#100 Series: Rich Kid, Fat Teen, Failed Son: My Unfiltered Story
#105 Angelinvesting.it - From idea to Series A - Weekly Newsletter
3 minutes to reflect
Dear reader,
Society has a peculiar way of measuring success: square meters of real estate, horsepower under the hood, thread count of suits. We worship these metrics so completely that we forget to question if they mean anything at all.
I know this because I once had them all. As the privileged son of a business titan in Turin, I drove my Maserati to our family villa, draped in designer clothes, yet feeling like an impostor in my own life.
The script was simple: be my father's son. The execution was impossible: how do you become a legend when you're barely managing to be yourself? The luxury couldn't mask the insecurity of being the overweight, underachieving heir to a business empire.
Then the script got torn apart. Our family business began to crumble, and with it, my father's superhero aura. While everyone saw disaster, I saw something different: an arena where I could finally prove my worth – not as my father's son, but as myself.
What followed was a decade of transformation. I negotiated our company's survival, topped my class in an international master's program, and rebuilt our family holding from the ashes. But the real victory wasn't in the business metrics. It was in finding myself through failure, struggle, and eventual redemption.
Today, when entrepreneurs pitch me their startups, they often lead with success metrics. I ask them about their failures instead. Not the fashionable "fail fast, fail often" startup mantras, but the real, painful moments that shaped them. Because I've learned that true potential isn't measured in current success, but in how someone handles and grows from failure.
This is also why I love angel invest – to support those who dare to fail spectacularly in pursuit of their vision. Sometimes, like in my own journey, you need to lose the script you were given to write the story you were meant to tell.
2 resources to advance to pro
1. Unlink intelligence, conciousness and will
"One of the more interesting philosophical findings from the work in AI so far is, I think, people conflate a number of factors into what makes a person a person. So there's intelligence, there's will, there's consciousness.
We kind of think about those three things as if they are all the same....
...but I think one of the crazier philosophical results from the fact that you have like meta AI or ChatGPT today and it's just kind of sitting there and you can ask a question and deploy like a ton of intelligence to answer a question and then just kind of shut itself down – that's intelligence that is just sitting there having no will or consciousness."
Mark Zuckerberg
2. On how to be a great Angel or VC
Reverse order is more crucial the earlier in the rounds you operate.
1 reason to smile
“An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.” ― Ian McEwan
HALF JANUARY 2025 IS ALREADY GONE!
GO BUILD!
Simone