BAIAblog

An Interview with Massimo Scognamiglio, CEO of D-Helix

Massimo Scognamiglio is the founder and CEO of D-Helix a new biotech company based in San Francisco with strong roots in Italy. Massimo is approaching business with an angle that is quite unusual in Italy: he is trying to combine the best academic resources with a solid business structure and plan. While Silicon Valley success is based on this kind of connection, in the Italian business landscape Massimo is still an exception. In order to learn more about Massimo's entrepreneurial adventure I invited him for an interview. Enjoy!

Massimo, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your company?

In my opinion the most important part of life is curiosity. When it doesn't kill the cat. It is an extraordinary source of knowledge that you first learn as a little kid. And if you can retain that curiosity, it can become the most important source of knowledge. Obviously that's not enough - you also need to study and have some luck. My curiosity led me to try to understand the mechanism that governs the world around us. I guess "curiosity" it's part of my DNA. However, what explains my actions best is the concept of multitasking: my life is multitasking. Everybody knows that you have only one life that has to be shared with your friends, your love, your society and your professional life... so for this reason you can't sleep too much and you have to live your life to the fullest. And the most important part of that life is to maintain your integrity.
Talking about my company, it's difficult to start a biotech company, but it's possible if you can see the business opportunity. I have this opportunity and I turned it into reality, much the same way as my first venture. In 1996 I founded a multimedia company in Italy at a time when the market was not quite ready even for the concept of the internet. However, I was successful in convincing the market. It also gave me the opportunity to grow as entrepreneur. I understood that you have to risk your own money, your stable job, the most precious years of your life, and all your passion. In 2000 I sold my first company (xmedia) to the most important media group in Italy. Years later, here I am in California. D-Helix, my company, was incorporated in San Francisco in April, 2006: It is the project that builds the bridge between academic discoveries and the industry. You don't realize how many great discoveries never see daylight because they are hiding in the university. Our main business is to fill this gap by sponsoring early stage research in many biotech areas. Even thought the risk is greater, so is the payoff. At the same time, we think that we are on an important mission for society: transforming these groundbreaking technologies for the real world.

With your company you are building a business bridge between Italy and California. Can you explain the reason behind this choice?

Italy is so beautiful, the perfect place to live but it's not the right place to be an entrepreneur. California is the perfect place to start up a global company based on a global network between universities and research labs all around the world, between United States, Spain and Japan.

San Francisco, the Silicon Valley, and the Bay Area are becoming key places for the biotech industry. How favorable is the business environment in Italy for biotech startups?

As I said before, Italy, today, is not a simple place to work like entrepreneur, and the university research environment is even worst: we have some great university and great scientists but absolutely no entrepreneurial culture... for too many years (and probably also today) research has been considered a loss of money and not a gasoline for new companies and for the Country.

Starting up a company is a difficult job. Based on your experience what are the most common errors new entrepreneurs should avoid?

The one billion dollar question... the first answer that comes to mind is avoid arriving too soon: you risk being not understood, and you must have a "marketable idea." The second error is to choose bad associates: do not trust from the very beginning, build the trust day by day... You must remember that even the greatest idea needs a great team and great marketing to reach the market. For these reason I believe that D-Helix could be a winner: biotechnology is becoming mature, from the business and scientific side, and, at the same time, our associates are strongly committed to the company. When I present my company to an audience, I emphasize not only the business/scientific side but also my spirit, my vision, my very personal way of seeing the world, and my commitment.

You are a strong supporter of the connection between academia and business. How do you manage the bureaucracy of the Italian academia in a way that makes sense from the business point of view?

We are currently working in the United States. D-Helix is active in scouting, acquiring, developing, and commercializing groundbreaking intellectual property licensed from a number of universities and research institutes in particular areas of biotechnology (with current focus on environmental stress plant tolerance, biofuels, and antiviral treatment possibilities.) The company’s business model is represented by an independent innovative platform (made of a strong research world wide network of leading scientists with a deep pipeline of development), able to accelerate the research value creation time to market and reduce related direct costs. We will soon begin collaborating with some Italian universities, so wish us good luck! The bureaucracy is awful and it's still one of the most important difficulties when working with universities. You can't manage bureaucracy. If you are a very lucky boy, you can just survive bureaucracy!

Fundraising is one of the most critical steps for new entrepreneurs. Any recommendations?

A very good Business Plan, a short Time to Market, and a clear competitive advantage. Then great imagination and luck.

BAIA has plans to promote on Italian land the Silicon Valley open approach to business network. What will Italians have to change in order to fully benefit from those types of social relationships?

The network is the most important issue, more than the money. In Italy the network is always a closed network, you can't talk directly to anybody. The Californian way is the opposite: it's not a matter of friendship, it's just business.

I would like to thank Massimo Scognamiglio for taking the time to speak with me today. If you have any questions for Massimo or for BAIA, please leave a comment below and we will be glad to answer.

Franco Folini

An Interview with Giorgio Manfredi, Founder and President of Kallideas

Giorgio Manfredi is the founder and President of Kallideas a hi-tech Italian company. Kallideas approaches business in a dynamic and innovative way. Instead of waiting for support from Italian institutions, as many Italians companies like to do, this cutting-edge company is pro-actively building an international network of connections with top universities, research labs, and business associations like BAIA. The person that founded Kallideas and that continues to inspire it is Giorgio Manfredi. Here is a short interview with Giorgio.

Giorgio, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your company?

