Europe
I had a really professional summary up here, but I recently discovered I hate it when people introduce themselves to me with their job title. So I changed it into something I would actually like people to know about me. Here it goes! Hello! My name is Michela, I live comfortably in chaos and I hate being constrained by too many rules. My friends usually come to me when they want to do something they know nobody would approve of, because I tend to push people to do disruptive things: in their lives, their relationships, their careers. If I could chose anywhere to live in the world it would be NYC, but for now I'm just loving living mostly in airports since I'm basically traveling every other weekend. I love being bold and strongly opinionated, but I always give myself the opportunity to change my mind. And I love it when someone challenges me to see something in a completely new way. I'm currently working on improving lives of manufacturing SMEs, if you can't find my at my office look for me in a warehouse. I realise there are to many "I" in this summary. I'll work on this too. Now it's your turn!!! Let's connect, I wanna know about yourself.
Unifying manufacturing supply chains through operational intelligence.
I quit my full time job at Google because I knew that career path was not right for me. At the time I had been working on an Edtech startup for about a year and I wanted to give it a real shot. I traveled to the US, toured universities from Philadelphia to Boston to validate the idea, I met with VCs, angel investors, founders and very cool people. And quickly learnt, the problem I was set to solve was not a VC backable one. I then decided to start from scratch, spending some time in VCs and incubators to learn more about the process of building a VC backed company. I spent some time as an entrepreneur in residence with Vento, the Italian chapter of Exor, whose team I had met in NYC. I supported the team with the organization of Italian Tech Week and learnt more about their investment strategy and process. I then joined Antler and started working on an HRTech solution. However, I quickly realised that was not the field I wanted to invest my time into. I spent a few months looking for a problem worth solving and... I found it! I'm now building an exciting venture in the b2b manufacturing space. If you are attracted by the usage of technology in "the real economy" let's talk!
Supported companies in their digitalisation journey by crafting digital marketing strategies (with a focus on Google Customer Solutions) aligned with their goals. Biggest learnings: when talking to SMBs, data will only get you so far. Building strong relationships with my clients was what allowed me to earn their trust and convince them to try new strategies to outperform their initial goals. Also, working for big companies is not my cup of tea. Probably this was the most important learning :)
Edit: this is now something I do on the side. If you need interns / entry level professionals hit me up! I have a community of 30k young people eager to make the difference. Fully bootsrtapped startup whose ultimate goal was to increase socio economic diversity in companies by helping unprivileged students create a portfolio life that would make them more attractive for companies. I had no idea what I was doing when I set it up, I only knew it was possible somehow because I had tested it on myself. Biggest learnings along the way: - Not everything is s VC backable startup, and that's ok - Socioeconomic diversity is an unexplored field: you can't improve what you don't measure, and so many companies are not aware of this being the key diversity trait they should look out for - Cultural issues are way more complex than technical issues - italian students don't work, to make society understand that practical experience is more important than perfect grades required a tremendous effort
Healthcare Swedish scaleup that wanted to digitalise the industry across various European countries. My role was extremely horizontal and it allowed me to go from marketing to sales, BD, product and hiring in the span of a day. We wanted to enter new markets with a SaaS model which was never fully defined, reason why we ended up shutting down the project. Biggest learnings: - Ask difficult questions and engage in difficult conversation if you're unsure of what is happening, even it is uncomfortable - Don't be so into the execution piece that you forget what you're building - Hiring is *very* important