Roman Gladiators: Entrepreneurs in the “Eternal City”

After spending three incredible sunny days in Rome, I could try to wax poetically about the history, culture, and people of this truly unique city but many books have been written about this topic by people far more qualified than I to comment on these topics, so I will not.  I will focus on observations on the entrepreneurship dimension of the city.

I found myself loving the city very quickly from just a feel standpoint. It was both livable, busting with activity, unpredictable (surprises around almost every corner) and yet with an unparalleled historical component. What a fabulous place to be, but is it a good place for entrepreneurship?

That is a question that to date would not receive an affirmative answer from many experts. But that does not mean it must be that way going forward but the constraining factors must be addressed.

The city has three major challenges for entrepreneurship to overcome and hence the title “Gladiators” for the current generation of entrepreneurs.  These structural issues can be overcome and there are encouraging signs but I found them particularly present in Rome an emblematic of what exists in other regions but maybe with not the same intensity.

1. Tourists want to look at the past; Entrepreneurs want to look at the future: Dominating everything in Rome is its history. It is what brings in the waves and waves of tourists and makes it famous. A great metaphor that is also literally true in Rome is that if you dig to create build something new and you hit any historical artifacts, you must immediately stop. Understanding Rome, you would know that it is almost impossible to not do so, so this becomes an actual and mental roadblock. I understand that life is a blend of past, present, and future but the entrepreneur’s job is to create the future. Entrepreneurs need updated infrastructure but that is not the only issue here. It is one of mentality. The past is a gift and it can also be a burden, and that is especially true in this case.
2. Teams Must Be Able to Easily Evolve: As I have talked about before, the most important determinant of a new venture’s success is the quality of the team. This is not a static situation either. The team that launches a new company may be great for that stage but suboptimal for the challenges facing the team a year later. There is a healthy and necessary evolution of teams to create global competitive scalable ventures. I found in Italy a culture and laws that create much greater friction in this process than other regions. The inability to move out team members that are no longer a good fit or some would call “firing” in the extreme case, does not create a high-performance environment for IDEs to thrive.
3. Patriarchal Society:  Entrepreneurship requires a diversity of perspectives and to be globally competitive, it requires the inclusion of all the possible talent of a region. Italy is not alone in being more of a patriarchal society that it might want to be. While we are far from perfect at MIT, we have seen the inclusion of women on teams materially improves the results of those teams. Not only in the numbers at the meetings were females underrepresented, but the feel of a more command and control environment (e.g., unwillingness to give up equity in a company) was clearly more prevalent than what I see in the US and other countries.

Despite these obstacles, the signs I saw that are encouraging and there is great potential. There is a clear recognition of the imperative to move forward at places like Marconi University and the Manageritalia. I saw vibrant global youthful talent being brought to the city to study and grow roots in places like John Cabot University.  Maybe most encouraging of all, I saw a well-funded and private (outside of the fickle hands of the government) initiative run by LVenture Group called Luiss EnLabs. This was an accelerator/startup factor that is creating a much-needed pipeline of the first generation of new companies to jump-start the entrepreneurial ecosystem.  It will take patience but I am confident that this organization is on the right track.

In summary, this is complicated and it will all take time. The new pioneering entrepreneurship gladiators must be given time to win this battle, and when they do, the past will be connected to the future and all will benefit.

Special thanks to the DE Dream Team Italy, Rachel Hentsch Spadafora, Tommaso Troiani, Fabrizio Rovatti, Floriano Bonfigli, and Alessandro Conti and the so many other people in Rome who welcomed me and made the visit so memorable.