We were born at the end of 2002 with a mission to realize innovative projects in the field of business-users relations. Our reference customers were mainly telco and media agencies. Among our main customers there are Vodafone, Fastweb, Cartasì, Nokia, Dell, Motorola, etc. Our background is seated in the university and telecommunications fields. I represent its synthesis since I worked in both of them: I worked for many years as an associated researcher at the INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics). Afterwards I worked in several companies specializing in system architecture design for computer-telephony (CTI), Vodafone (then Omnitel) was one of them.  For over a year, Kallideas has focused its efforts on the K-Human™ project, passing all the other assets to Key-One, one of the companies we control. Kallideas strengths are surely the people who work in it and the great work environment we were able to create: a real lab where technology, design, and creativity are well combined. Cultivating relations with the university research world is one of the main focuses of our assets, directed to constantly feed this “will to explore”. With the K-Human™ project we have gained a good visibility in Italy and Europe. The level of this project allowed us to get in touch with sector leaders in the field of technology for communication (obviously on this side of the Atlantic!) It is our intention to make the most of the opportunity we had to grow up and make Kallideas a presence also in the American market.

Kallideas is proposing an integrated approach to different channels and media (voice, video, text) of interaction with the end-user or customer. How do you manage to combine a general approach while exploiting the specific nature of each media?

There are two types of integration that need to be considered. The first, purely technical, relates to the choice of having a very same platform able to integrate different channels and media. We have developed a very flexible and modular software architecture that allows us to easily add any kind of input devices (such as web, telephones, touch screens, but we could just as easily add facial recognition devices which could give us information on user's experience) and output devices without ever having to reconfigure the platform itself. Our approach therefore integrates various channels and media from a technical point of view. The second type of integration relates of course to the content that is being treated over different media and channels. Here too, it's necessary to distinguish between knowledge acquisition (i.e. understanding what our K-Human™ virtual assistants have to do by discussing with our clients and analyzing their available data) and the interaction that is then presented to the final users. Knowledge acquisition is, of course, media independent: understanding and building model logics is related to client's business, not to the channels the interaction with the final users will be done on. Therefore, our approach integrates procedures independently from the channels and media that will be used. On the contrary to technology and knowledge acquisition for which media and channels do not matter, we actually do have different interactions designed according to the nature of each media: on the phone, for instance, conversations have to be much shorter than what you can typically have over the web, and it would be suicidal not to differentiate such channels. Our whole policy is based on making machines come closer to the human ways of interacting, not the other way around. Our approach for designing interaction is therefore to use common logic but allow specific discussion flow decisions to be taken according to the media and channel the interaction is taking place on.

Another new idea of Kallideas is to integrate emotions in the interaction with the user. Diego Ventura, in an interview on this blog, said that is better not to emulate human emotion "to set the proper expectations for the customer". What is your position on this topic?

This coin has two sides: one is of potential problems, the other of potential opportunities. Let me start from the potential problems. ACM Digital Library is packed of papers about human behavior emulation's pros and cons. Most cons basically relate to a risk called "Uncanny Valley" that predicts a sort of repulsive response when robots are too much similar but distinguishable from a human being. In our point of view, we are still far from experiencing such a situation, and considering that Masahiro Mori (the scientist that first introduced the Uncanny Valley concept) focused his attention on robots, we believe that this risk is something related to a human like robot with a physical presence, not to an avatar that needs a screen to be visualized. No physical body, no Uncanny Valley. Now, about the opportunities. I see various different levels of opportunities for our K-Humans™ virtual assistants. First of all, people are connected as it has never before been experienced in the whole human history. Due to competition issues, companies need to overexpose themselves on different media and channels, and strive to face the raising number of interactions with people. Nowadays, companies need to talk with customers, partners, and third players more than ever. This is the time when companies can bet on intelligent and pleasant automatic systems, which are the only way to deal with the amount of contacts required by their overexposure. It is something already here, we are not talking about a nearby future. In the Long Tail era user interfaces are "conversational" interfaces. Think for a while on the blog revolution and how it changed the way in which people write and share text documents. Today, another revolution is taking place: social networks are taking the shapes of Second Life, Nintendo's Wii and Mii, and PlayStation's "Home" virtual world. You may ask yourself a question: are you ready for a world in which everyone has avatars? Companies needs to talk the language their target users talk, and undoubtly virtual assistants are a relevant part of this new environment which is coming just one or two years from now. Our 'second level' of opportunities. This thought drives me to the last point. Humans (atoms) and machines (bytes) have experienced a deep gap in the past. In the near future we will find hundreds of ways to fill this gap. New hardware, new mobile devices, new interfaces: machines need human-like behaviors. We are producing culture, by developing technologies and 3D engines, by researching in the modeling of human-like emotions and human behaviors. We have started to build a piece of future.

When you add emotions to pseudo-human intermediaries between the user and the software application, you must also consider how different cultures express and handle emotions. What is your approach to this challenge?

This is easy: user profiling.

Interacting with a software application or database at a level so close to natural language requires trust in your technology. For example, if I check my bank account using one of your human-like interfaces, I want to be sure my questions are fully understood and the answers I receive are accurate. How do you build trust in your users?

From our experience, trust results from the level of the perceived professionalism of the technology a user is confronted with and the familiarity of the interface he's using to interact. We build on professionalism by using AI to enable our K-Humans™ virtual assistants disambiguate and identify users' real needs. We are the layer in between humans and machines: we therefore interact with users to ensure that the questions they ask correspond to what they really desire, and help them complete their request with the data they eventually didn't think of or remember. By enhancing all the human aspects of our K-Humans™ virtual assistants, such as displaying emotions or having a sense of humor, we build immediate confidence and familiarity since users find in them the behaviors of real persons. Our users always refer to our assistants calling them by their name: this says a lot about their way of approaching our technology.

The integration between the knowledge base and the interaction technologies (avatar and similar) position your company among the most advanced in this area. Do you think promoting innovation from Italy is more difficult than it would be promoting it from here in the Silicon Valley?

