Masterclass: Alessandro Santo

 

Alessandro Santo, the story of an Entrepreneur in Venture Capital

It was a pleasure for the MBA fellows to host Alessandro Santo, director of Last Mile Ventures, to hold a Masterclass about his experience in digital value creation.

“Entrepreneurship: When is the right time?"

With this question Alessandro challenged the fellows and shared his experience of entrepreneurship at 29 years old. He recommends taking the entrepreneurial step after having experienced the business environment: it’s easy to fall in what he calls the “optimism bias” typical of MBAs.  

On the other hand, too much cautiousness can be negative as well. Even not taking risks can negatively affects the Human Capital, and this quite often happen with Italian VCs. He also pointed out that Italian VC investors consistently underperforms also because they fail to attract the best teams, the most critical factor in nascent, early stage, ecosystems.

Finally, Alessandro highlighted that the development of VC sector in our country should be focused on our strengths, such as the food industry, in order to attract the best start-ups and develop an ecosystem.

Thank you Alessandro for the great talk!