Giorgio Tinacci is the founder of Casavo, the proptech scaleup launched in 2017 that simplifies the process of buying and selling homes. Buying or selling a home can take up to 6 months and the aim of Casavo is to reduce this to 30 days. Casavo is now present in Italy, Spain, Portugal and France, it has raised over €700 million between equity and debt with an international team of over 400 people.

Silvia Wang is co-founder of Serenis, a tech company with the aim of making mental wellbeing more accessible, offering quality online psychological support. Silvia is what we call a second time founder. In 2015, at only 28 years old, she co-founded with her husband ProntoPro, the number one services marketplace in Italy. In 2021, Silvia exited ProntoPro and founded Serenis.

Riccardo Zacconi is the co-founder of King, the developer behind Candy Crush. Candy Crush has been downloaded more than three billion times since it launched in 2012, becoming the most downloaded casual match game of all time. In 2016, King was acquired by Activision Blizzard for $5.9 billion. Riccardo went on to launch his own fund Sweet Capital that focuses on early-stage investments in consumer technology companies.

Fundraising is an incredibly complex and nuanced topic to cover - but we have invited two great guests to try to untangle it from an investor and founder’s viewpoint. Here with us are: Carlotta Siniscalco, a Partner at Emergence Capital based in San Francisco and Raffaele Terrone, an Italian entrepreneur and co-founder of Scalapay, a successful buy-now-pay later fintech company.

Niccolo Maisto and Michele Attisani founded FACEIT in 2011, together with their third co-founder, Alessandro Avallone and the company grew to become the world's largest eSports platform in the world. It hosts competitive gamings for egames, like Counterstrike and Dota 2. In 2021, FACEIT was acquired by Savvy Games in a deal, valued at $500 million, and then merged with ESL gaming in a deal that was itself valued at $1.5 billion.

One of the pillars of FACEIT's success as been the incredibly strong community that the company built amongst gamers especially, but also game developers and content creators. To quote Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit on this topic, who said, "Community is everything, it's what helps companies thrive and survive and it, and it's what's keep and what keeps people engaged and coming back". Today, there are more than 30 million users playing over 30 million game sessions each month on FACEIT. So we think we have the right experts to cover the topic.

Launching a startup can be a daunting task, especially when it comes to building an effective minimum viable product (MVP) and finding product-market fit. In a recent masterclass series, Pleo's CTO, Nicola Perra, shared his experience of launching Pleo's MVP and the challenges he faced during the process.

One of the key takeaways from the discussion was the importance of having a technical co-founder in a startup team. Perra emphasized that his expertise as a software engineer played a crucial role in the success of Pleo's MVP. Having someone who understands the problems and challenges that may arise during the development process is essential for building a successful product.

Doug Leone, Partner at Sequoia Capital is widely regarded as one of the most influential investors in Silicon Valley. He served as Senior Steward of Sequoia Capital, one of the most respected venture capital firms in the industry, before stepping aside last year to make wave for a new generations of leaders. He continues to have an active role at the firm.