I believe every market has its own prerogatives. Silicon Valley sure is an enriching place, it would be interesting to see the inevitable synergies that would derive from being close to so many innovative companies.

You are considering creating an outpost of your company here in California. What are your plans and expectations for this idea?

We think that the opportunity to develop virtual humans is just at its beginning. It's obvious that the US is a seductive market, but what is really relevant for us is to identify who will lead in the next steps of this evolution. Our K-Human™ virtual assistants are in pole position right now, but to stay there we need to cooperate with the best minds, companies, and universities on the planet. We perceive this field as something that is accelerating more every single day. Today the market is focused on specific applications, such as call center applications, info-points, or educational tools; but in a few years who knows what our experience could be used for: the movie industry, video-games, or -why not- developing a physical human-like virtual assistant.

I would like to thank Giorgio Manfredi for taking the time to speak with me today. If you have any questions for Giorgio or for BAIA, please leave a comment below and we will be glad to answer.

Franco Folini

An Interview with Mauro Lupi, CEO of Ad Maiora

Mauro Lupi is the president and CEO of Ad Maiora, an Italian Internet marketing agency. His blog is one of the top 20 Italian blogs. Mauro doesn't need any additional introduction to BAIA members; he was a panelist for a BAIA event held here in San Francisco last February about Blogs and Marketing (check the videos). In my daily excursions to Mauro's blog I always find it to be a place where people can exchange opinions in a respectful yet profound way. I asked Mauro for this interview with the hidden agenda of capturing his secret for a successful blog. Read the interview to find out what I was able to discover.

Mauro, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your company?
My last 12 years are devoted to internet business, mostly of them through Ad Maiora, an agency based in Rome with offices on Milan and San Francisco, that I founded in 1997. My past experiences was in marketing and advertising in financial sector, then computer and telco industries. Ad Maiora is specialized in online marketing services, search marketing and business blogging services and consulting.

You are one of the most popular bloggers in Italy . You managed to get there without screaming or attacking anybody. I can see a bit of your style in your blogʼs comments. Which other features of your personality do you recognize in your readers?
I think that the blog owners is the first influencer on comments quality. It's like when you invite someone in your house: if your guest find an ordered environment, probably he will asks where hang his coat; instead, if he sees confusion everywhere, he will leave his coat in any place. If you scream, everyone will do the same.
Other important element it's the relation with other companies in the same marketplace, expecially with competitors. A fair approach, talking about them when it's opportune with links to their sites, receive trust and normally it's reciprocal.

You wrote more than once about the importance of managing your own time. A blog, if not well managed, can absorb quite a lot of personal time. Do you have any specific advice for bloggers?
First, look to any of current content material you produce now: sometimes there are many stuffs that should be used as blog content, and it means less time to produce them.
In any case, consider blogs like one of other communication channels where the time and budget reserved to them should based on ROI evaluation.

Many SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts claims that what is good for your website Google ranking is always good for your visitors. Is this statement always valid? How can technologies such as Ajax and search-engines interact effectively?
I'm not fully in line with this assumption. Some technologies like Flash or Ajax, could be coherent with the website strategies and so used even if they create problems on search engines ranking. My point of view it's that there isn't a single "best way" to create a website, because the users preferences are different too. Some likes emotional communication, others need concise information; some use to visit home pages, others prefers to subscribe RSS or email newsletter.
Search engines are a kind of "special user": they like many text, focused on specific topics, well inter-linked on the web site and updated incrementally frequently. Then they like incoming links. So, there isn't a secret recipe: it's opportune to start with users in mind and then see if the contents produced match the search engines principles. If not, should be necessary to produce other optimized contents.

As the CEO of an Italian company, Ad Maiora, do you perceive the language barrier (English-Italian) more as a protection for your domestic market or as an obstacle for global growth?
Both. But considering that the globalization is an on-going process in every business sector, I think that the language barriers will be continuously reduced year after year. At the same time, I feel that together with language it's the culture the real key point that creates distances through markets. "Culture" both in the way to conduct business and also regarding the experience in international relations. What I see it's that for countries like Italy, the difficult it's to scale a project when it was thinked for local market originally. I believed that you could deliver a project to a global market only if you start it with a global approach from the beginning.

Your blog seems to be shy in promoting your company: there is no logo, no prominent links. How separate are the two entities: the blog and the company? Can you also tell us about the exchange of ideas, connections, experiences between Mauro the CEO and Mauro the blogger?
I write about what I have in mind and what I do regarding my work, so I write about my job and my company continuously even if it's not specified directly. For example, when I write about a conference where I talk, the non-written words are that my company and myself have gained the authority to participate to the event. And when I share my visions, in fact I talked about the vision of my company and the knowledge inside it. Call that "information marketing" if you want; the fact it's that companies likes to find some expert that demonstrate time after time their knowledge, their visions, outside the standard marketing (read "advertising") ways. The blog it's a simple ways to demonstrate it; of course you must have some interesting to say!

I would like to thank Mauro Lupi for taking the time to speak with me today. If you have any questions for Mauro or for BAIA, please leave a comment below and we will be glad to answer.

Franco Folini

An Interview with Marco Palombi, Italian Entrepreneur

Marco Palombi is a special Italian entrepreneur and blogger. After starting a very successful company (Tipic, Inc.), he wants to share his experience helping Italy and Italians to be more competitive and to develop a stronger entrepreneurial attitude. To me this sounds like a perfect match with the BAIA mission. Even if the Silicon Valley business model can't be implemented in Italy, as Marco made clear, he still looks at California as a reference and inspirational model. It's time to get Marco's first hand opinion on these topics. Here is the interview.

