Translator: Reviewer: Michele Gianella
This is my graduation,
the turning point in my life.
The college years, for me, were so difficult,
and this is the first time that I talk about it in public.
Migraine, nausea, and constant stomach pain.
Whatever I did, I suffered of a very strong anxiety.
Mind you: I didn't take trains or planes for over 10 years,
and I lost count of my hospital visits.
I really had all kinds of visits.
I felt frozen
while the world was in continuous motion.
Everyone else was traveling, going on an Erasmus, moving,
and I was home, still.
But one thing made me feel good - immensely good.
It was playing video games alone or with my friends.
I liked it so much.
When the opportunity came to write a thesis,
I got an idea:
donate without spending by playing video games.
You should know that not just us, young people, play video games.
We're nearly three billion people in the world.
The video game market alone
is worth more than twice that of cinema and music combined.
Even boomers, our parents, and people of all ages play it.
So, my passion for video games
led me to the insight
that I had to do something that had an impact in the outside world.
But how did I come up with this idea to convert the time spent playing
as a donation to non-profit organizations?
Do you remember Gangnam Style?
This song had been drilled into our ears before Despacito.
I read in an article that the singer,
after the first billion views on YouTube,
had received several million from Google advertisements.
So I thought: let me make a video.
I'll convince a million people to watch it,
and I'll give all the money that comes in to charity.
Convincing a million or a billion people
to watch a video isn't so easy.
But my video game passion suggested:
what if it's a "play and donate"?
So I started writing a 700-page thesis.
I feel sorry for my professor who read it - I assume.
Then, to validate my idea,
I collected questionnaires on the beach with the help of my little cousins.
We bought some white T-shirts
that said: "Fill out a questionnaire, we'll give you a smile."
We went to the beach, in Jesolo and Caorle.
It was about 30 – 40 °C,
but my 12, 13 and 14-year-old cousins were very happy.
They keep asking me to go to the beach
to give smiles in return for thesis questionnaires
now, when I had already graduated a few years ago.
Let's go right back to my graduation day.
That's when I got out of existential chaos.
What will my future be? What do I do now?
So, deliberately, I went into entrepreneurial chaos.
I mean, I had an idea.
I wanted to save the world by playing video games.
Yeah, okay, but how do I do that?
Right after I graduated,
the first sentence I read
was by Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, who says:
"Being an entrepreneur
is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death."
And I said, yeah, off to a great start!
That's when I immediately realized
that, sure, my idea was beautiful,
I've got an honors in economics and a shining 32-teeth smile,
but this wasn't enough to establish a company,
something that could take off.
The idea, I realized right away,
was the one percent, i.e. just a little piece of the puzzle.
I needed someone to help me.
So I started to tell my idea here and there.
So one day, an ex high-school basket player
just like me, wrote me.
He says, "Hi, I want to help you. I don't know how, but I want to help you."
Small detail: that person, Matteo, is an aerospace engineer.
So I thought, yeah, sooner or later,
I'll design a space game, a Space-Invaders-like game.
But I didn't have to, like Elon Musk, fly into space.
So I say, okay, look, you know what, let's try.
And so we go, we develop the first games.
This is the first game, with my head that took a lot of beatings on the pipes,
but we left,
and a few weeks later a call comes from Silicon Valley.
We were like, "Oh my goodness, a call from America?"
We started a fundraiser.
We didn't want to ask dad for money
and we said, let's try, let's do something:
a "gamification" of fundraising.
For just 20 euros you became a King, we made you a video.
For 50 euros you became a Champion, and we sent you a postcard.
Fundraising was a success, we had thousands of shares
and we went to the U.S.
For me it's been an incredible dream.
It's been 10 years since I took a train, an airplane,
and I found myself there to set foot in America.
It was something extraordinary that I had always dreamed of.
My enthusiasm was really high.
However, before leaving, we had to deal with something a little lower:
the money to travel.
Yeah, we did the fundraiser.
We checked out every form of lodging.
San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Rent is about $3,000
and a margherita pizza costs $32.
So we were like, now what do we do?
We get in, searching and searching.
Finally we found a lady, we got the deal.
But then she said, "I have a problem, I have to go to India
to take a hot air balloon ride throughout India,
and I need someone to look after the cat."
And we're like, "Here we are, sure, we'll cat-sit,
but you have to give us 60% off on the house."
She says okay.
So we cared for BC.
We discovered only on the last day that BC stood for "Black Cat."
We gave him food in the morning, then he ran away.
So we got into the U.S., what a dream.
We immediately realized
that there was a need for creativity and resourcefulness
in what we had to do.
I want to tell you about Facebook.
We wanted to get in to tell our idea.
Our first move
was contacting those who work there.
We didn't get any answer.
We tried the front desk and said,
"Hi, we're Italian guys with a gaming start up, we want - "
They said, "No, that's the door, get out of here."
We were going out and while just stepping outside,
found a phone on the floor.
"Well, it'll be an employee's phone."
We'll get it and deliver it to the reception,
and at that moment we think:
"Wait, there's one thing you can do with a pin-locked phone:
a video!"
