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| Well, it might be the worst...
I'm on the train, starting my short getaway to Austria and Germany. I've been working all days of the holiday season and this short break is defintely needed (and well deserved...).
In the last weeks a lot of new stuff is coming out. Following Filippo's resignation from dPixel, I've been working with Gianluca on SmartRM and Crowdengineering, the two "stars" in our portfolio and am now working hard to get these companies to their milestones (q1 and q2 2010).
What I'm more happy about is that not only I am working hard (a lot harder than in 2009 with almost the same energy I used in Bain), but I'm a lot more focused (which implied saying "no" to several business, ideas and other stuff I was working on) and really determined.
If I get the milestones and am able to share these feelings with my team, I know that 2010 will be best year ever.
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| Few weeks ago, following the advice on Augusto Marietti, I joined airbnb.com, a website where anyone can list his/her room or apartment and people cna rent it out.
Airbnb is a YCombinator company and secured financing from Sequoia Capital, the most important VC fund of the world. I love the website GUI and use it as a benchmark.
I listed my living room sofa (Milan's best ever sofa) and waited until Sabrina Relaix hooked me up inquiring for 1 night stay on Jan 2nd. We exchanged some information about ourself and we set up a meeting time. Yesterday night I met with Sabrina and her boyfriend in Milan, they already had dinner (I suggested a real Milan place which they enjoyed) but came with Max and I out for a pizza. We had a fast tour of the city (the Castle, v. Dante, v. Mercanti, La Scala) and finally got to my place; told them about kitchen, bathroom and we went sleeping. Had brekafast together this morning and explained something about Milan and their following destination (Venice).
Overall a great experience - Sabrina and Mike are super nice, they both are into technology (post-doc researchers at Kent State Univeristy, Columbus, OH) working on LCD physics. We talked about technology, VC investing, their career, the Internet, my portfolio companies and so on - will do it again!
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| On December 26th I watched a TG2 Dossier titled "Gli anni zero" which recalls the biggest event in the closed decade (2000-2009). I found it again on rai.tv and wanted to share.
I'm also sharing December 31st editorial of Sergio Romano (whom I generally don't like) who discuss the same topic focusing (last section) on the silent changes on Italy (which I don't really see, neither agree on)
If I look the past and see my "zero years" I can be satisfied as I believe I completed my 2nd decade of "learning" (which perfectly fits in my life path - I'll blog about this later) as I graduated from Bocconi (2001) and Columbia (2006), learned some financials and sales skills (Euromobiliare), some technical and managerial skills (Bain) and, finally, understood what is really important to me (entrepreneurial mindset). Surely there were negatives in this decade (more than anything else my dad's loss and the 3 motorbike crashes) but positives were a lot more.
For 2010-2019 I expect
- big success with dPixel (with us being able to establish an entrpreneurial ecosystem, and make a lot of money!)
- a more stable personal life (I want to create a family by decade's end - not before 2015 yet!)
- a lot of fun with friends and other people I might get to know
I can't call for an improvement of Italy's on both economic and social terms as I can't see anyone who might be able to drive the change.
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