There is perhaps no entrepreneurship story without up and downs. Just when Gianmarco was planning next milestones for his successful startup, problems in the team unexpectedly changed everything in his both business and personal life. But his determination was beyond that to make any compromise and eventually success was his.
Gianmarco Carnovale, 43, is an Italian entrepreneur and startup mentor. His entrepreneurship life started twenty years ago, when he returned to Italy after two years living in California.
“It was like if I had seen the future in the USA. At that time, I was a university student, but all our courses sounded useless to me. I had the feeling that the world was moving in a totally different direction from what we were studying”, Gianmarco expresses his feelings after his return to Rome.
He was determined to become an entrepreneur, but the path was not so straightforward. As his parents were all against “such a crazy idea”, he decided to leave both the university and home.
Not so long later, with his cousin, Gianmarco founded his first startup. “You may not remember, but in the early 1990s miniaturised electronic devices were not as common as today. So, we opened a small shop to sell such devices. We were importing them from different countries. In a short while, we managed to open eight shops all over Italy”, Gianmarco recalled.
Close contact with clients, was a source of information that Gianmarco could use to identify his clients’ needs. Soon, he got the idea of making an online magazine. “I was giving guidance on different IT questions. But after a while I moved on to provide IT corporate solutions. It was a primitive version of “APP-stores”. At that time, all applications should have been made individually for different devices like pocket PCs, Palm computers, etc. and we were providing them through our IT-website.”
In 2008, when App-stores were getting more popular, Gianmarco gave up his website. But another major change had already happened in his professional life. Two years before that, he had sold his share at their chain-stores to his partners.
This decision had many consequences on his life. Still after ten years, it is not so easy to talk about it. “It was perhaps my worse professional experience in life. I felt like leaving my child”, says Gianmarco, “In 2006, our turnover was €10 million; it had doubled every year. I had planned to reach €20 million by 2007. But my partners were getting lazy to work as hard as before. They wanted to relax and I couldn’t change their mind. They were all against me! Eventually I had no other choice than selling my share and I left the company which I personally had founded”.
Gianmarco was the innovative driving-force of the chain-stores. It took only two years until his ex-partners had to shut the stores down and put an end to it.
When Gianmarco stepped out from this company, he had to rebuild everything from scratch. The difference was that, despite ten years earlier, now he had a family and a newborn daughter.
“I think, young entrepreneurs must get their startups to a firm level and then have a family. Entrepreneurship life means non-stop work. It has no schedule and no limit. It doesn’t fit to a family framework”, he comments on his broken marriage, “but when you have passed difficult years, you can permit yourself to work less hours and be more dedicated to your family and children”.
However, after this bitter period, glorious days returned to Gianmarco once again. During the next years, he brought various Silicon Valley startups to the Italian market. With all the experience he had gained, he started mentoring Italian startups and together with other Italian entrepreneurs, he founded the first Italian accelerator in Rome in 2010. Later he was elected as the chairman of Rome Startup Association.
Since then he has mentored more than 50 startups. In parallel, he is currently working on his own startup, called “Scuter”. He gets very excited talking about it and says: “Founding Scuter is my best experience. The idea is to have a platform to share motor-scooters in the city. Anyone who needs one, can book it, drive it and then park it somewhere in the city.”
Gianmarco and his team has been working on this platform for a year and its final prototype should be released by May 2016 and he hopes to launch it before the end of 2016.
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