A year later, they drove a van filled with sleeping bags and building supplies from Cambridge to Athens. They’d been told that starting a business in Greece was easy: you just get a permit and you’re ready to go. “When we arrived, I went to the embassy and said, ‘Ok. We’re here. We’re doing this,’” says Craig. “That’s when I got a really swift kick in the head.” Only one person in the group spoke Greek and there was a lot of paperwork. The bureaucratic hurdles they faced became the subject of Craig’s 2012 TED Talk, “Artful lies and shelves of fiction”, which focused on the white lies we tell in pursuit of our dreams. “We definitely doubted ourselves,” he says, “but we told each other we could do it. At the end of the day, it was just a bookshop. We were all over-educated, young, dynamic people with a future ahead of themselves. We knew we could make it work.” After a month of shuffling between government offices in Athens, Craig’s confidence was low, but his faith was restored by the optimistic welcome he received on Santorini. “We got a lot of assistance from the locals. Some just thought we were silly, but others were really happy about our plan for a bookshop,” he says. “They helped us find an empty space, donated materials, and showed us the scrapyard. That’s how we built most of the store—you’re on an island in the south of Greece; Amazon doesn’t deliver here.”