Vis à vis with Friendz Co-Founder Cecilia Nostro

Every now and then in Friendz we have time for interviews: we find it a very great opportunity to let people know more about our story, our background and our business plans for the future!
Italian Startup Magazine is taking an interview-journey among 100 minds of women, each with different backgrounds and skills, who have something to tell us to inspire us.
Start-uppers, entrepreneurs, managers, researchers: women who took a challenging path and reached amazing goals.
Guess who is the first being interviewed? Our co-founder Cecilia Nostro, of course!
Here you can read the translated interview, you can find the original one here: https://www.startupmagazine.it/vis-a-vis-con-100-donne-da-raccontare-day-one-cecilia-nostro-cofounder-di-friendz/
Let’s start with Cecilia Nostro, cofounder of Friendz, social startup which in a few years has conquered a great audience by letting big brands and common people meet thanks to advertisement.
Cecilia, young and unstoppable, has been listed among the 100 most influent women in the digital sector in Italy and we want to chat with her to know more about her story and experience…
Tell us more about your background (education, job experience, collaborations abroad…).
I was born in Alba (in the North of Italy) in the land of fine wine, truffles and Nutella. I grew up practicing athletics, dreaming about the magic world of the Adults and, as soon as I came of age, I left home every summer with my best friend Viu to go on adventurous journeys with very little money in our pockets and a huge backpack. I studied Economics in Turin, I found the world of Marketing and the art of Sales very fascinating. I added to my Bachelor’s degree a Master’s in management in Switzerland and then in South America. As I came back with my flip-flops after tough months during which I grew up a lot as a person, I decided to face the world of real work in a digital marketing multinational company. I didn’t resist much, though: I needed to capitalize my 25-year-old’s energy for something bigger or, at least, something more…mine.
Was Friendz foundation originated by a crazy idea, a lucky encounter or just a simple career development?
I started signing in in any event whose name contained the keywords “Start Up, Innovation, ICT, Entrepreneurship…”. After that, I found myself at an aperitivo with 40 strangers (I was of course that last one to show up, as usual), and among this crowd I decided to sit next to “those nerds in the corner”. “Those nerds” were Daniele and Alessandro, who now are not only my job partners, but also two of the people that I most care about in my life. We immediately “fell in love” with one another, we felt we had the same energy and the same ambitions, but we had completely different points of view, a complementary union that allows us to find the best solutions, often creative and crazy but unanimously shared and efficiently developed.
Back then, which were the main difficulties and satisfactions in the initial phase of the startup foundation?
The hardest part was taking our first steps into a completely unknown world. You can learn about entrepreneurship as much as you want but rolling up your sleeves is a whole another thing and counting on your force and ideas is not that simple. Nevertheless, we were so determined that any idea seemed possible and never too strange to reach our goals. We literally rang tons of bells and crept into hundreds of offices just to speak with the marketing managers and tell them about our idea. This allowed us to improve both our project and our approach a lot. Then we met our first business angel who gave us an amount of money to be able to hire the first two employees and get started, a few later the first clients joined us and then we started the engine and we launched plenty of campaigns and advertisement concepts.
How do you consider your leadership style?
That’s a tough question. You should ask the guys that work with me, they’ll surely have a more precise idea than me. The first time I heard about the different types of leadership I was at school and I thought “it’s too many words to describe an innate skill!”. People simply follow or not follow you. If you force them to do that, they won’t feel motivated; if you don’t take their ideas into consideration, they won’t improve themselves; if you don’t let them do thing by themselves they won’t learn, if you don’t have fun with them, they’ll avoid you; if you don’t show them the “real you”, they won’t trust you; if you don’t have dinner or go clubbing with them you’ll never know them entirely. Let’s say that my leadership style follows this logic implication “If I don’t…, then they won’t…” and things seem to work. Every day I try my best to learn from them how to be a better leader!
What do you think about the role of women in the Italian startup ecosystem? Is the future promising?
To tell the truth it’s hard to define “the startup ecosystem” in Italy and abroad. Opportunities come for those who search and find them, and sometimes a too stimulating environment might make a startupper life might result not challenging enough to prepare him/her to bigger obstacle that he/she may find later in his path. A context in which “you just go to a bar and find two fellows to create a business with” seems of course very appealing, but you never know how much could last a business born in this environment. Will it be able to resist to stressful situations? Will it be able to come up with disruptive ideas to overcome those situations? Will it stay strong although nobody believes in the project? We in Friendz had crazy ideas to get to know new people who could give us the right pieces of advice and information to carry on with our project. The enthusiasm with which a person met in an unconventional way welcomes you is far way different from a formally invited crowd of investors.
What is Friendz direction?
Our motto in 2018 first semester was ICO. In the second semester, instead of a motto, we have had a question: “How can we invest our ICO raising in the best way?”. Our main projects are:
Internationalization, we are planning to bring Friendz to other European countries, and diversification.
We are creating new products to make Friendz more solid and promising!
