I love startups and I like to work with their founders in the very early stages of the company creation. I love the positive mood, the hard work and the passion of developers, designers and business guys. I love hackers.

I few months ago it has been time for me to decide what to do next after more than 10 years in the company I created. It wasn’t that clear to me at that time what I really wanted to do next, but I was sure that “the new new thing” would have needed my full attention.
Many times in the past I tried to work on new side projects, spending weekends and vacations, but something didn’t work with this method. It didn’t work for me, in that moment of my life. Too few nights and probably too many ideas as well, but more than anything else I understood that real constraints were missing. Continue…

I’m reading the wonderful book about startup communities by Brad Feld. Awesome book, and moreover with so many similarities about Italy and its startup young startup ecosystem.
I think that everyone is working hard in our country to build local startup communities must read at least this fragment. Continue…

Sometimes I wonder how to make things happen faster: new ideas, small and big changes, strategies, new lines of business. Speed is one of the key factors that influence what we do, because many people talk about doing things, but a very few of them are smart enough to make things really happen. The more you create things or initiatives that work, the more you gain self trust. I guess it’s really important to visualize a method, because someone makes things happen and someone else doesn’t.

So, how to make things happen? Continue…

Yesterday, attending the Venture Camp in Milan, a young and brilliant entrepreneur named Umberto Malesci, founder of Fluidmesh, gave the best definition ever of what a startup actually is and what it is not:

In Italy, pretty often, a startup is small business. In the United States is a big company just born.

Think about it when you create the business plan for your new venture.

Starting a company is tough, but it’s something that you don’t actually choose, it’s a kind of recurring thought you need to follow. The best way I’ve found to describe this mind status is that “you cannot avoid to create a company”, it’s the only way to get you finally in peace with yourself, with the world, with your family and with you job naturally.
Sounds weird, uh?

But that is it. You have to – and not for the money – create your own company. It is not about getting rich or drive fast cars or live in a gorgeous house. It’s something you cannot avoid to think about when you get up in the morning, on your vacations, during the week ends, at least until you take a deep breath and make the quantum leap.

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They did it again. The core guys at 37signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, just released a new book titled “Rework”. I had pre-ordered the book through my Kindle a few months ago, so I had the chance to read it the same day they published it.
I thought that the “make it simple, make it now” philosophy was already been explained and detailed enough in their previous book “Getting real”. I remember that as soon as they made it available the paper version on Lulu.com, I bought 10 copies of it for the people who worked with me. It was straightforward, useful and quick to read. It helped me in many different cases to cut the unnecessary activities, but Rework is a step forward.

I think every person who wants to create a (product) company must have it.

Among the many different valuable chapters contained in the book, two of them are really fundamental to start a business the right way.
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So, you have just decided to invest a significant amount of your time (and money) in designing and developing a brand new product potentially used by tenths of thousands of people through the Internet. Having read up a lot about how to make your product succeed, in this case you decide to apply it, step by step. Buying “the whole package” you are pretty confident that you will have a good chance to create something used by a lot of people.
Trusting your intuition, you choose an innovative technology that you love, to create your software. You set up an on-line community to support the use of your tool, you create an account under a social CRM platform to be really transparent to users, you create your website as a blog so you can talk directly to your customer base.

Everything is ready to go live and you remember that you forgot one of the most important things of all: marketing. So, you work really hard to set up a web marketing campaign in order to spread the word as much as you can. You monitor, measure and estimate; then again you integrate Google Analytics into your product and define marketing goals that you can check.
Finally everything is ready to go live. The product has been developed and tested, so you launch!
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A lifetime business. The first time I heard of this concept related to a business on the Internet, I was listening to the beautiful This week in start-ups podcast by Jason Calacanis. Every business is a lifetime business of course – as J. Fried CEO of 37signals reminded me on Twitter-, but in this case the guy interviewed by Mahalo founder meant a special kind of business activity, the one you love to do to sustain yourself and your family, providing a pretty good annual income, without a specific will to create a big company at all. Especially with no clear understanding of words like “exit strategy”, “value proposition” or “business plan”. One day, you simply settle to go through an idea you have had for a long time, something that you never thought of setting up and launching as a business. The Internet is the perfect place to test and possibly make money out of with these kind of opportunities, because as stated by Chris Anderson in his last book – Free -, while describing Joseph Bertrand theories, the Net is truly a “competitive market” :”the Internet is combining the democratized tools of production (computers) with the democratized tools of distribution (networks)“. Continue…

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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