Thoughts by an Italian Tech entrepreneur abroad - Lessons Learned - Vincenzo Belpiede - Startup - Silicon Valley - San Francisco - Italy - Technology - Development - Investors - Fundraising
Thoughts by an Italian Tech entrepreneur abroad - Lessons Learned - Vincenzo Belpiede - Startup
1. Vincenzo Belpiede
Thoughts by an Italian entrepreneur
abroad
Factory Impresa Turismo
Falcade - Italy - July 2017
Connect with me on Facebook (Page) Linkedin Twitter Angelist
3. About Stellup: Fundraising Platform
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4. Sharing Learnings and
Lessons Learned
• General
• Team - HR
• Product
• Market
• Pitch
• Investors
Ask me for a list of
• Tools
• Readings
• Podcasts
• Pitch Deck Example
5. –Johnny Appleseed
Work on something you are super passionate about (so that
you won't have a to work a day in your life) body language
10. Be Persistent
“I'm convinced that about half of what
separates the successful entrepreneurs from
the non-successful ones is pure
perseverance.... Unless you have a lot
of passion about this, you're not going to
survive. You're going to give it up. So you've
got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong
that you want to right that you're passionate
about; otherwise, you're not going to have
the perseverance to stick it through.”
Read the book here
13. The Founder’s Dilemmas - Read it here
To become an entrepreneur you need 3 types of
capital: Human, Social and Financial
14. How to find a cofounder
Key to Have 3 different figures:
CEO: Sets the vision,
CTO: better if a full-stack developer
Design
Sales
Who is looking for a CTO / Developer?
Best
• Previous work experience
• Studied together
OK
• Hackathons
• Startup Weekends
Avoid: Job posts
15. If you don’t have a designer Behance might be a good place where to find one
https://www.behance.net/
27. Brian Chesky - Co-Founder and CEO at Airbnb
Ask users “What can we do to surprise you? What can we do, not to
make this better, but to make you tell everyone about it?” And that
answer is different. If I say, “What can I do to make this better?
29. Vincenzo Belpiede
B2C is hard, it’s hard to grow virally and exponentially and it’s hard
to make consumers pay. B2C typically needs huge investments.
Whenever you can start B2B as it pays bills earlier and faster
30. How to find or polish your startup idea?
Add Aaron Patzer image
31. Tourism Ideas
• Ticketing apps for museums to skip the line
to buy a ticket
• VR for historical sites (especially great for
Roman Forum and Acropolis)
• App to pay for Autostrade around Europe (in
Greece I was forced to pay with cash)
• Network on flights on ferries + choose
neighbors and cabin members
32. Do a ton of customer development or better “Sell before you build”
If you have Mac definitely use Sketch app https://www.sketchapp.com
33. By selling your ideas you clear out a lot of thinking
Add Tim O’Reilly image
35. Vincenzo Belpiede
Apply to accelerators and incubators, the application processes
alone are great ways to think more deeply about your
company, market, strategy, product, etc
36. Fundraising
All Mobile Fund
San Francisco Rome, Italy
$200,000 already raised from seed investors
$80,000 received in grants from two accelerators without giving out any equity
53. Let’s be ambitious as Italians
let’s catch up with Israel!
Italy Israel
Population 60.6m 8.5m
VC
investments
$200m $4.800m
VC $ per capita $3.3 $564.70
54. How a simple spreadsheet became a comprehensive, crowd-sourced map of the
Israeli startup scene (direct link)
55.
56. Silicon Valley / San Francisco
Specific Stuff
• Trends can matter: currently investors are looking into AI
machine learning, VR AR, IOT
• Building a startup just around a mobile app with smartphone
sale growth that has stalled is not a good idea
• It takes time to get funding from there, need to build
relationships, luckily you don’t need the whole team there,
just the CEO that needs to be a hustler, networker, pleasant
person,
• But it is possible: Fabrizio Capobianco with Funanbol and
TOK.TV and Marco Palladino at Mashape that raised +10m
USD but the CEO (possibly CTO) needs to spend years
there
57. Recommendations
Let’s network and help each other as entrepreneurs
Let’s build and share a Google Sheet with startups,
investors, corporations, accelerators, etc like the
Israelis did
Let’s be organized in going to California specifically
Bay Area (Invitalia should build a Casa Italia like at the
Olympics)
58. Italy is a great nation!
We should win in business and tech more like we do at
the Olympics and at the World Cup :D
63. Thank you - Grazie
Connect with Vincenzo Belpiede on Facebook (Page) Linkedin Twitter Angelist
64. Books
• The Lean Startup
• The Startup of You
• The Alliance
• Steve Jobs biography
• Elon Musk biography
• From Zero to One
• The Founder’s Dilemma
• The Hard Thing about Hard Things
65. Podcasts
• A16z (one of the largest Venture Capital firms
in the world)
• Masters of Scale