Marco, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your company?
I consider myself a serial entrepreneur. I sold the latest company I founded 6 months ago and now I am helping with its integration; meanwhile I am trying to figure out what the next big thing is.
When I sold it, Tipic Inc. had developed Splinder.com into the largest community and blogging site in Italy with 5.5 Million unique users per month. I sold it to Dada SpA, which is part of the Rizzoli Corriere della Sera Media Group.
Tipic Inc. is a very advanced technology company too; we developed the first Jabber Instant Messaging Server for Windows in 2002, the first mobile Jabber client for J2ME, etc. I was a Member of the Board of Directors of the Jabber Software Foundation in 2002/2003. I have a blog, and you can find more info about me there.

There is a lot talk in Italy about importing the Silicon Valley business model to foster the growth of new companies. What is missing in Italy that could prevent the successful replication of this model there?
Importing the Silicon Valley business model as a whole is not possible because there are too many things that are missing, not only in Italy, but in Europe in general. The most important missing piece of the puzzle is a market for products and services offered by start-up companies.
Let me explain this in detail because I have been through this for the past 10 years and have developed a good understanding of the situation. When you start a technology company -- once you assemble the team, create the product, and finance the company -- you must start selling the product or offering the service. That's where Italy and Europe have a lot of catch-up to do with Silicon Valley; large and medium Italian companies do not invest in products or services created by start-ups, because they are not in a competitive market and are not forced to experiment with new technology. An Italian start-up with the best product would probably start selling it in its home market 3 to 5 years after a US start-up with an equivalent product.
Finding money and bright people is possible in Italy; finding a market for a technology company is very hard on the other hand. Our hope is to do what Swedish or Israeli companies do: develop the product at home and sell it in the US first. That's what we did with the Instant Messaging products we developed in Naples, Italy. Our first customers were NASA, the US Army, and many other medium and large US companies. The first Italian company to buy our wares was Tiscali, 3 years after we had sold the first server to a US company.

Business social networking, both online and in person, seems to be one of the key components of Silicon Valley success.  Regarding the building and maintaining of business relationships, what is better to handle online and what in person?
Nowadays I do not see any difference between online and offline any more. I have a blog, and use it instead of a business card, or together with it. You meet someone in person, chat a bit and then refer him to your blog. On the Internet you can search for people, starting from what they do, something which was impossible before. Some of the people that worked for Tipic Inc. had never met in person, although they actually worked online together everyday.
That being said, you still need to meet in person for casual conversations. That's when unexpected opportunities arise!

Can you describe a little about your First Generation Network initiative you’re setting up with Michele Appendino? What are the current and long term goals for this program?
Italy's economy has not grown much in the past 20 years. We think that that is due, among other things, to the lack of innovative first generation entrepreneurs.
The current goal of the First Generation Network is to show that Italy has some valid first generation entrepreneurs; these entrepreneurs can be role models for a new wave of young entrepreneurs. We started by interviewing some first generation entrepreneurs, and posting the video online.
The most common misconception in Italy is that for you to be an entrepreneur your dad must be one. This feeling is so ingrained that *real* entrepreneurs seem to be only the second generation ones.
The long term goal is to create a Network of Entrepreneurs and Friends of the Network that can spark an ecosystem where it is easier than it is now to start and grow your own company.

Young entrepreneurs can be concerned about sharing their ideas and experiences with others. How can we motivate them to share their experiences and benefit from others’ experiences?
We must create a win-win situation where young entrepreneurs participate because that gives them access to knowledge, resources, visibility and people (Friends of the Network); we ask them to contribute to the Network by sharing some of their knowledge.

You are a popular blogger and Splinder, your previous company, is about blogs. In a world where almost everybody connected to the Internet seems to have a blog, having great content is not enough to be noticed anymore. How can an individual or a business attract readers to their blog in such a crowded environment?
I would say that the rules have not changed. Having great content is still very important. What has changed is the fact that we hear many more voices today, now that anyone can have a blog.
Thanks to the Internet, we do not live into a broadcast world anymore; now you can interact and communicate directly with your friends and partners; and you must nurture and build your own networks everyday.

A few years ago, when I moved to California, I noticed and learned to appreciate one great feature of the local business environment: professional roles are well-defined and each person is responsible for his part. For example, an investor is responsible for choosing the manager but after that should not interfere with the management of the company. My Italian experience was quite different.  Do you see this situation changing in Italy with the appearance of a new generation of entrepreneurs?
Yes, I see a change mostly when you interact with people that have studied or had a significant work experience in the UK or the US. Changing the culture is the most difficult thing to do.  We think that a good way to start is showing positive role models.
The problem and opportunity in Italy (and Europe) is that ideologies are waning and there are no clear role models anymore. We think that ethical, responsible, innovative, first generation entrepreneurs can be a model for the new generations in a fast evolving society.

What can a business association like BAIA do to help young Italian entrepreneurs succeed?
Well it can do very much. When I founded my latest company, I had no idea how to start a company in the US, how to contact possible buyers of the technology; had to work hard to find partners who could help me with communicating what I was doing (from Italy) in Silicon Valley.
An association like BAIA can provide all the above and much more. It is important for Italian entrepreneurs to know that they can talk to someone who understands them, yet someone who is fully integrated in the Valley.
Thanks to the Internet, there are a lot of new opportunities for entrepreneurs (and a lot of competition too). BAIA can provide competitive advantages to Italian companies wanting to expand into the Valley.

I would like to thank Marco Palombi for taking the time to speak with me today. If you have any questions for Marco or for BAIA, please leave a comment below and we will be glad to answer.

Franco Folini

The picture is a Photoshop elaboration based on an original by Shel Israel.

