“We are the best at breaking boxes, your boxes”: this is the incipit of the site www.iMasterminds.net “, which definitely knows about breaking boxes (way of saying that in the Italian language is equivalent to the English one “think out of the box”). Because going outside the box and the ordinary paths is what the iMasterminds do best, aware of the fact that in order to be different and to create truly innovative products and services, it is necessary in order to “break”, to bang your head, to imagine first and to create immediately after what doesn’t exist yet; and at the end to hear customers saying “how was it impossible to live without it before?”.
Precisely for this reason we are close to startuppers, true innovators, to all those people who have an idea so crazy that they cannot find investors and who, precisely for this reason, in the end pay out of their own pocket, without a salary for who knows how much time. Yes, because the money comes only on those rare, very rare times when they manage to complete their startup, selling it when it has proven to work in spite of those who didn’t believe in it. And it is only then that the sleepless nights and all the sacrifices finally take on value. In jargon, this is called “exit”, exit from a dark and dangerous tunnel lasted many years; sometimes out from a real nightmare in which no one believed in their vision of the future.
It is precisely because of all these difficulties that real startuppers, those who have really invented something great, started with nothing: a stinky garage and a handful of dreams to make it laboriously come true. To quote someone who everyone knows, let’s talk for example about the much loved Steve Jobs or the much hated Mark Zuckerberg, or even the richest men in the world like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Isn’t it really from a basement that their startups started and then became the largest and most envied companies on the planet? Weren’t it perhaps disruptive ideas, stained with fatigue and sweat, that have generated some of the most important revolutions of recent decades? What would we be today without all of that? We cannot answer for the simple reason that today they represent our daily bread which we also use to have a drink delivered to us from the bar next door; but we are well aware of how our life would undergo a total involution, if only everything that we have conquered thanks to these gentlemen was taken away from us. Always starting from that garage that is often mistreated by gentlemen in jackets and ties who, comfortably seated in a comfortable armchair in an even more comfortable office, tell us how to build a startup without ever having worked their way up, without ever hearing the musty smell of basements; only because they felt like startuppers for having created new companies thanks to the money of the banks, the government (or new weekly supplement newspapers like Luca De Biase thanks to the money of Confindustria – the Italian association of large entreprises).
As Rufo Guerreschi (serial startupper in Bangalore, Miami, Rome and Zurich) wrote on Linkedin, it is necessary to distinguish the roles and differentiate the figure of the pure startupper, meaning the innovator who does not get remunerated until success, from that of the manager who receives a salary from day one.
The spark of this story (or perhaps, the poisoned arrow) comes from reading an article published in #Sole24Ore, precisely by Luca De Biase, in which an examination is made on “open innovation” crammed with contents, names and concepts, through a disquisition that passes through half the world. The observations of the well-prepared journalist, which in some points are perfectly right, inevitably get lost in the air when, narrowing down the contents and getting to the bone, one realizes that probably those who talk about innovation should do so with full knowledge of the facts. To be less politically correct, one could say that perhaps there are few, other than Mark Zuckerberg himself, who might have the right to talk about his “move fast and break things, because if you don’t break things, you’re not moving fast enough.” Because if you don’t know the noise of things breaking, if you don’t cut yourself with those sharp shards, if you don’t run over the pile of sharp and dirty debris that make “clang” and “crash”, then you cannot talk about it with full knowledge of the facts.
So let’s break these things, without fear, just as we break our boxes/bias.
Let’s look beyond the ordinary, trying to do it before and better than the others. Without being afraid to try, because sometimes this spasmodic attention to stillness and control – to the detriment of breaking – leaves some great minds on the track to watch the others, the brave ones, who run bumping into dreams, trials, projects and failures, shouting for pain and for happiness. We always think of the finish line, of that wool thread that seems impossible to reach but which then, sometimes after so many long years, is surpassed, of those races against time… of those boxes to break! Always remembering that to achieve success, you must always run with your eyes ahead and a beautiful smile painted on your face.
Pier Ludovico Bancale
