I feel so lucky and so blessed to be able to work every day on the things I love. Over the past five years I’ve had the opportunity to work on incredibly innovative communication tools and some of my products, like the Virtual Mirror, have completely redefined what interactive retail marketing is. I’ve had the opportunity to bring together thousands of fashionistas in Shootlook, that have shared more than 100,000 photos and over the last few months I’ve worked on an incredible project like TrisDB, that as of today has been downloaded over 1 MILLION times by developers all over the world.

To accomplish all this, you need to keep working, hard. These months of intense work have been infrequently punctuated by periods of a few days in which I wasn’t sure what to do, and felt really bad. It definitely hasn’t been easy and often the most difficult task has been forcing myself to focus on just two or three projects at a time.

By nature, I tend to be very reflective. I actually tend to think a lot about big ideas. Big ideas for my startup. Big ideas for my country, Italy. Big ideas that can help others. And the “entrepreneur” in me wants to make them all happen — right now. But if you think about it, there’s a huge difference between having big ideas and having a great vision. One of the things that I constantly remind my team of is that there are lots of people who have big ideas, but not everyone has a great vision to strategically transform ideas into action over time.

In other words, the world simply doesn’t need big ideas. The world needs great vision, powered by great people that have the courage to change things. It’s all about people who question the usual definitions of success. It’s about entrepreneurs who can prove it as they build it.

This is exactly what we’ve done in TrisDB: with tens of competitors in the Big Data database market (including Google, of course) we decided to challange the status quo and believe that Big Data is not, after all, as complex as it seems. We decided to bet on our vision and make something difficult, easy. TrisDB is not the world’s most powerful database and it’s definitely not the most flexible database. It is the simplest.

Disruption isn’t always that difficult. Don’t overlook the obvious — force yourself to think simple. Find what you do well and make it better, as that’s when disruption and innovation happens. Simplicity and beauty are buried deeply into Sixth Sense Solutions’ DNA and these values are the foundation of TrisDB.

Over the past few months I’ve learned that if you want to be successful, you have to believe in a vision, not in ideas.

Working in Italy isn’t easy, believe me. The inertia of mediocrity that populates this country makes it really hard to do great work. Most people just want most things to stay the same. Here, everything is mediocre. Most jobs are mediocre. Most people’s work is mediocre. Most products and experiences are mediocre. This means that when you rise above the mediocrity and do something genuinely good, people will notice and will appreciate it.

(Actually, no. At first they’ll tell you that you’re crazy and that you should find a serious job and stop playing with computers. Then when you receive appreciation from other countries, the same Italians will start talking about beeing “proud of Italy’s talents” and other rubbish like “Italy’s sense of design” — it lasts 2 days after which they go back to doing what they’re good at: talking a lot and doing nothing.)

To me, a key ingredient in a startup is its motivation to go for it despite the odds and conventional wisdom. This is what happened with TrisDB. I had an idea and I just did it. I put a lot of passion in it and people appreciated that.

If you have an idea, put yourself out there and just see what happens. Trust me — most of the time it will evolve into something much greater

Once again, I feel so blessed to work on what I love.
There is a new project that my team is working on and we’re putting our hearts in it. I’m really looking forward to showing it to the world — be prepared fashionistas! Thanks to everyone that makes my life great, all this wouldn’t have been possible without you.

Everywhere is full of advice on how to succeed in life, but it doesn’t work because after all life is a journey, not a destination and we’re all at different places in our own journey. The only true, valuable piece of advice that I can give is: just do what you love. The rest will come.

Stop dreaming about your dreams and start working towards them.