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The Founder Institute's four-month curriculum covers everthing you would expect from an early-stage startup program, including topics like "Startup Legal and IP” towards the beginning, to “Fundraising” near the end. What makes the curriculum special is the Mentors that teach it, whose passion, feedback and support helps our companies avoid rookie mistakes and set the foundation for a meaningful and enduring company. 

The Founder Institute carefully recruits approximately 25 Mentors per Semester, who are normally the CEO or founder of a successful startup. Rather than specialists or consultants, we prefer Founders and CEOs to give our companies "the entrepreneur's perspective." The mentors share their experiences, best practices, and mistakes, while also providing specific guidance and feedback on the Founder companies. 

In addition, the Founder Institute's unique Graduate Liquidity Pool allows our mentors to share in the equity of companies formed in each program - and, their share is based solely on the anonymous ratings they receive from the Founders both during, and after the program. In this way, the Founder Institute incentivizes mentors to take a special interest in our startups, and provide as much assistance as possible after the program. 

We have a great lineup of Mentors confirmed for the Autumn 2012 Rome Founder Institute, including many from out of town. See the full list below.

 

 Adeo Ressi 

CEO, TheFunded.com 

Adeo Ressi is Founding Member of TheFunded.com, an online community of 17,000 CEOs to research, rate, and review funding sources worldwide. Adeo also runs the Founder Institute, a mentoring program that helps entrepreneurs launch hundreds of world-class companies each year. The Institute is the eighth start-up that Adeo has founded or built, four of which were acquired and three of which are still operating.

 

Andrea La Mesa 

Managing Director, Airbnb US 

Andrea La Mesa is Managing Director at Airbnb US and is currently a governance member of BAIA (Business Association Italy America). He founded Publisoftweb, startup specialized in social networking platforms development for brands and, before starting his own company, he worked as a management consultant for Accenture, working on several consulting projects with major telecommunication companies in Italy, France and Brazil.

 

Andrea Di Camillo

Managing Partner, Principia Sgr 

Andrea Di Camillo is managing partner at Principia SGR, one of the biggest venture capital firms in Italy. Since 1995, he contributed to launch several successful internet Italian company such as Yoox, Venere and Tiscali and the first italian venture capital fund, Kiwi. He also co-founded Banzai and Vitaminic. Recently he invested on new digital startups Viamente, Geomercato, Fubles and Ofootball.

 

Antonio Leonforte

Co-founder & CEO, Fhoster 

Antonio Leonforte is Co-founder & CEO at Fhoster. He is also a seasoned software engineer with 16+ years of professional experience (2 years spent abroad in UK and NL) on a wide range of application domains ranging from real-time military systems to large distributed information systems for private companies and public administrations. Antonio is an entrepreneur and co-founder of two other software companies, which he has managed and personally directed as chief software architect and designer many large development projects, including Lottomatica's ticketing system, mastering both technical and strategic issues. Since 2003 he's also contract professor teaching Software Engineering at the University of Perugia.

 

Antonio Tomarchio

Founder, Beintoo 

Antonio is the founder, President and CEO of Beintoo. He is a serial entrepreneur, technological visionary and an experienced manager with several years of experience in the Internet industry. Before founding Beintoo, he worked in Dada SpA, where he was head of Products, in charge of product design and performance advertising strategy, leading an international team of 30 professionals in the UK and Italy and maintaining foreign relations with Dada’s strategic online advertising partners. Prior to Dada he cofounded and was CEO of Adright, a startup focused on innovative technology for performance advertising, later acquired by Dada in January 2009. He also cofounded and was CEO of PreCYdent Inc., a San Diego based startup that created and patented an innovative algorithm for legal research based on complex theory. He is author of several international publications on network theory and performance advertising algorithms. He earned his masters degree in Mathematical Engineering at the Polytechnic of Milan and a double degree in Engineering Sciences at the Ecole Centrale de Paris. He loves the Internet, but his greatest passion is traveling the world, scuba diving and the study of foreign languages.

 

Augusto Coppola

Co-founder, Innovaction Lab 

Entrepreneur and manager with a focus on execution. He is co-founder and president of InnovAction Lab. He was part of the founding team of two international startup, for which he has found partners and investors and closed contracts in Europe, America and Asia. In addition to being co-chair of BAIA Italy and co-founder of Startup Rome, is one of the authors of CheFuturo!, Augusto is the advisor and board member of several start-ups, a consultant of private investment funds, consultant and speaker on innovation. Augusto has a degree in engineering and a practical experience in the creation and development of products, combining the technical, marketing, financial and business development aspects. He acquired a good ability to identify the potential of people and build harmonious and productive team.