An Interview with Diego Ventura, Founder and CEO of noHold

Diego Ventura is the CEO of noHold, a company that provides services based on Artificial Intelligence. Diego is a well-known and highly respected member of the Italian community in Silicon Valley. I thought that it would be of interest to our readers to have Diego share his experiences as an Italian entrepreneur in the US. Here is the interview:

Diego, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your company, noHold?
I was born in Trento, Italy, but I consider my hometown to be Pordenone where my parents a brother and a sister still live.  Pordenone is about one hour away from Venice. I attended high school there at the Liceo Scientifico and then got a degree in Computer Science with the University of Maryland. I met my wife, Tammy who is from California, in Aviano where she was stationed with the U.S. Air Force. We have a son, Francesco (20) and a daughter, Stephany (18).  I founded noHold in 2000, raised about $15M and created an expert system, we call InstantSupport™ that helps big companies reduce support cost, by providing technical support automatically without human intervention. The solution manages millions of sessions per year for customers like Microsoft, Cisco, Acer, etc.

Artificial Intelligence has been promising exceptional results for many years. Only now, when it’s not anymore the coolest area of Computer science, AI is starting to deliver interesting results. Why now and not before?
I agree with your comment, but just to be specific, I will limit my answer to the area of AI we work with, Expert Systems. A solution like ours needs several ingredients to work well:  Smart algorithms, easy connectivity and fast execution.  The smart algorithms may have also been available in the 80s, although things improve all the time, but ease of connectivity and fast execution were definitely lacking back then.  There was no Internet, so creating a scenario where millions of people could easily connect to a single computer system was unthinkable.  Processor speeds were order of magnitude slower than what we have today, so even if the main algorithms to mimic inference did exist, they could not be executed fast enough from the machine of that time. In my opinion AI is still cool, but with the added bonus of being practical.

In competitive environments, it is becoming more important that companies communicate effectively with their customers by not only providing the right answers to their inquiries but also by recognizing and empathizing with their emotions. How well can software applications handle the emotional level of communication?
We found that it is absolutely key to be straightforward with end users to create a constructive experience.  We refrain from using avatars or smiley faces for our user interface, because it is important to set the proper expectations for the customer.  We tell them that we are an automatic tool and that we will try to get them as fast as possible to the right solution for them. If we are not successful, we will promptly escalate them to an agent via live chat, email or phone.  One way to think about it is to consider what happened with Banking.  Banks have trained us in using ATMs and now for certain operations, like just getting cash, people prefer ATMs, they don’t want to walk into a branch and spend some time in line. I think the same can be achieved with solutions like ours. However, the key is to choose the right battles, situations were the emotional component is predominant should be handled by humans.

The interaction between a service and its users is quickly spreading over several media: phone, IM, webpage, etc. How is your company addressing this proliferation of channels?
The name of the game here is “Interconnectivity”. noHold is and wants to continue to be a point solution that is best of breed in its space, but we recognize the importance of other communication channels. Therefore, our strategy is to connect and integrate with applications that take advantage of other communication channels. We can currently connect with the most popular Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. We can escalate our virtual agent sessions to live chat systems or email and we are considering partnerships with companies that provide voice recognition functionality, so that the whole solution can be used over the phone.

The dot-com collapse ended up destroying not only poorly conceived startups but also several companies based on solid business models. How did your company manage not only to survive but also to grow during those times?
We got our first round of financing in the summer of 2000, right after the burst of the “Bubble”. A really bad time because investors expectations were still pretty high, but the market had crashed.  We were lucky enough to recognize the change and adjust for it; we knew we were in for a marathon, not a sprint.  I think a lot of companies ignored the signs and kept spending like there was no tomorrow. I actually believe that the Italian background here helped quite a bit.  Let’s not forget that my generation was raised by wonderful people who saw the Second World War and knew the meaning of saving and being resourceful, so thank you mamma e babbo! The other element that helped us was the character of the people my team is made of. I am talking about resilient, battle-tested professionals who never gave up even in the toughest situations.

Would it be possible for a business like noHold to be based in Italy?
Yes! We are a software company, so all you need are smart dedicated people to make things happen. I have to say that however, there is nothing like the fertile grounds of the Silicon Valley for a young startup. Ultimately the ideal scenario is a company with a presence both in Italy and the U.S.

The Silicon Valley and the Bay Area continue to attract young entrepreneurs from Italy. Based on your experience do you have any recommendations for them?
Here is what worked for me:

• Work hard and smart
• Try to get to know as many people as possible and be nice to all of them.  It really is a small world
• Stay true to your roots.  At first I was concerned about my accent when making a presentation for example. Now I see it has an advantage, all the ladies say it is cute and the guys remember it!

I would like to thank Diego Ventura for taking the time to speak with me today. If you have any questions for Diego or for BAIA, please leave a comment below and we will be glad to answer.

Franco Folini

An Interview with Ian Wright, Founder and CEO of Wrightspeed

Ian Wright is CEO of Wrightspeed, the Californian company working to bring high performance electric cars to the market. Before founding Wrightspeed in January 2005, Ian was vice-president of vehicle development at Tesla Motors. Last week at an electric sportscars event in San Francisco organized by BAIA, Ian presented the X1 prototype to a group of car enthusiasts and business people. I invited him to participate in the following interview to delve deeper into some of the interesting topics that were brought up during his presentation.

Ian, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your company?
Sure. I have an engineering background, mostly in data communications equipment. But I used to build and race cars as a hobby, when I lived in Australia. I’ve always been interested in performance cars, and also in electric cars. I guess the engineer in me likes the unbeatable efficiency, and the nice match of the torque curve to the demand. But in the past, I didn’t think it was worth building electric cars, because the batteries just weren’t good enough to make an interesting car.
Now they are… if you wanted to, you could build an electric car with 500 mile range. Or more than a thousand horsepower. Or one in which the batteries would last 15 years, and 250,000 miles. But you can’t do all of that in the same car, and you can’t make a cheap electric car. So trade-offs are necessary.
But one trade-off suffered by internal combustion (IC) cars does not apply to electric cars. In an IC car, if you design for performance, the car will be thirsty even if driven carefully. If you design for efficiency, the car will be slow. This is not true for electric cars. You can design for very high performance, without any loss of efficiency (compared with low performance electric car). Possibly even at some efficiency gain.
In 2005 I founded Wrightspeed to build extreme performance electric cars, which would make use of this very interesting property of electric drive-systems. The first thing I did was build a high performance prototype, to test the concept, and to gauge customer reaction.

