Ettore — The Eternal Entrepreneur
Crowdfire Spotlight: From struggling with English as a recent immigrant to becoming a successful YouTube influencer and co-founding a company by the age of 23 — this is Ettore Fantin’s story.
A lot of us fear public speaking. Ettore Fantin was no different. Moreover, being an immigrant in the States with no grasp of the English language, he was too shy to even think of ever talking to an audience. 227 YouTube videos, 16 thousand subscribers, and millions of views later, Ettore has become quite fond of speaking wherever he can.
Standing up to the invisible bullies from the comments sections of his videos gave him a way to communicate without being constantly afraid. Since then, he’s even been invited to speak at various events including hackathons and the popular Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
A fresh start
While Ettore’s family is from Chile in South America, he was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1994. His parents had grown up under the dictatorship of Pinochet in the 80s and withstood the worst of it. To get away from the harshness and the instability, they packed up and moved to the States in November of 2001. Ettore feels he’s had a very different parental experience than most people. “Since we were all immigrants in the US, my parents felt more like teammates to me. We all spoke Spanish to each other and that gave us a differentiator from the rest of the world.”
While he admits to having a pretty easy childhood prior to the move, Ettore struggled with having to learn English in his new school. Though he was academically driven and excellent at maths, he hated having to read English texts. The kids in school constantly made fun of his language skills and picked on his accent. This treatment left Ettore petrified of speaking English in front of other people. He would, however, learn to overcome this barrier in time.
Ettore’s family is one that truly values higher education. His father is a doctor and his mother an English professor. They set high standards for their children and Ettore found himself being constantly outperformed by both his higher-achieving siblings. While he was better than average, in comparison to his erudite siblings, he found himself falling short. But he’s quite all right with that assessment. “I have too many interests,” he says.
“I’m always looking for more entrepreneurial endeavours, not academic ones.”
Ettore always considered himself entrepreneurial, flipping items on Craigslist from a young age. He’d purchase canoes, snowboards, and skis after the skiing season ended in spring, and start selling it right before the new season. Being a kid at the time, he had the luxury of storing these items in his parents’ basement, which made it a breeze for him to operate this side business. He’d constantly look for ways to increase his online income and kept building websites on the side for any profit. Looking back, Ettore realizes that he developed many skills there that are relevant to him today. “It was a process of self-discovery for me,” he acknowledges.
Snowed in
It was around this time that Ettore discovered the magic of YouTube. He uploaded a video for the first time in middle school in 2007, as part of a class project. At the time, there weren’t many videos floating around. After his team uploaded the video, it racked up nearly 30,000 views in the first year which was considerable at the time. Ettore was hooked. The unexpected response to his class project steered him toward replicating the success. He wanted to keep experiencing the exposure he got the first time round.
“I love the internet. I often say that I grew up on the internet.” Ettore’s always viewed the internet as an incredible resource, especially video platforms like YouTube, where he believes anyone can learn anything. And he took full advantage of what it could offer him. From a very young age, Ettore found himself drawn to two very specific hobbies — extreme sports and video recording. He found a way to marry his two passions by shooting videos around skateboarding and snowboarding with his friends and sharing them online.
Ettore used to work at a ski-hill as a bus aide. His job was to go to the local high school, load the kids and the equipment on to the bus, drive them to the ski hill and give them their passes. In return, Ettore got to snowboard for free which was great since tickets were really expensive. He would snowboard twice every weekend on Fridays and Sundays all through high school.
On his last day of his senior year of high school, Ettore met with an unfortunate accident. He pushed his limits snowboarding and fell from a height, hurting his back and passing out on the snow. Apart from compression fractures in his back and multiple broken vertebrae, his trachea was deviated, causing him to breathe only from his mouth.
An endocrinologist then found a pretty large goitre in his thyroid. After getting every possible test done, from ultrasounds, MRIs to CT Scans, the doctors found something they’d never seen before — Langerhans cell histiocytosis (LCH). It’s a really rare disease found in bone marrow or in lungs in kids, but never before seen in the thyroid. After all the tests were done, they decided to remove half of his thyroid and found the excised tumour to be benign and non-cancerous.
If Ettore hadn’t had that ski injury, the doctors would never have found a problem with his deviated trachea or the disease in his thyroid. They continued to conduct tests on him for the following four to five years. Ettore now takes a pill a day to help his halved thyroid keep doing its job.
In another league
His last semester in high school, Ettore was in and out of the hospital, almost failing out and endangering his chances of graduation. Not knowing whether he would graduate and wondering if he had cancer contributed to the incredible stress Ettore underwent during his last semester. He had to work hard to pull his grades up again, all while wearing a bulky back brace due to his injury. But he did pull through and ended up attending Case Western Reserve University, ranked as one of the top five schools in the US at the time.
At an academically rigorous institution, Ettore didn’t get much free time to pursue all his hobbies. But whenever he did, he played video games with his friends, who were recording their games as they played and posting them online. That’s when he decided to get involved, considering it afforded them pretty good exposure. Ettore would earn his experience working with brands and companies from something as unexpected as his video gaming channel online.
“I started recording and uploading videos and my channel grew rapidly.” He and his friends would constantly compete with each other for the most views each of their videos could garner. Soon, Ettore earned the title of an influencer and started making money from his channel. At one point, he was funding the entire video game experience for him and his friends, including server costs. “I could always get money from YouTube to pay for expenses or I’d get sponsors with shoutouts on my channel.”
Ettore can thank YouTube for him having a bank account and credit card at the precocious age of sixteen. “It allowed me to afford things I really wanted. I bought my own smartphone and paid for my own data plan. That was really cool for me, gave me a taste of independence from my parents.”
Networking effects
College was a relief for Ettore, a lot easier than the rigours of high school. He continued pursuing interesting projects on the side all through — going to Las Vegas for CES paid for by the school, and getting the opportunity to record many concerts meeting famous musicians along the way.
Ettore was used to being the Project Manager for anything he was working on with his classmates or friends. “I’d come up with crazy ideas, do a lot of networking, go out around Cleveland, and meet a lot of people.” Ettore dabbled a little in coding and graphic design, and he’d attend hackathons with his friends, winning a couple events in the process. Soon, his group became well known in Cleveland and they started attracting contract work. “We built a name for ourselves in the Cleveland community.”
One exciting opportunity during his senior year of college was when Ettore and his friends were contracted to make cyber security software for a client. Before they knew it, they went from living in a basement room to working in a big office with actual employees.
Ettore’s goal is to eventually become a world-renowned keynote speaker. He got a scholarship for his Masters in big data and he’s now running a company he co-founded, with 30 people under his employ in an office. He used to work 12 hour days on top of school and a lot of his classmates would make fun of him because he just wanted to pass. “It kind of became a running joke with how little I tried to pass. That being said, I graduated with maximum efficiency — I did the least effort possible,” he grins.
Most likely to be famous
He quotes Mark Twain to me when I ask him if he has any advice to impart, “Don’t let schooling get in the way of your education. I really believe in that. You should always be learning, from other people, from experience, or podcasts, whatever. I don’t have a GPA to show my knowledge, no one knows what I know or experienced, because there are no transcripts to show it.”
At Ettore’s graduation, he was awarded three superlatives —
“Most likely to miss a test”,
“Most likely to be late to graduation” and
“Most likely to be famous.”
With his fame already burgeoning, it’s safe to say Ettore’s all set for new superlatives in the next chapter of this tremendous story.
