“A tech event in Italy with successful speakers from all over the world? That’s impossible, the ecosystem is not ready”.
It was 2018, Spotify had just filed its IPO, and that’s what people told us when we announced we wanted to launch what later became Italian Tech Week.
But we were convinced Italy had to start somewhere. And so we thought: why not Turin? Why not with us? We pulled together all our resources: the incredible network Exor Ventures built over the years, our tech expertise, our community in Italy.
And we did it: June 2018. Italy had its own small Tech Event. It was called SEI Torino Forum, and our mission was to inspire future entrepreneurs.
100 promising founders came to learn about what it takes to go from 0 to 1 directly from the words and experience of Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and first external investor of Facebook. People started talking to each other, sharing ideas, getting inspired. Relationships were forming, whether in front of a glass of wine or during a panel about Networking held by Reid Hoffman himself, the co-founder of LinkedIn.
And our team, although buried with work, was there to witness the incredible phenomenon that we truly hoped would happen: the ecosystem was coming together. All the rooms of Fondazione Agnelli were full of (still unexploited) potential, and what’s even more beautiful is that people started realising it.
An infinite number of things have changed in in the past 5 years but our mission remained the same. In the next days we’ll be sharing memories, behind the scenes, anecdotes and key moments from the past editions of Italian Tech Week: join us in this walk along memory lane as we get ready for the 6th edition of ITW, coming up in just 16 days!
A tech event in Italy with successful speakers from all over the world? That’s exactly what the ecosystem needed. And we, at Exor, knew it.
In the picture, from left to right, all the people who believed in this event at the very beginning:
Taavet Hinrikus (founder of Wise), Diego Piacentini, Mike Volpi (partner Index Ventures), Matt Cohler, Daniel Ramot (founder of Via), Demet Suzan Mutlu (founder of Trendyol Group), Luciana Lixandru (partner at Sequoia Capital), Reid Hoffman,Mike Butcher, Alexander Karp (founder of Palantir Technologies, Sissel Hansen (founder of Startup Guide), Riccardo Zacconi (co founder of King), John Elkan, Roni Bonjack.