Italians who have made it in Silicon Valley were gathered yesterday, October 14th, in the Palo Alto conference room of SAP (the global German business software company).The discussion panel was moderated by Massimo Arrigoni, board member of BAIA (Business Association Italy America), the San Francisco-based organization that brings together Italian professionals in the US.
Mr. Arrigoni is one of those Italians who succeeded after having moved to California as an exchange student and meeting his future wife in California. He is the CEO of Earl Impact, Inc., a California based e-commerce software company.
Along with Massimo Arrigoni, the panel lined up special guest Vivek Wadhwa (the inspiring tech professor at Duke, Berkeley, and Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School,) and an array of old and new entrepreneurs such as Fabrizio Capobianco (CEO of Funambol, Inc.,) Aldo Cocchiglia (CEO of M31USA), Marco Marinucci (Google) and the young Milanese, Augusto Marietti (CEO of Mashape.com).
But the reason that around one hundred people convened at a discussion entitled “Transplanting Start-Ups in Silicon Valley: Does it Work?”, is that there is a feeling, among BAIA members that not enough Italians are on the path to success in Silicon Valley.
“In the Italian community,” said Mr. Arrigoni, “when we look at companies that decided to move to Silicon Valley and grow and prosper here, the names that come up are always the same. Why is that? Why don’t we have a bunch of companies that did that?”
It is certainly not easy to find an answer to this puzzle in the time allotted for a panel discussion.
Vivek Wadhwa (who is also a columnist for Business Week.com, and a contributor for the popular tech blog TechCrunch, and became, for his comments on US immigration policy, a provocative and threatened public figure, as we explain in the next article,) pointed out that there is no reason why Indians should succeed more than Italians. If anything, “You folks are white. When you hang out with Americans you look like them,” he joked.
Some recognized that Indians, contrary to other foreign-born groups, had the foresight to allow newcomers to tap into the first generation of successful entrepreneurs. But what still makes the greatest difference, according to other panelists, is the same old basic recipe for success: the hunger… the need to make it.
Does that mean that Italians don’t really—badly—want to become the next Mark Zuckerberg?
There was no definitive answer to that. However Massimo Arrigoni observed that, sometimes, in the Italian popular culture there is still a stigma attached to the word entrepreneur (one could notice, for the sake of a joke, that the Italian translation, imprenditore, is far less appealing than the French entrepreneur adopted by the English language.)
But in a happy reversal of this somewhat pessimistic picture, the last guest of the panel table was Augusto Marietti, a youthful looking, casually dressed, backpacked “twentysomething” creative mind, who cheered the crowd when he told about his beginnings in an—archetypical—garage in Milan, where he and two peers created the “EBay of the APIs.”
While this term may sound pretty obscure to tech dummies, Silicon Valley seems to have already taken it seriously. He and his cohorts came here with a tourist visa to look for investors, and just 10 days before the visitor visa expired they got funded by local venture capital and are now back here with a regular work visa.
Stringent immigration rules did not stop Mr. Marietti on his path of “transplanting” his idea in America, where “nobody tells you what you have to do”, he said. “This is your time, you are young. If you want in some ways to change the world you have to come here.”
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