The X1 prototype seems to be showcase to attract investorsʼ attention and to display your skills in building high-performance electric cars. What did you learn from that prototype and from people's reactions to it?
It’s been very educational. I expected that the X1 prototype would appeal only to a very narrow slice of humanity: some subset of racing drivers. And part of the objective was to get a sense of the size of that slice – would it support a startup company?
Also, I didn’t really expect any media attention, and I did expect that the prototype would be something that anyone could drive.
I was wrong on all counts. (I did predict the actual performance numbers, and the car actually meets the predictions. So the engineering was OK…)
Firstly, the styling, concept, performance, and the fact that it’s electric, appeal to an amazing wide spectrum of people. Not just racing drivers. From little kids (I’ve done show-and-tell at a couple of schools) to strong silent types driving pickup trucks, to grandmothers, homeless people up in SF, professional racing drivers, and even most of the law enforcement people I’ve met…
I’m collecting some great stories. Perhaps my favorite so far is about the very elderly lady I met outside Bucks in Woodside one day. (There was the usual crowd around the car.) She was walking very slowly by, using a cane, and stopped to ask all the usual questions. She asked very good questions, and was obviously fascinated. Her last question was “And how much will the production version cost?” I said “Oh, about $120k.” She thought about this for a moment – clearly weighing the cost/value – then said “Well! That’s less than the Rolls!” And off she went.
And the car has had some awesome media exposure: Business 2.0, Autoweek, Discovery Channel, PBS, KRON4, IEEE Spectrum, Wired, Die Zeit, Radio NZ, Robb Report (March feature article)… without any requests from us. Before that first test, the drag race against the Carrera GT, November 2005, I did call a few journalists, to suggest that there might be a story about to happen. Not one called me back, and I thought “I guess they are not interested in electric cars. They’ve been there…”
The next TV piece is Discovery Channel, end of May.
And the hardest lesson was foreshadowed by the friend I took for the first demo ride. He said, as we parked after the ride, “You know Ian, this is too much car for most people.” A couple of weeks later, I met a mutual friend, and let him drive. He normally drives a Porsche Turbo, and I coached him on the fact that there is so much torque, that if you are not going exactly straight, using full “throttle” will cause the car to spin. Immediately. It’s catchable, but everything happens fast, so you have to be in a heightened state of adrenalin… It was Highway 9, out of Saratoga. There were very slightly damp patches… he did the first corner fine, right at the point that I thought was the upper end of safe. The next corner, he wasn’t going too fast, at all. But before he straightened the wheel, he nailed the accelerator. The rear tires can only do so much, so… around we go. He lifted his foot immediately, but forgot the opposite lock. Sadly there was a power pole there… No injuries, just the feeling of being a helpless passenger. I hate that.
It took a while to absorb that lesson. We plan for the production car to have stability control, preventing this kind of accident. There’s quite a bit of development involved.

In order to build your prototype you had many options. Why did you choose the Ariel among the several "rolling chassis" available (e.g., Ultima, Noble)?
Well, I’d driven one, with 190hp Rover engine, a few years before. And fallen in love. It’s the lightest thing out there that you can drive on the street. And Simon Saunders, the designer and founder of Ariel, is a really interesting guy. I’ve learned a lot from him. I’ve met Lee Noble, the designer of the Ultima and the Noble (but haven’t driven his cars). He’s a really interesting guy too (England seems to be the place for this sort of thing.) But in the end, I was looking for the lightest weight. 1500 lbs for the complete car was the target. I missed by 36 lbs.

The electric car is a hot topic with new companies and products (Tesla, Zap, etc.) popping up every other day. How do you plan to compete with them?
I don’t. I plan to compete with Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, and to some extent Mercedes. The electric car companies intend to compete ultimately with Toyota. They are selling efficiency; I’m selling performance. Extreme performance. I do think it’s great to have several startup companies in California attacking different parts of the market.

According to your CBO (Chief Business Officer) Marv Bush (source), your plan is to build a car with electric motors on each wheel. Some expert believes that this is not a viable solution for high-performance cars. What is your opinion on that?
Hmmm, sounds like a cocktail party misapprehension. It’s certainly true that motors in the wheels increase the unsprung mass to a very large degree. And in performance cars, ultimately, it’s all about getting the most grip from the tires at all times. And that requires keeping them in contact with the road, which is much easier if the weight that moves up and down with the tire is very low compared with the weight of the rest of the car. There are also subtleties to do with feedback to the driver through the steering wheel (self aligning torque, confused by driving the front wheels), and the fact that the way electric motors scale, it’s lighter to make one big one than 4 smaller ones, for the same peak power.
It’s also true that we have no intention of using motors in the wheels. We are building extreme performance cars, not buses.

Switching from gasoline to electricity could have a strong impact on many aspects of a car, from the shape to the weight distribution. What differences can we expect to see in the next electric car?
Good observation. There is certainly more freedom about mass distribution, and possibly less cooling air required. Stay tuned, the next version will be quite different from the prototype. Sorry I can’t say more right now.

You're showing your ideas and skills in order to raise the first round of funding. Based on this experience, do you have any recommendations to share with other new entrepreneurs?
This is the first time I’ve actually built a working prototype before looking for funding. I recommend it, if it’s at all possible. It keeps you talking to customers, anchored in the real world, and it proves a lot to potential investors.

