Coraggio Massimo!

I am compelled to express my solidarity to Massimo Marchiori in his recent resignment as CTO of Volunia.

With a open letter, Massimo Marchiori announced and explained the reasons of his resignation from CTO role at Volunia.

First of all, I would like to stress that Volunia has been launched as a private beta and therefore nobody should say that it has failed.

Second, the CTO should not considered directly responsible of a flawed marketing campaign. Although Marchiori was in first line in the launching event, this might have been decided by other people because of his visibility and reputation.

Third, if it is true that Marchiori has been excluded from the decision process in the Board and thus forced to follow a strategy he did not support, not only he has the right to tell about it to everybody, but he also has the obligation to disclose it to Volunia's investors. Probably, investors have suppported Volunia because of his reputation and therefore if the company no longer endorses his vision, they must be informed about this.

I believe that Marchiori has learned the lesson that only who has the vision and the core idea of the business has the right to become CEO. At the startup stage, only who has the vision and possess the IP should be entitled to hold control of the whole business, no one else. 

I need also to express my opinion to the reaction of Italian media and entrepreneurial community who stigmatized Marchiori's decision as being determined by a poor teamwork or by not wanting to accept the failure of his project. I don't think it is fair and correct. I believe that Marchiori, had the right to express his disappointment against people who failed in aligning the business objectives to his vision. He clearly explained that what Volunia became was not what he intended and it was mainly the results of other's decisions. 

I wish all the best to Massimo Marchiori and most of all that he could recover from this situation as fast as possible and be ready to undertake another venture with better team mates.

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The future of Italy is in its past.

Where are the economic opportunities for Italy? They are mostly in its past!

Where exactly? In its culture heritage, in its wonderful resorts, in its beautiful lifestyle full of art, music and fine food.

If you were about to choose a place where to install a R&D center for a big company, would you chose a place where living is easy? Yes of course!

But why this does not happened in Italy, which fulfills this requirement? The answer is simple: all the rest is missing!

What is basically missing is infrastructure for business, lightweight bureaucracy, an international environment (Italians who live in Italy barely speak their own language), business and technical skills of local people (here I mean not just managers, but ordinary people), competitive universities and research centers.

So what? Maybe our last chance to survive an economical disaster is to capitalize on our past: history, art, fine food, music, ...  Somebody already calls Italy the "World's Disneyland". Why not? Entertainment is big business and we possess the necessary "know-..." What is missing now is the "how"!

Where is Italy?

EUROPEANA is a new initiative to bring the European's cultural heritage to the Internet.

It is a huge digital library that has been by the European Digital Library Foundation.

Here is the list of participant insitution and as you can see (this is at November 2008), Italy is missing. Yeah, Italy the craddle of "renaissance" culture with Da Vinci, Michelangelo etc. is not part of the effort.

Italy is again missing an opportunity of being part of the cultural discourse that is developing in Europe.