Sir,
Your article describes the misery of tech in Italy by looking at the wrong people – politicians and corporations. Successful tech countries like the US teach us that neither of the two has any part in creating a tech culture that promotes digitalisation. You need startups that become unicorns by delivering great user experiences and services to make digital technology commonplace. The best thing politicians in Italy as well as everywhere else in Europe can do to make this happen is: get out of the way. Corporations are helping a little more already, by demonstrating on a daily basis how urgently they’re waiting to get disrupted.
Having founded the Southern European business of a tech unicorn, I learned first hand that Italy does not lack entrepreneurial talent. My small team at Groupon was the oldest in Europe (avg. age 28), but in its third year delivered the highest revenues outside the US and most profitable business of 48 countries on 5 continents. This also showed that Italy is a great market for eCommerce – Italians bought coupons like few others. Also Italian merchants adopted technology better than most of their European peers. I saw first hand how, if presented with a good service and value for money, Italians can be as tech savvy as anybody else. I doubt “Io” can achieve any of that.
So what’s the issue? A lack of top business schools, a “stay at home into your 30ies” culture, strong risk averseness and no language skills are all impeding factors for young Italians to become tech entrepreneurs, to look abroad for inspiration and to give your moonshot idea a try. Another issue is the lack of serious VC funding. The 7 digit launch cash I could work with in 2010 to start my business in Italy, Spain and Portugal is something that more than a decade later Italian seed-stage startups can only dream of. In Silicon Valley this would be a joke. There are few funds, with small pockets, and meager portfolios. For foreign investors Italy is a no-go zone, with its archaic labor laws, tremendous bureaucracy, unreliable legal environment, no possibility to incentivize talent with stock options, and many other hurdles that make startup life almost impossible. What VCs and entrepreneurs in Italy both lack, is the vision for a disruptive business model at scale.
To be fair, all of these issues are not unique to Italy. Germany would be in the same situation, had three brothers not almost single handedly created a whole tech ecosystem in Berlin in the early 2000’s. The UK has profited from being the first “overseas” country US companies go to in Europe. Spanish unicorns had to rely on Latin American markets for scale.
If we want Italy, and Europe, to breed more Enzo Ferraris or Marco Polos in tech, we need less GDPR banners, more VC cash, and give young entrepreneurs a try.