So we do it and record ourselves saying,
"Hi, we're the guys who rescued your phone.
Wanna pay us back? Please let us into Facebook for an interview.”
No response. No one, no one, no one.
In the next days and weeks,
while looking at our phone we noticed a picture of us outside.
We liked it, it was nice, with our little smile.
We considered an experiment.
Let's try to load it on LinkedIn, another social media network.
The goal of the experiment was seeing
if, by liking guys that made the like symbol
outside the company of likes,
the post can go viral.
If so, how can we not get one of the 10,000 employees
of the San Francisco headquarters?
Well, in 5, 6 hours we got hundreds and hundreds of "recommended"
and the next day, while outside it was raining cats and dogs
we were inside talking to the Facebook Gaming Manager.
What did we learn? We had been lucky, sure.
That was the tip of the iceberg, the success story.
But underneath there are so many failures.
However, if you're really motivated to achieve your goal,
then you don't give a shit, you go and run.
Both me and Matteo, as former basketball players,
consider His Royal Highness, Michael Jordan as a model.
One sentence of him best expresses
why success and failure aren't two opposites.
Rather, failure is a step in achieving success.
Jordan says, "I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career.
I have lost almost 300 games.
26 times, I have been trusted to take the game winning shot
and missed.
I've failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed."
So every day, in what I do,
I always repeat to myself, despite this may sound trivial,
"If I try, I've got one percent chance to make it.
If I don't try, that's zero.”
And so, if it's something that I really want to achieve,
I'll try.
One is greater than zero, no need of a degree to gett it.
So I really say, why don't you try?
It's okay to think about it, reflect on it, study, etc.
But at some point, you also have to try and do something.
Indeed, I strongly believe
that no one's ever lost weight sitting on the sofa,
reading books on how to lose weight.
At some point, you get the calories and you need physical activity
and tie your shoes to start running.
A start up saying goes like "Done is better than perfect."
So we can't sit down hoping for the right time to come:
we have to go and try, one lil' step at a time.
In my case, these lil' steps brought me from the thesis to Silicon Valley.
In any case, even during my existential chaos,
this has allowed me to go out and take trains and planes.
My town's name is "Paese" i.e. "Town" in Italian - what a fantasy!
The first few times I wanted to travel again
I didn't say right away, "Let's go from Paese to San Francisco."
I went from Paese to Treviso by train: four minutes.
The first few times it didn't go well at all.
But I tried and tried again.
Then, after Paese -Treviso was OK,
I travelled Paese - Venice - 29 minutes, fast regional train.
There, too, the very first few times it didn't go well,
but I kept trying, trying
until then I made it to Paese - Milan, and then Paese - San Francisco.
So it was an extraordinary emotion,
but it wasn't out of the blue.
It was a step, a step, a step.
Every time I made this attempt
I used to listen to a motivational speech
by Al Pacino from the movie "Any Given Sunday."
He says, one inch at a time.
When you finally add up all those inches
you'll see the difference between victory and defeat.
So really, it's one step after another.
Now I want to close by giving you a hand with five tips
which I believe are very important to take action.
First. I lived it through my skin, and I really recommend it:
find a partner.
It's really hard on your own.
In good times and bad,
have someone who can help, it's really important,
because there're no winning ideas, there're winning people.
If 17 years ago I had the idea of creating a social media
where, when a person has interesting content,
I give a tall thumb,
it's not guaranteed that I'd succeed in creating Facebook.
So, people first.
The second: be curious and listen to someone,
be it a friend, a relative, a mentor,
someone who can tell you how to do that thing.
We often don't act because we're afraid of what can happen.
So talking to someone that has already done that
can help us a lot.
In startups, they always tell us
that we should run, run.
But every now and then, it's right to stop to discuss with someone,
because it doesn't make much sense to run fast,
if you go in the wrong direction.
Third: don't wait for the perfect time.
Here we're all young and so I say:
if you want to set up a TikTok channel,
write a book, do something that obsesses you, that you want to do,
go, do it, count to three and go.
Fourth: think now about a B, C, D plan.
You've all seen, also with the Facebook story,
that we didn't stop at the fact that no one had answered us:
we moved on, because we wanted to achieve the goal.
Therefore, you have up to Z - A, B, C, D, E, F, G.
Then, the moment you arrive to Z it doesn't work.
Change direction, possibly that's not the best thing to do.
The last tip I want to give you
slightly differs from my worldview:
don't give up.
They told you endlessly, "Don't give up."
I want to bring it to you with a different point of view,
that of video games.
When you play a video game,
maybe you win the first level right away,
but when it starts to be the fifth, sixth, seventh level,
it's not so easy to win right away.
So you play a round and lose, you play another and lose.
Failure is there,
and that's OK in the virtual world, much less so in the real one,
but that's perfectly normal in the world of video games.
Try to think of a game
where, every time you play, you always win.
How boring!
So really,
the world of video games has taught me
that we can't give up, that you have to try.
With these five points
I hope from my heart that I've given you five practical tips.
I hope I've given you a hand
for you to be able,
by grasping this hand, to run, not to stand still,
and remember that, however it goes, it's worth it.
Thank you.