Thoughts by an Italian Tech entrepreneur abroad - Lessons Learned - Vincenzo Belpiede - Startup - Silicon Valley - San Francisco - Italy - Technology - Development - Investors - Fundraising

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

2. About me on Stellup Maps

3. About Stellup: Fundraising Platform
● 1. Intuitive
Payments: Click on
a perk or
Contribute CTA
● 2. Enter credit card
details or pay with
Apple/Android Pay
(SEE VIDEOS)

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

6. Build a strong network
Read the book here

7. Pay it forward - Karma

8. Improve everyday - Permanent beta
Read the book here

9. Be ambitious
Read the book here

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

11. Don’t forget to sleep - Arianna Huffington

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/

16. Your initial team needs few but very good people

18. Product and Market

19. Network with other Entrepreneurs
(Especially get mentors that have done it before)

20. Build an MVP
Read the book here

23. Design before developing software
If you have Mac definitely use Sketch app https://www.sketchapp.com

24. Review and comment designs in Invision
https://www.invisionapp.com/

25. Use Trello (left - simpler) or Jira (right - more advanced) to plan your software releases

26. Less is more
Also applies to your overall business focus

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?

28. Market

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

34. Accelerators and Incubators are Great!!! (some more than others ;)
Ping me for a list

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

38. Before focusing on investors remember that...
100%

39. Network with other Entrepreneurs
(Best introductions are from Entrepreneurs that have done it before)

40. Don’t write a long business plan just fill out a 10 slide deck
https://guykawasaki.com/the-only-10-slides-you-need-in-your-pitch/

41. Avoid PDF...use Docsend to track who views your deck and when

42. Use Streak CRM in Gmail to track your investors
Treat them like Sales leads

43. Avoid giving out equity at seed stage, use YC SAFE or convertible
notes

44. Vincenzo Belpiede
“At seed stage try to get a quick yes or no”
On the other side
you do need to build up relationships with investors

45. Vincenzo Belpiede
Until money is in the bank don’t count them

46. Some thoughts of Italy vs. USA and ROW

47. Italy needs to get better at attracting US funding

48. Italy’s VC funding per capita is sad

50. Let’s not complain but be grateful for having amazing food, water,
mountains and seas! Let’s find solutions!

51. London, Berlin, Paris, Tel Aviv and Stockholm are great cities to visit

52. Italy remains a great place where to hire developers

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)

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

59. Enough Chit Chat
Let’s do it

60. Because being an Entrepreneur is like
Reid Hoffman is the founder of Linkedin

61. Because being an Entrepreneur is like

62. Ideas are a commodity

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

66. Thank you
Vincenzo Belpiede
Connect with me on Facebook (Page) Linkedin Twitter Angelist

67. DRAFT STUFF

68. For profitable startups: The big tech companies use complex (and legal)
schemes to avoid paying too much taxes
Microsoft chose it ;)

69. Remote Working: lots of best practices to share here

70. Design is important because
Though I guess Bill meant this in general...like “fake it till you make it quote

71. You can’t just recreate Silicon Valley somewhere else better go there

74. It’s gonna be hard
Read the book here

75. Thank you
Vincenzo Belpiede
Connect with me on Facebook (Page) Linkedin Twitter Angelist