We can say that the recent BAIA (Business Association Italy America) event held at the ClubSportiva in San Francisco has been very successful. What has your experience been like with BAIA?
Great! I didn’t know what to expect, but I had a great time. Good people, great questions, good food! I’ve met some interesting people.

I would like to thank Ian Wright for taking the time to speak with me today, and Cristiano Sacchi for his invaluable guidance in helping me understand technical aspects of high performance cars. If you have any questions for Ian or for BAIA, please leave a comment below, and we will be glad to answer.

Franco Folini

An Interview with Nazzareno Gorni, Business Development of NWEB

Nazzareno Gorni is the co-founder and Business Development of NWEB, the Italian company offering MailUp, a popular e-mail marketing service. Nazzareno is a friend of BAIA and I invited him to participate in the following interview:

Nazzareno, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your company?
I'm 34, I have a PhD in Management Engineering, and I'm recently married. I worked for 5 years as a consultant in marketing and communications technologies, and then I founded NWeb -- a web engineering company -- in 2002 with 4 friends.
NWeb has developed an ESP (email service provider) named MailUp.  MailUp is a .NET application for sending newsletters and email marketing campaigns, up to millions of recipients. We are market leaders in Italy thanks to our unique features and innovative pricing model (truly flat fee). We were ahead of our US competitors so we decided to export MailUp in the US, and later we arrived in San Francisco.

Can you tell us how MailUp is approaching the global market, and what are the plans for the future?
MailUp is currently available in three languages: Italian, English, and French. In Italy we have important customers like IULM College University, the Alfa Romeo Racing Team, Venice City Hall, MyAir.com, La Perla Group, Fiera Milano International, Coin, and EURO RSCG.  Also, IBM, Oracle, Symantec, Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz, and many others now use our services, through MailUp resellers, to send newsletters.  In the US MailUp is used by Laplink (Washington), IACCW (Los Angeles), BAIA, BrasilSF, and Novedge (San Francisco).
MailUp is investing in R&D and we will release the new MailUp release 6.0 in a few weeks. We believe that email will be the real killer application in the mobile phones market. If we look at the global picture in 2006, about 34% of the world population has a mobile phone (source), while only 13% of the world population has a PC with an internet connection (source). For several years to come the mobile phone will be the primary way for most people to exchange data and information. And we have several ideas on how to develop MailUp in that direction. When the network PC and the IP connection become widely available, I think email will maintain its role as a keystone in communication.
We are quite a little company (our revenues are about $700,000) and we are growing, in Italy alone about 40% per year. This explains how hard it is for us to invest outside Italy as needed, even if we have a very good service, with nice margins and a good outlook (like many SaaS services). The war against other worldwide competitors is very challenging due to marketing investments which need to be measured very carefully.

As an Italian company, do you perceive the (English-Italian) language barrier as a protection for your domestic market or as an obstacle for a global growth?
I don't think Italian is a big barrier to protect our domestic market from foreign companies.  It's more of an obstacle for an Italian company's global growth for two reasons: the first is that many managers in Italy do not speak or even understand English, and the second reason is that Italy is famous for food, fashion, culture, and mobile phones, but not for IT solutions. There are no US competitors in Italy; I think mainly because our market is too small for those companies.

E-mail is quickly becoming just one of the many options to communicate with customers. How is MailUp dealing with this always changing landscape?
I see that email is still the preferred option for communication. It's easy, universally used, fast, available on many devices, and with low or no cost. I'm sure that once mobile push-email is affordable not only at a business level but also to the larger number of consumers, email use will increase even more. Just think of the possibility of easily sending a picture, video, or broadcasting an application.  It could be the real revolution, after the MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) failure.

Do you have any suggestions for a successful e-mail newsletter?
If we are talking about a B2B newsletter, I suggest:

a) Send a newsletter only when you have something really interesting to say to your contacts.

b) Pay attention to compatibility. Your message needs to communicate effectively in the preview panel, even before image downloading. So be careful while defining your sender name, your subject, and the first part of your message.

c) Track your activity. Don't say everything inside the message, be short! If interested, the receiver will click and continue reading on the web site, and you will learn which topics are the most important ones to your recipients.

What is your connection with BAIA? Did MailUp benefit from that connection?
BAIA is very important for us. After just one BAIA meeting I had one customer and one partner! I remember the first BAIA meeting I attended last year. I met a lot of interesting people, thanks also to Matteo Fabiano. I was so excited that the day after I opened my personal Blog (sorry but it's in Italian), in order to let my friends and colleagues know about my experience in San Francisco. I also met Massimo Arrigoni, founder of Early Impact.  A successful partnership was born from that meeting, which is still growing and creating new business opportunities. Thanks BAIA!

I would like to thank Nazzareno Gorni for taking the time to speak with me today. If you have any questions for Nazzareno or for BAIA, please leave a comment below, and we will be glad to answer.

Franco Folini

An Interview with Massimo Arrigoni, Co-Founder and CEO of Early Impact

Massimo Arrigoni is the co-founder and CEO of Early Impact, the company making ProductCart, a popular shopping cart program for e-commerce. Massimo is a friend of BAIA and I invited him to participate in the following interview:

How did you ended up in California founding an e-commerce company?
I fell in love. Not with e-commerce, but with a gorgeous California girl. We have been married for almost 10 years and have 3 kids. When we met I was at UCLA doing research on e-commerce. Early Impact came later, but electronic commerce is something that I’ve been involved with for over a decade.

Which aspect of a shopping cart is more important: the interaction with the end-user or the services for the merchant?
What we sell is a feature set: businesses buy ProductCart because it has this or that feature that is particularly important to them. But what makes ProductCart a successful shopping cart system is ultimately the fact that online shoppers like stores that are powered by our software. So I guess the answer is: they’re both extremely important.

