital content, super fast and reliably.

Xenios has kindly agreed to present The GWG Website of the Year Awards at a drinks reception held in London on Monday 17th November.

My Favourite Website... Amazon - It might sound cliched but it has to be Amazon. The experience just keeps getting better; every time I use it they have done something to make the customer journey easier, the checkout process smoother and improved recommendations for other products I might like to buy. They truly look at the experience from the customer point of view and I think they are probably the most customer centric company that exists today.

My Favourite App... Foursquare - Lately I have found it indispensible. I travel a lot and I find it helps me to have a great local experience wherever I am in the world. It really leverages mobile, geo-location and the power of the crowd to deliver very informed hyper-local experience.

My Favourite Blog... Paul Graham's Essays - This is a favourite read of mine. Paul Graham is a programmer, writer and investor and co-founder of Y Combinator. His posts are full of no-nonsense insights into the world of startups and they’re a must-read for any entrepreneurs, whether you’re just starting out or have an established business.

My Most Recent Buy Online... Perhaps a little predictably it was food shopping; I bought my groceries on FreshDirect. I’m based in New York for a lot of the year but as you can imagine, I don’t have much time for food shopping! The produce is of a really high quality and most importantly, delivered to my door!

My Favourite Tweeter... Carl Icahn - I must admit I don’t use Instagram! However I do love Twitter, sometimes you don’t want to read giant blog posts so I use it to get my dose of 140 characters. I love the tweets of Carl Icahn, he rocks! As per his Twitter bio, he says he makes money studying natural stupidity. He has over 189k followers already and I’d urge others to follow, it’s a gem of an account!

My Pet Hate About Life Online... Unfortunately I think that people expect everything online to be free, given away or dirt cheap. The propensity to pay is much higher offline and that gap needs to close for the web to become a better place.

Social Media Allowed Me to Meet... Actually I’d say social media has allowed me to become really antisocial when I’m offline, which is actually a good thing from time to time. My days are frenetic and hectic so I like to spend a lot of my downtime reflecting and sometimes, to refresh and recharge the batteries, you need to be antisocial!

My Stand Out Online Memory... Being featured in Forbes. It was a really exciting time. Forbes is a worldwide institution. I think the first time you see your business written about in such an outlet, it’s really a stand-out moment.

Most Worthwhile Newsletter... The Centre for Data Innovation - Great weekly newsletter that includes summaries of news articles about science, big data and the internet of things etc. I like the fact they send me the most important articles of the week to my inbox on topics that greatly interest me.

29 October 2014