 

Davide De Guz 

Founder and CEO, ClickMeter 

Davide De Guz is founder and CEO at ClickMeter and Marketing Director at Translated. He has a degree in economics and business and about 15 years of experience in Internet business as an entrepreneur and top consultant. In 1999 he won the WWW Sole24Ore Award for University. it The company was self-founded and in 2001 was sold to Italian venture investors. In 2004 he founded ConsultingSoft an offshore programming company with USA based project managers and offshore coders. In 2009 he founded ClickMeter the online service to track pay-per-click campaigns and prevent click fraud. Davide is also the author of many articles regarding world of Internet and new technologies for national magazines and newspapers.

 

Davide D'atri

CEO, Soundreef 

Davide d’Atri is founder and President of Soundreef.com. Soundreef is a VC backed european music rights management company, specialized in background music for retail chains. Davide was also the founder of Beatpick.com, a global music licensing company, working for advertising agencies, film production houses and game producers. Davide graduated in Economics and obtained a master’s degree in International Business Economics. He is currently a lecturer at the Marketing and Management of Music Master of University of Rome “La Sapienza”.

 

Fabrizio Capobianco

President and Chairman of the Board, Funambol 

Fabrizio Capobianco is President and Chairman of the Board of Funambol, and has extensive expertise in the mobile industry, with work experience that includes Reuters and Tibco. He is a successful entrepreneur, having founded several Italian high tech companies. Fabrizio also holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pavia, Italy, with a focus on usability. He has been recognized as a top '40 under 40' high tech leader and mobile visionary. He also writes a blog that was voted among the best in the industry by FierceWireless.

 

Gabriele Valli

Partner, Crinali, Zivago, Beatpick, Soundreef 

My first time as entrepreneur was in 1988, when I founded my first new company, whose purpose was "designing and producing auto shades for cars". After some experience as a business consultant, between 1990 and 1994, I went back to my entrepreneurial "career" in 1995. Since then, I founded and funded almost 10 small business, in the fields of Information and Communication Technologies, Business Consulting, Training, Digital Contents. Nowadays I am Partner in the following company: Crinali srl (business consultancy and business process outsourcing for the Public Administration), Zivago srl (human resources consulting and training), Katalys srl (IT Consulting and funding), Beatpick Ltd and Soundreef Ltd (music rights trading company, both for in store music and audio-visual sound tracking) and Unconventional srl (Communication and Events). Since 2008, I have been President of the "Informale", an association managing "Spazio Informale", whose mission is to develop the entrepreneurial culture contaminated with arts within the Italian society, through building business community. Since 2009, I have also written 3 books: “It’s a question of style: booklet about the Power”, “Respect" and "Leadership in Jazz".

 

Marco Trombetti 

Founder and CEO, Translated

Marco Trombetti is Co-Founder and CEO at Memopal and Founder and CEO at Translated. He started his career very young - at the age of 15 he delivered innovative technology and algorithms for PC CD players to the Fidonet BBS community (back when the Web was just a nagging thought in the back of Tim Berners-Lee's mind). During his studies in Physics, Marco continued developing technical solutions, this time for the digital mapping market, information retrieval and image manipulation. In 1999 Marco created Translated, one of the first internet based-translation services and, today, one of the most innovative. Translated provides localization services to many leading global companies and fast-growing businesses. In parallel, he created other successful e-businesses such as WebChatWorld (over 50M pageviews per month, ilsole24ore WWW nomination). WebChatWorld Ads management was later acquired by Doubleclick (now part of Google). In recent years, Marco has created an exciting internet search technology for images, which he has sold to a well-known IT company. Today, besides being responsible for the overall administration of Translated, Marco is pursuing research in machine learning models for integrating machine translation in a human translation workflow.

