How Two Italian Founders Pointed Their Dutch Startup back to Italy

Today Equidam released it’s Italian translation. It took us 3 years to open properly to the Italian market from Holland, despite the fact that both me and Gianluca Valentini are Italian. What has brought us to Rotterdam and why did we decide to open up to Italy this late?

Since I was a kid, I always had a strong drive to go abroad. English fascinated me as a language, and, being born in a small village in the mountains, I’ve always been eager to know what the larger world has to offer. During my studies, I had the opportunity to travel to Scotland, and learn a few facts about the business world abroad. Everything sounded more honest, open and direct than Italy, good points for me.

The choice of going abroad again to complete my education was then easy. Rotterdam was a natural choice, one of the best M.Sc.s in finance in Europe. That brought together me and Mr. Valentini and ended up with us starting Equidam.

Even before Equidam, we shared a passion for private companies. I think it probably stems out of the fact that they have larger opportunities to grow, they are more flexible and more responsive to market needs. We also shared an assumption. The assumption is that finance is under-utilised by private companies. We thought, and still do, that by knowing more about finance and having the right tools, private companies around the world can grow faster, bring their innovation to market in a better way and finally help millions of people sooner.

It was this drive and shared assumption that brought us to start Equidam. Through our little consulting days, valuation came up more and more as a topic with large disparities of knowledge between parties. Entrepreneurs and founders are not used to the valuation discussion as much as investors are. They can end up leaving money on the table or

not close a deal at all because of this miscommunication and information asymmetry. We thought (and still do!) that we could solve that. And that is how Equidam started.

Through the years we grew Equidam trying to help as many founders as possible, and I’m extremely proud of our results!

And it is on this mission, that today we launched the Italian language. After Dutch, German, and French, Italian was a natural addition. Valuation is a though topic and a though negotiation. If we want to provide companies with the best tools, these tools have to speak the language of the discussion. This increases trust, reliability and simplicity.

So why does Italian come so late, after all we are both Italian right? wasn’t it a natural choice to have Italian as first foreign language?

Yes, it might have been, but something interesting has happened. To my surprise, the Italian companies and founders demonstrated a very good English proficiency! This, coupled with a larger number of customer requests for translations in German, French etc made us change our priorities. This couldn’t go on for too long though. The Italian startup scene is happening now, and we hope to be part of it as much as possible. Lately, there’s been talk of increasing number of VC funds, angel investment clubs, accelerators and most importantly startups emerging all over Italy. Italian startups raised roughly €100 million for 2015 alone and Italian’s equity crowdfunding law was one of the first ones to come out, and still a solid base for other regulations around the world.

As a startup that is focused on helping other startups all over the world, we have been on the lookout for new developments in the global

startup scene.
From the tech unicorns in the Silicon Valley to the European startup hubs such as London, Paris and Berlin, to the Israeli tech scene, we have been witnessing the boom of unicorns and smaller companies going public.
We wish nothing but the utmost success to the Italian hub, and with the addition of Italian to our languages, we’ll strive even more to make it happen!

P.S. Un grazie enorme va rivolto agli utenti italiani che ci hanno aiutato ad adattare la piattaforma e finalizzarla in questi ultimi mesi, grandissimi!