I live in Italy and as you all know it is a wonderful country: nice food, wonderful cities, amazing landscapes and a gorgeous coastline. It’s also a great place to bring up a family, where the political system guarantees a great social security environment – compared to the United States at least. As Italians we strongly believe we have a great entrepreneurial material, in fact our economy is primarily sustained by small and medium size businesses (almost a million if I remember correctly). They are the Italian equivalent of start-ups, small business initiatives launched by normal people who want to make the difference in their life, creating their own business. A fraction of those companies operate in technology and process innovation, having their foundation assets on software design, and the majority of them didn’t have any institutional investor on board, no VC or angel. This is quite normal for us, because we didn’t have a strong venture capital culture in our country. We don’t have 35 or 40 years of VC funding history as Enzo Torresi states in an interview. Of course knowing how to pay the bills from day one is a good start. On the other hand, this aspect of an Italian environment prevents  – or at least decreases the likelihood that – the next Google could face the market from our country. In a playground like this our start-up cannot simply scale, because to scale the way fast Internet growing companies do, you need to have the financial support of institutional investors, you need millions of dollars or better said millions of euros.
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There are many ways to make your start-up fail, and probably the most common is not to follow this advice: make simply useful things. Paul Graham, an interesting guy I had the pleasure to meet in Berkeley at the University of California, founder of YCombinator, loves to put it in a similar way: “make something people want”. This is probably the best advice that someone can give you before you decide to bet your future and your youth on a start-up.

Paul created a really interesting model giving young entrepreneurs an opportunity to make a difference. In short he selects among many potential start-ups the ones with the best ideas and with the most committed team of founders, and gives them a chance to create a first working prototype, something they can show to attract the big guys – business angels and VCs. Each funded team typically have three months and a really small amount of money – more or less $6,000 for each founder. They can work anywhere they wish, at the company office, at home or at Peet’s coffee shop – they have free Internet access and better coffee than Starbucks.

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