 

Marco Magnocavallo

Venture Partner 

Marco Magnocavallo is a serial entrepreneur, product manager and technology executive. His most recent company, Blogo, became the most visited vertical blog network in Europe with more than 11 ml/uu month with activities in 5 countries. He sold a first stake of Blogo to RCS/Dada (listed at Milan Stock Exchange) and then to Populis for more than 8.5 ml/$. Marco is also an angel investor and in many cases a board member. He has currently invested in companies in the US, UK ,and Italy including: Trigger, NextDigest, Mumumio, Fubles, Pusher and Iubenda. In these deals he has co-invested with investors like 500 Startups/Dave McClure, Founders Found, Paul Graham, Kauffman Foundation, Passion Capital and dPixel. Marco is also a startup mentor and panelist at many events and have been covered in Techcrunch, Read/Write Web, Alarm Clock, Corriere della Sera, RAI, Repubblica, Wired. Earlier in his career he has founded a web agency (Communicate!) where they shipped complex web projects (Intranet/Extranet) for big customers such as the Italian Postal Service, McKinsey, Daimler Chrysler, Lycos. He sold this business to a pre-IPO company and then stayed a couple of years as CEO. After Communicate! he did a management buyout of an italian ISP with more than 8000 SME customers, he did resized the business (people, offices) and bring it back to EBIT. He sold this company to private investors, and in the late 1990's he went on to found an e-commerce site that grew to more than 1ml/$ sales in the first year of activity, which he then sold to Jumpy (part of Fininvest Group, listed a MI Stock Exchange). Marco then founded an online customer care company that built one of the first livechat solutions for e-commerce websites. Marco is also co-founder and curator for Startup Wikli, a weekly email digest focused on Web, Business, Angel investing and startupping.

 

Marco Massarotto

Founder, Hagakure 

Marco Massarotto manages and is one of the founding partners (2006) of Hagakure a leading innovative italian digital communications agency. Hagakure has been working with major italian and international brands such FIAT, TELECOM ITALIA, MICROSOFT, NESTLE, DANONE, UNILEVER. Marco is the author of Internet P.R., a book published by the main italian technology publisher on April 2008 and introducing the practices of online P.R. in the italian market. In 2011 he published, always for Apogeo, the first italian manual on communications on social media: Social Network Costruire e Comunicare identità in Rete. He worked for 10 years in major international advertising agencies (Publicis, Lowe). From 2002 to 2006 he’s been a member of the executive board of the Art Directors Club Italiano. He also teaches digital marketing in many Italian universities.

 

Massimo Sgrelli

co-founder & CTO, Wave Group 

Entrepreneur, angel investor and CTO at Wave Group. I Graduated with a degree in Computer Science, and have been working in Internet technologies since 1991. My career started in Telecom Italia working on distance learning software, then I completed my experience in Accenture and Fininvest. After that I created my own company - a boutique technology consultancy - and after less than 2 years I merged it with Wave Group, an IT Consulting and Outsourcing company with a particular talent in innovative technology services for enterprises. I have a real passion for startups and I love to help the Italian talents to leave their mark in the world.

 

Massimo Melica

Partner, Melica, Scandelin & Partners 

Massimo is a Founding partner of the Fondazione per l'Informatica e l'Innovazione Forense (F.I.I.F.) at Consiglio Nazionale Forense. Professor of "informatica giuridica" at the University Giustino Fortunato. He is also an expert in law applied to new communication technologies, reputation management, e-business, e-government, privacy, intellectual property, e-commerce, and marketing. He has decades of experience in contracts in the field of digital industries, protection of patents and trademarks, arbitration, negotiations with trade unions, relationships with government agencies, branding and identity, and mergers and acquisitions.

 

Paolo Barberis 

Co-founder, DADA 

Paolo Barberis is a co-founder of DADA, one of the most important and enduring italian internet companies, which he created in 1995. In 1998 he founded the italian chapter of the Internet Advertising Bureau and, in 1999, he founded SuperEva and the Italian chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC). He quit his role in DADA on February 2011.

 

Stefano Quintarelli

Entrepreneur, Garden ventures 

Mr. Quintarelli, 47, is an entrepreneur who played a pivotal role in the development of the Internet ecosystem in Italy, pioneering its introduction in Milan university in the mid 80’s, founding MiNeRS - the first Italian students’computer network association, and later starting I.NET, the first internet business operator in Italy which was listed in Milan’s stock exchange in 2000 and later bought by BT Group and delisted. He contributed also in the foundation of Mix - the first and major Italian peering point, Clusit - the Italian security association where he still serves in the board, AIPSI – the Italian chapter of the Information Systems Security Association and AIIP – Italy’s ISP’s association where he served as Chairman until 2007, when he resigned from BT Group. As a business angel he invested in various start-ups including Eximia, an RFId system integrator which he chaired until 2011 when he was called as Chief Digital Officer of Gruppo 24 Ore, (a media group owned by Confindustria, the Italian employers’ federation) participating in the most relevant industry bodies. He resigned in June 2012 following his candidacy to Italy's communications Authority. He maintains a blog, very popular in the ICTs community, where he comments his views on the impacts of ICTs in economy and society.

 

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