Joining Bakeca.it to build a new ventures division

A few weeks ago I started a new job. I joined Bakeca.it in Turin as Director of Product and New Ventures.

After two and a half years as Head of Operations & Technology at GreatPixel in Milan, this is a big change. Right now I'm in that phase where you learn a lot of new names, open too many documents at once and ask questions that probably sound naive. I'm fine with that. It's the fastest way I know to understand a place.

What I'm here to do

The short version: build a new division from scratch. Its job is to launch startups that go after emerging market opportunities. Not an innovation lab that produces nice slides, but actual businesses that need to make money.

The deal comes with full P&L responsibility and freedom on technology, team and strategy. That second part scares me a little, in a good way. Freedom is great until you realize that if the stack is wrong, or the team is wrong, there is exactly one person to blame.

It's also the closest thing to founding a company that I've done since eKoodo. Back then I was preparing decks and pitching investors. This time the investor is the company I work for, which means less time chasing funding and a different, very direct kind of accountability.

I'm not going to say what we are building yet. Partly because it's not only mine to announce, and partly because in February a good chunk of it still lives on a whiteboard.

Why an established company would do this

Most established companies spend most of their energy defending their core business. I get it: the core business pays the salaries, and nobody gets fired for protecting it.

Bakeca.it is choosing to also put money and people on a few high-growth verticals. That's a bet, and I find it brave. Some of these new ventures will probably not work, and that is simply how launching things goes. Accepting that upfront, and measuring a new venture differently from a mature business, is not something every company is willing to do.

It's also interesting from a purely practical point of view. A startup inside an established company can move fast like a startup, but it can lean on things a real startup doesn't have on day one: experience, know-how, people who have already made the obvious mistakes.

The risk is also clear. The startup can get suffocated by the processes of the parent company, or the parent company can lose patience before things have time to work. I honestly don't know yet how that balance will look in practice. A big part of product leadership in this role, I think, is protecting the speed of the new teams while keeping them honest about numbers.

Hiring: who I'm looking for

The team starts at zero: engineering, product and operations. At the moment hiring is the thing that takes most of my calendar, and I expect it to stay that way for a while.

This is the kind of people I'm looking for:

Builders. People who like shipping things and seeing them used, more than polishing them forever.
Comfortable with ambiguity. There won't be a perfect spec. Often there won't be a spec at all, just a problem and a deadline.
Able to pivot. If the data says we were wrong, we change direction without drama and without defending what we already built.
Owners. People who care about the result, not just about closing their ticket.

At GreatPixel I built an internal dev team from scratch and led a group of 30+ people from 7 countries. What I took from that is that empowerment only works if accountability comes with it, and that the first hires shape the culture much more than any document I could write. So I'll be slow and picky with the first ones, and I'll probably annoy some recruiters along the way.

If this sounds like you, or like someone you know, get in touch. I'd rather have a coffee with someone who asks hard questions than read one more perfect CV.

Now, back to the whiteboard.