About me
From an idea to something you can use, in a few keystrokes. That's what programming is about.
It's magic to me. 🦄
Technology has been a magnet since I was eight years old. Over the last 25 years, I've gone from ideation to MVP to commercial traction to scale multiple times. And the magic is still there, just more magical.
I now want to help others succeed through the complexities of being a founder, engineer and leader in tech.
It sometimes feels impossible. It's not!
TL;DR: THE SHORT VERSION
On one of the last trips with my mum 💖 - R.I.P. 🦋
Ten years doing hands-on work, that’s how I got a solid technical foundation. Coding and architecture on all sorts of software: mobile, web, API, e-commerce, etcetera.
It was 2006, startups were a hot thing, where was mine? So I co-founded a social network, Koinup. I was the CTO, I built myself the whole first iteration: frontend, backend, data, messaging, media processing and streaming. Oh my goodness how much work it was. But it became the go-to place for artsy users of the metaverses, and it got acquired in 2013. 🎉
Those were also the “there’s an app for that” years, and where was mine?! So I created Flux, a news reader. It went from zero to being featured in 120 countries in less than two years. That made me happy.
In 2012 life handed me a lemon. And my lemonade was to move to London. A new life, a new professional chapter: leadership it is.
I was first VP of Engineering at Adbrain, we did AdTech big data and data intelligence. We delivered a $1M ARR SaaS product in 9 months. Then it was Hadean, we built a deeptech stack from scratch in 18 months. And broke a world record with that. It was 🦚.
Since 2020, I have been an independent CTO, advising, consulting and coaching.
If you want the longer, juicy story, keep going👇
THE LONG ONE
Till 2000: The Discovery Chapter
You'd expect an eight years old kid to play video games on computers. I didn't.
VIC-20 was my first one. It came with a manual with a cryptic "Appendix M: VIC programs to try". Without knowing what I was doing, I typed the lines of code printed in that manual. I was not playing a video game. I had just *created* one.
Then it was Commodore-64, then Amiga, and then it was high school, with a few hours of computer science a week. During the summer break, I once coded a text-based address book. Pure avant-garde.
And then it was the internet. I could not stop myself from experimenting with code and HTML. You do not just create something you can use. You make something that *everyone* can use.
Anna Wintour would say triple triple thumbs up.
2000 - 2006: The Coding Chapter
I was still at uni, internet was growing exponentially. A friend-of-friends marketing agency was searching for this new thing that is a web developer. "Can you help us?" Let me think - being paid for what I'd do anyway? Hellooo, bring it on! That's how it started.
Everything needed to be created from scratch, no Shopify or WordPress existed. My first project was an e-commerce website. Then a CMS for a museum website, an estate agency platform, and so on.
I got involved in increasingly more complex products, designing architecture and project managing dev teams: a multi-tenant SaaS platform, a two-side marketplace and many more significant projects for well-established orgs.
Service-Oriented Architecture and Domain-Driven Design emerged as the cool kids at the time. It's fun to see how parts of these concepts converged in the microservice architecture later. I guess I'm just becoming old. 🤷
2006 - 2012: The Startup Chapter
A journalist was writing on Vanity Fair about people getting married in a metaverse and taking pictures of their virtual wedding. I beg you pardon? It was aaaall real.
That's how I met my Koinup co-founder. I was intrigued by this artistic use of Second Life. It was an unserved vertical, so we created a social network for them, based on sharing images and videos.
The following years were exhausting. In Italy, it wasn't like in Silicon Valley. The term startup was unknown, investors were taking little risks, and there was no ecosystem. The lean startup methodology didn't even exist! 😭
Working 14 hours a day was not unusual. Everything needed to be figured out and then done. We got a family round, and we started. I was in charge of the tech. I built the first iteration by myself. There were tons of web parts, comments, discussion groups, and direct messages. Data to be manipulated and stored. Images and videos to be converted and streamed. And no cloud services I’m afraid. I wish I could talk to an experienced CTO! It was huge for me.
Koinup became the go-to place for this artistic community worldwide in a few years, and it was acquired in 2013.
But it's not everything for this chapter! Apple released the iPhone in 2007. I desperately wanted to build an app, but I couldn't. I was committed to Koinup and had to wait until I was not needed 24/7. I finally created Flux in 2010, a news reader app for Windows Phone.
Users loved it. 80% of them used it at least once daily, and the average session was 56 minutes. It featured in 120 countries and went #1 in most of them.
But I don't have to tell you how it ended as I guess you don't have a Windows Phone? 🤦
2012 - 2020: The Leadership Chapter
In 2012 I went to London to stay for a few months, the kind of thing you do when life hands you a lemon. But all of a sudden, I felt connected. The multicultural diversity of London was electrifying and the British way of working was inspiring.
This was my world. I wanted to immerse myself in this newfound energy. I wanted to learn all I could. I got hired by a London startup, Adbrain, and I stayed.
I quickly went from developer to VP of Engineering. Fundraising, DD, hiring. We delivered a $1M ARR SaaS product in 9 months. And then again, fundraising, DD. And scale-up, hiring fast, SLA to guarantee. Big data, data science at scale, low latency. API of 125K request/sec. 50 billion items in a table. 3000 EC2 instances. Re-architect, re-platform. 5 programming languages, 3 runtimes, 3 PB-scale databases.
Wanted to learn Edoardo? Be careful what you wish for! 😬
In 2016 I took a quick break and did some contracting work for a couple of companies. Interim CTO for a B2B AdTech and product engineering for a deep tech in its infancy, Hadean.
Hadean was pioneering massive-scale computing, and the founders were stellar. When offered, I joined them as VP of Engineering. What I didn't know is how complex deeptech can be. Not just from an engineering perspective but from an R&D, product, commercial, talent, and management point of view.
Hadean decided to attempt to beat a world record with its tech. Live. At the most important conference of its sector. We had six months to go. 😱
Ten thousand concurrent users, connected from the five continents through 7 data centres, interacting in real-time. 250K requests/second served in low latency.
We made it! That journey developed alongside two rounds of fundraising and multiple doubling of the engineering team. Hadean matured into the commercial phase and is still grabbing headlines nowadays.
2020 - Today: The Code Couture Chapter
In 2020 I decided to use my learnings for a different purpose and help others.
We tend to obsess with things we can't control, like success, the market or the opinions of investors. But there's a bunch of stuff we have an immense influence on, like how we make decisions, approach the market, or design the tech.
Having seen the long-term implications of many choices, with time, I've built a repertoire of mistakes that can be avoided, and I developed an intuition of what could work in each specific situation.
I like to think that my approach is twofold: prevent what can be detrimental and augment what could work. So you can play your strengths, leverage your intuitions and bring out your genius ✨
