Carlo Alberto Degli Atti is an Italian entrepreneur with a strong passion for technology. He is the founder and the CEO of Concept, an Italian consulting software-house that helps customers make decisions by providing business intelligence consulting services and software solutions.
Q: How did your adventure start?
Everything started in the 1996, when -as a student in Computer Science at the University of Milan- I developed my dissertation in “Business Intelligence software & Data-warehouses systems” at Birra Moretti, an Italian brewing company. That experience was a magical and incredible series of events that led me to the idea of “software helping managers make decisions” which is the base of MyK.
How would you describe your product, MyK?
In 2004 we started to work on MyK, our EFM (Enterprise Feedback Management) software solution. Our product is a flexible data collection and analysis platform which can be used to perform market research on costumers and employees in order to optimize certain processes. Our customers can easily and quickly understand what their stakeholders want, what they expect, and say about their products, services and/or organization. This way they can act before those opinions become actual behaviors, such as switching to competitors' products or spreading bad opinions online. This has been shown to be very useful and powerful today in this fast changing, competitive and global world.
Is it something new to the market?
Definitely our product is something new because we're bringing tools to gather and analyze feedback, which are typical instruments of market research guys, to managers and organizations. However we use a business approach because we don't want our customers to become IT specialists and we don't want them to specialize in market research.
Which market do you want to reach?
Our market is the enterprise: every organization, for profit or non profit, with a large base of customers, employees or suppliers.
How did you end up here in Silicon valley? What was hard? What’s surprised you?
I chose to come here to Silicon Valley because this is an excellent observation point: a lot of things happen here very quickly. It's a simple and effective way to test your own ideas and get clear feedback. The first impression was a shock because of the many cultural differences; but in a few days you can understand how things work. And you can shift into high gears very quickly! It's really surprising and impressive to see how the technology is pervasive in everyday life; it's not a matter of how advanced this or that device is, but how widespread its use is. Another really striking point is related to speed and ease of networking: you can basically get to anyone very quickly, but you probably have just one opportunity to do, so you must be well prepared!
If there is a measure of the success of the team, what would that be?
Yes, we're still a small Italian company. Our measure of the success is to be able to install our software in Fortune 500 companies.
What’s next for the company?
We're working on two main things: we're trying to scale our business out of the borders of Italy in a very short time. The second one is undisclosed :-)
How did the Baia Network help or how could it be of greater value to Italian entrepreneurs and investors?
I don't know very much about the Baia Network, so I cannot answer precisely. But this is also a good point: as an italian entrepreneur I hadn't heard about BAIA before I decided to fly to the US. So maybe you could spread the word more in Italy by “bringing the American way” to the Italian context (ie working very closely with the local associations, such as Assolombarda, Giovani Imprenditori, Roberto Bonzio and so on). By that I mean “doing team building in Italy”.
Rossella Florio
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