Can you tell us why a company should invest resources selecting a shopping-cart? Aren't all similar?
It’s the foundation of your e-commerce business. It’s crucial to spend time understanding what best fits your needs, even if it takes a lot of time. And you’re absolutely right. There is an overload of shopping carts today. That’s simply because putting together a cheap, basic shopping cart is not hard. But once you dig a little deeper, the differences are huge. Do most shopping carts allow you to get a report of customers that have not yet purchased product XYZ and email them an electronic coupon for free UPS Ground shipping if they buy it within 2 weeks? No way. Only a handful are at that level.

Is Google checkout affecting more your business or your customers?
Google Checkout actually generates business for us. ProductCart is integrated with it, so now merchants buy our software for that reason. Google aggressively went after companies like Early Impact to quickly make Google Checkout available on as many stores as possible. By the way, I just posted something on my blog a few days ago exactly on this topic. It might be worth a look.

What is your connection with BAIA? Do you think that Early Impact could benefit from that connection?
I’ve been to many BAIA meetings and recently became a member. I’ve met a lot of interesting, talented people. Early Impact has already benefited from some of the connections. We found a new master reseller for Italy, for example. The company is called NWEB, and I met one of the owners, Nazzareno Gorni, at a BAIA event last summer. Nazzareno and his team are going to help us aggressively sell our e-commerce software in Italy, which could be a big growth market for us in the future.

I would like to thank Massimo Arrigoni for taking the time to speak with me today. If anybody has a question for Massimo or for BAIA, just leave a comment below, and we will be glad to answer.

Franco Folini

BAIA and BEST: Both Working in the Same Direction to Foster Entrepreneurship

In January I had the pleasure to meet with a visiting delegation from the U.S. Embassy in Rome in connection with the BEST Program. The BEST Program is a very interesting initiative launched by the Hon. Ronald Spogli, U.S. Ambassador to Italy, to promote the exchange of entrepreneurial experience between Italy and the U.S. The BEST delegation has just arrived in the Bay Area and its members will be interning at local companies for a few months (see their blog). It is very reassuring and positive to see that this initiative was launched so quickly and so well. BAIA is trying to follow a similar track with its internship program. Young talented Italians need international exposure to grasp strength and weaknesses of the systems and bring back to Italy the strengths of American entrepreneurship. Unlike the “school trip” mentality of many traditional delegations from Italy, BEST seems to be a novel, practical approach to this issue. Let’s give our BAIA compliments and “best wishes” to BEST!

Matteo Daste

The Funambol model: US capital and Italian heart

I'm very happy to post this interesting contribution from Fabrizio Capobianco (blog), an Italian entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Fabrizio is a friend of BAIA who has been participating in our activities. Last August he was involved as a speaker at the Mobile Platforms event in San Francisco (pictures on Flickr). Our plan is to open this blog to external contributions from invited speakers such as Francesco, and to make the BAIAblog a meeting point for the entire Italian and American business community. Thank you Fabrizio. Franco Folini

Life as an emigrant is tough... You look back at your native country and you struggle between love and hate. Emigrants flee home because they go looking for something they could not find where they were born. They leave their heart in their home country, hoping to come back one day to find that everything has changed.

I left Italy for California in '99 and I go back home quite often. Not that much has changed, but I am not planning to give up that fast...

After founding a couple of companies in Italy and working for a public US company, I founded Funambol in 2002. Funambol is the mobile open source company, bringing BlackBerry-like capabilities to the masses. A Red Herring 100 company and the largest open source project in mobile with almost one million of downloads, Funambol has been funded mainly by US Venture Capitalist. The headquarter is in Silicon Valley, but the R&D is in Italy. In Pavia, close to the local university.

US capital and Italian heart.

Italy is a beautiful country, but in a state of crisis. The economy is suffering. Globalization is killing our small manufacturing companies. Competing with China in these markets is simply not doable. Protectionism attempt will fail. We need to move on.

Italy can compete on high tech and software in particular. Our labor cost in this sector is highly competitive. It might sound strange to many, but Italy has the lowest cost of software in Europe (35K/year Euro per engineer). That's extremely competitive with respect to Silicon Valley (the weather is still better here, sorry) and also with India or China, where wages keep appreciating every year.

In particular, if you compare the Intellectual Property protection Italy enjoys. I know of a few examples of outsourcing companies in India, where a group of employees took a product they were developing for a third party and started a new company... Outsourcing saves money and it is necessary, but can be risky in a country where the legal system does not support you. On top of it, Italy is the best with respect to loyalty of the employees (a key element in software, which is all about people)

When it comes to education, Italy ranks high. In my experience, the competence of Italian engineers is comparable if not better than American peers. Italy is the country of creativity. It is in our DNA. Software is creativity. Add some rigorous engineering and you have Ferrari, the most beautiful car on the planet, but also a technological jewel.

Software is great for Italy. It requires limited capital to start. If you use open source as a distribution model, it is even better. You can take advantage of globalization and reach markets anywhere on the planet.

When you are ready to go to the next step, however, risk capital is missing in Italy. The ability to manage risks of Silicon Valley VCs is unrivalled. All your connections are here, if you want to grow your company or find an exit via M&A. This is the place to be if you want to go big. Not just for cash, but for the mentality. Things move at a different speed in the Valley. And I do not believe it is going to change any time soon.

For now, I see a great opportunity for Italy to be a center of excellence for software outsourcing. Becoming a new Silicon Valley is the next step. We are not ready for that yet, but the Funambol model is a start. US capital and Italian heart. I hope many more companies will follow. It is simply the best of both worlds.

Fabrizio Capobianco