A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be in Silicon Valley for two weeks, during that time I got the opportunity to meet a lot of smart people. Many of them were part of the Italian community in the Valley, and a subset came from Olivetti, an Italian company established in 1908 in Ivrea, a small town near Turin, in the northern part of my country. Olivetti was probably one of the few Italian companies that made its mark in the Silicon Valley many years ago, entering the personal computer market with success in the ’80s.

Many of the people I met had a very well established position in the Bay Area, and over the years gained respect from the community of growing entrepreneurs, investing and living there with their families. That means they have access to smart people, financial institutions, venture capitalists and investors, events and mentoring. They are successful also because they are considered Americans by Americans’: they have been living there for many years, their children are born there and they voted in the Presidential election. Anyone who works in information technology, at least once in their lives have dreamt of being part of that environment, because there, in that place, innovation happens, for real. In a dynamic environment like that, technology ventures are rising every day, many of them will fail, but a few will change the way we work, communicate and live.

During this business journey I understood a lot of things about what can be done residing in the Valley, and what can be started living outside that ecosystem, in Europe or other US states. If your intention is to raise money and create the next Google, then you must definitely be there. Better said, you must live there, you must be part of the Silicon Valley culture each day and that will allow you to understand how American people make business and manage relationships. But if you want to create a product or a service and sell it online for a monthly fee, then the the main thing you need to have, is the product itself.

Great products and services are made available online in software as a service, which is something that can be done anywhere, anytime, and that’s the amazing opportunity offered by this new wave of innovation facing the Internet. This way of doing business, creating small and specialized software tools, designed to aim at users solving a specific problem can probably be a great opportunity for (Italian) creative entrepreneurs all around the world. These startups behave like smart-startups or smartups, because they don’t need a lot of money or a hundred pages detailing the business plan. They need an idea (a simple one), a founder and the capabilities to drive a project to a conclusion in a few months. That’s the focus of my blog.

Through these posts I want to provide some help and useful advice to young entrepreneurs. I decided to write this blog in English so that many others can be part of the conversations, even if I would like to talk specifically to the young Italian generation of entrepreneurs.

SmartUps are a new breed of companies, focused on cash flow first without a clear understanding of what an “exit strategy” really is. They want to change the way people do everyday chores, providing “simply useful tools” directly online.

When business people talk about strategy very often they forget to include technology and architectures and programming languages. Be sure I won’t do that

When business people talk about strategy very often they forgot to include technology and architectures and programming languages. Be sure I won’t do that