The Vento Post | June 24
Our monthly pills for founders, wannabe founders and Vento’s friends.
June is a month of mixed feelings at Vento.
We are a few days away from the Investor Day of our Venture Building program. There is a part of us that is happy. We are looking forward to it. Finally, the teams will present the hard work we have done over the past 5 months and face the market. We will have a big party. Vento closing parties have become legendary. In previous episodes: the best nerds in the program suddenly start rapping, tables fly into the river, and many other things that unfortunately we can't report in this newsletter.
But then there is that other part of us that is already sad. We will arrive at OGR (our headquarters) and there will be no more morning standup with all the teams, no more founders knocking at our office with some exciting news or some daily drama, and no contest for the worst lunchbox of the day.
But we will survive. Because seeing each of these new ventures move forward is exactly why Vento exists.
And speaking of moving forward, we've made a lot of progress with Italian Tech Week. The lineup of speakers we put together for this edition is incredible. In the sense that right now even we are wondering how we did it.
Among the speakers already confirmed we have: Sam Altman, Mike Volpi, Doug Leone, Raluca Ragab, Julia Andre, Robert Gentz, Matt Miller, Alexander Rinke, Ilkka Paananen, Alex Kendall, Taveet Hinrikus, Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, Harry Stebbings, and many more.
Remember to pre-register here and follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn.
🌎 News from Vento
Our portfolio keeps growing. Here’s a sneak peek on one of our latest deals:
Scalestack
What does Scalestack do? Scalestack is a GTM orchestration platform that allows RevOps and SDR to sync data from all sales-related data sources creating automated workflows and improving pipelines.
Elio Narciso, the founder, can boast an impressive track record. After spending his early career in Italy and Spain, he earned an MBA from MIT and has successfully exited 2 startups.
🔮Wisdom Pills from our Founders
Everyone looks forward to a Happy Hour. And if it’s also a chance to learn something from fellow founders, well that’s a huge plus. That’s why every two weeks we organize the Beer Tuesday, a chance for our Venture Building founders to gain insights from a special guest and discuss ideas.
Our latest Beer Tuesday guest was Gabriele Venturi, founder of Pandas AI, straight out of the W24 Y Combinator Batch.
Pandas AI is an open-source AI agent that allows decision-makers to gain insights on any company-related question by integrating the whole company data infrastructure and applying conversational data analysis.
Here’s what we learned:
Building is all about thinking strategically and foreseeing outcomes three steps ahead. This has been Gabriele’s hallmark since high school, where he used to deal with laziness by building tools to automate the boring everyday stuff. He even enrolled in Economics at university to learn both sides of what it takes to run a company. Eventually, Gabriele dropped out to follow his entrepreneurial fever.
Everybody has different opinions about open source. Somebody says you can’t monetize it, somebody else sees it as a competitive advantage. Gabriele is a strong supporter of the last thesis and that’s because it gives you an essential asset: the ability to build a community. And a community allows you to do two things: keeping your clients close, therefore gathering feedback faster, speeding up the development cycle, and achieving economies of scale by rapidly spreading the word.
🫵 We want you! (Openings)
Looking for growth opportunities? Our companies are looking for bright individuals.
Give it a shot!
DeckX is looking for a Full Stack Developer
Zefi wants a Senior Data Engineer
Futura needs a Customer Care Specialist
Bonus: Italian Tech Week is still looking for Volunteers, apply to enjoy this experience from the inside!
🤝 The Network Effect (only for our Portfolio Companies)
We are not just a fund: we are a partner. And we support our founders to the best of our abilities. How do we do it? Well, among other things we create synergies with companies to offer dedicated perks and help our founders work better, spending less!
🧘🏼♂️ Take care of your mental well-being with Serenis! With us, you could have the first 5 sessions at just 10€.
🚀 Scale fast with Digital Ocean! Take advantage of up to $200K in infrastructure credit to scale your projects and reach new heights.
🌟 Innovate and connect at Talent Garden! Get your first month for only 1€, then just 29€ per month. Plus, enjoy a 15% discount on other memberships. Join a vibrant community of creators and entrepreneurs.
To get to these perks and 40+ other partnerships we have in place :
✨ The 3 Ls: Learned, Loved, Laughed
🤓 Learned
Scaling through chaos: the new book published by Index Ventures. Ebook available for free, pre-order are open for physical books.
AI’s $200B Question - Sequoia
😍 Loved
Why YC went to DC - Garry Tan, YC
Zefi, a SaaS startup born during last year’s Venture Building program, closed a 1.6M Seed Round
B4I announced a new co-founder matching platform 🤩
😂 Laughed
Lately, Isa opened a new internship position and a lot of very interesting people applied, eager to join us in supporting the best Italian founders.
It’s fairly accepted that to have success you gotta impress, and everybody has its own way to do so. Well, this reply definitely stood out:
We don’t know yet how the selections will go, but for sure we had a good laugh :)
🦄 If you
If you work in VC and want to receive updates about our Portfolio Companies, get in touch with us here
If you are a founder and you are in fundraising, apply here
If you want to be a founder, but you don’t know where to start, just click here