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  • New York City

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    I am in NYC for 3 days. Cloud Academy is sponsoring the AWS Summit and we are excited to get in front of 10,000+ people expected! Yesterday night I had dinner with a friend and walked a bit around Brooklyn.

    Every time I am in NYC I cannot ignore how different this city and these people are from San Francisco. Yesterday night NYC was truly beautiful, it felt much more human and international than what San Francisco is today.

  • Influences and open-mindedness

    You are the product of your environment. Ultimately, the people around you are the ones who shape you. I was thinking about it yesterday: I changed my perspectives a lot in the last 6-7 years. (more…)

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  • San Francisco

    I’ve been to San Francisco for the first time in August 2012. Before then I was barely able to point it on a map. It’s been a great journey so far and the best has yet to come.

  • The importance of writing

    2017 has been a long and tough year, a lot of challenges, changes and of course, also some great achievements. In 2018 I will use this blog a bit more, to write and share stories, thoughts, and resources mostly about entrepreneurship and about my business and personal adventures.

    Writing is always a good way to digest things and focus. Back in the days, I used to write 2 to 4 articles per day on HostingTalk.it. It was tough and time consuming but that helped me shape my thoughts around things, people and understand an entire industry (webhosting) I knew nothing about. A great lesson.

    I am definitely planning to do that much more this year.

  • “Fighting against empathy”

    Romain Dillet at Techcrunch describes pretty well what I have been thinking for a while now. Too much time spent on Instagram, Facebook, reading useless posts and not spending time building things, writing or simply trying to talk to people in our real life.  A good reminder to delete these apps from my iPhone sooner than later!

     

     

  • Cloud Academy Global Meeting 2017!

    Great week with our team at Cloud Academy to discuss 2016, new projects, 2017 focus and more!

  • Chaos Monkey

    I am close to the end of Chaos Monkey. If you want to understand more about Silicon Valley and how venture-backed startups work, this is the perfect introduction. Do not expect something unbiased: like every entrepreneur, Antonio went through several critical moments and tries to describe rules and problems that are common in the Bay Area for early stage startups that go through fund raising and acquisitions.

    I particularly appreciated the insights on the early days of Facebook.

     

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  • How to find out in an interview if someone is a giver or a taker

  • [Podcast] There is always a way forward

     

    Yesterday while driving to our Swiss office I listened to this podcast on Stanford eCorner. I didn’t know Matthew before. Brilliant entrepreneur and engineer. Besides talking about his entrepreneurial adventures, Matthew brings up about a few points and key lessons that only now I understand, unfortunately.

    • Why you should raise VC money at the very beginning of your journey. Not 100% in agreement with raising VC money at the beginning (bootstrapping is the way!) but I see his point about dilution and it’s smart.
    • On Silicon Valley’s big names in your board/network. They will be not so powerful while you focus on building a business. Sometimes they are just a big distraction. I understood this way too late and even today I struggle communicating this to other people.
    • Building companies and being a founder/CEO, a lonely job where taking care of your mental health is 99% of the game. Very true and sad.

  • On Tesla, Elon Musk and the entrepreneurship model

    I just started reading the biography of Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity. It’s a book I wouldn’t start without a great review like this one. The story is similar to the one of many other successful entrepreneurs but somehow all of them keep me thinking about how useless it is to look at them as a model. People became more and more passionate about this type of books and stories, but the reality is that Elon, like Steve Jobs, and many others, has been influenced by a specific path, a specific youth and a set of experiences you can’t replicate or follow to reach the same destination.

    It’s not really the point of reading such a book, but more and more people, specially in Silicon Valley, usually look at these people as examples and models – something they should follow and try to imitate. They are great, no doubts, but you cannot take them as models, as you cannot do it with the majority of entrepreneurs. It’s mostly about their story and their struggles and that’s how they usually end up in something not common for 99% of the rest of us.