What They Don’t Teach You in Business School: Andrea Mach on Leading Growth at BeReal

Well, nice to meet you everyone. Thank you so much. I'll try to make it as short as possible as an introduction, and then I'd love to hear questions from you. I'm mainly going to talk about my journey into the startup world in Silicon Valley and how I landed my job as head of growth at Perio, my most successful venture so far. And yeah, tell you a bit about all of the rollercoaster journey in my startup life. But yeah, a bit about me. So I grew up in Italy, in Rome. My mom is American. Studied in Milan. And after that, when I was studying in Milan, everybody in my university— I studied at a business school— everybody was going into like investment banking, consulting, into the corporate world. And I kind of wanted to stand out and be the outlier. And because I had the American passport, I thought, you know what, let me live the American dream and go to the US with a one-way ticket. I landed my first job in a private equity firm in Los Angeles, and from there I started like integrating myself into like the American life. I never used to live in the US, I only used to go there for vacations, but I started really absorbing the American spirit and mentality of entrepreneurship so much that I quit my job in the private equity firm. I hated it so much. I was doing accounting, so it was very boring, but I started being inspired by what was happening around me in the city of Santa Monica especially, where the first electric shared electric scooters were born, with Bird and Lime being the first 2 companies. And I just saw the revolution, the impact that they had in the city. I wanted to be part of it, so I decided to quit my job, start applying to all of the electric scooter companies that were popping out and starting. And I landed a job as a chief of staff in one of the companies called micromobility.com. Was based in New York. It was expanding in the East Coast and in Europe. And there I helped the CEO and the CFO expand the service mainly in the East Coast. Dealing with all of the government lobbying side of things, because with that service, before you operate, you needed to ask a permit to the city. So there was a lot of lobbying involved and applying for the city permit, and then structuring all of the local operations. So setting up the local operational team, the warehouse, the vans, the charging system. And that was my first startup experience, let's say, my first glimpse into a company that had a tech team. I understand— understood what a backend is, the product, all the fundraiser. Happening. And also being working closely with the CFO and the CEO for more than a year, even living together sometimes, I learned so much about how to run a startup. And after a year and a half, mainly because of cultural reasons inside of the company, it was a bit of a company where they kind of took more pride in the COVID of the magazines rather than the actual substance of the service. I decided to leave the company and launch my first Shitty startup. So I, with a dream of launching my own startup and being a founder and a CEO and running the culture myself, I launched this food subscription service in Milan, copying, replicating an existing service that I was using in New York as a user, and I loved it. So I thought, wow, this is genius, I just wanna replicate it, it works already, proven business model. And so I launched that business in Milan. It was basically a food subscription service that offered discounted meals to office workers. And the way it worked is the office workers were paying a subscription, a monthly subscription to get access to discounted meals that a network of restaurants that I partnered with would offer on the platform. And so it would be a win-win situation and an arbitrage business model. Unfortunately, I launched during bad timing, during COVID and so all of the office workers weren't there. So I got the restaurants, I got more than 300 restaurants, onboarded them, even like door to door, literally knocking, walking all around the city doing different strategies to onboard them, email, LinkedIn, even door-to-door. But the users weren't there. The target audience wasn't there because COVID wiped them out. And Milan was a pretty bad-hit city for COVID. There were all of the lockdowns, so people literally weren't allowed on the streets. And so after a year of struggling, of growing that company and launching the app and making it a thing, I decided to ultimately close it down. And that was a tough moment in my life because I was 23, 24. I saw all my friends that did the traditional path in the career taking off with their careers, earning a lot of money, enjoying their weekends, their holidays. And I was like a depressed entrepreneur who had debts as well and was struggling financially. I thought like, fuck, did I take the right course in doing the startup world? And ultimately the question was yes, because then As a way out, as the worst-case scenario, I started looking at job opportunities, for example, at Uber Eats or these other companies. And I started looking at the job descriptions, and because I had a food service, I thought, well, I can definitely do that. I mean, I was running basically the company myself. I onboarded 300 restaurants. I can definitely manage 20 restaurants as clients under Uber Eats. And that would have been like the way out to pay off my debts from that company. But But as I started looking into other opportunities, I got connected to the founder and CEO of BeReal through an investor friend of mine who I created that relationship throughout that shitty startup journey. But he knew that I was a hustler, I wanted to work very hard, and I had that startup jack-of-all-trades mentality. And so he told me that they just invested in BeReal. It was a French fund called New Wave. And BeReal was only like people of 3, 4 people. And they needed a person to help them grow around the world and help them launch in the US. So I wasn't familiar at all about social media. I just, because of the circumstances where I was, where like I was literally like struggling to pay the groceries, the rent, and all that, I said, you know what, I'm not the guy for that job. So I took a flight to Paris to meet the founder right away. They told me to start working remotely, but I wanted to like meet the guy right away to really create that connection and lock in that job. And so with the hunger that I came from, I worked my ass off and I started growing BeReal in the US with different strategies. We raised $30 million, but we wanted to be undercover because there was a lot of competition. And also with a social network, you don't want to start spending a lot of money on digital strategies, influencer strategies, because then yes, you get a lot of downloads, but then the network doesn't form. And And so people individually download the app, but they don't download the app with their friend groups. And the important thing is the friend group, right? Especially if you're with all your close friends. And so we took this unconventional approach to launch in college campuses, replicating similar strategies to Bumble and Tinder, literally copying them, like going online. I didn't know how to do that, right? So I literally said like social media app launching in the US or launching colleges or apps launching in colleges, news articles. And that's always like the way I start. When I don't know what to do, like benchmarking what other successful companies have done in the past, and then from there iterating on and adapting it for the product. And so we started being on the ground, literally on college campuses, handing out donuts to get the first users for BeReal and stopping people and giving them free donuts to download the app. It's a very humbling experience. It's not scalable, but it gives you a feeling of the user, their reaction when they download the app. Then we switched to gift cards more than donuts. It was more comfortable carrying them around. But then we quickly identified a more scalable strategy, which was essentially partnering with student organizations, most notably fraternities and sororities, just like Bumble and Tinder did, where basically we would sponsor their parties. But people, in order to get into the party, they needed to become a true user. And the true user is this metric, this golden metric that every consumer startup has. It's basically the metric that a startup measures the highest quality user, so the user that has the highest retention over time. And for us, since we were paying this $10 fee for acquiring users, we wanted to make sure that the user that we would acquire would complete certain steps inside the app to arrive to that aha moment and understand the value of the app and then retain them. Because we knew that the product was so magical that if they completed those 3 steps, which was taking 1 picture so you understand how the double-sided camera works and how you unlock the feed because you post, having 5 friends so that you have a and you understand, okay, there's a feed, there's friends, like I interact with friends, and having notifications on so that you understand the game, it's time to be real, right? And with those 3 simple steps, we would ask everybody to download the app and do those steps to get into the party. And so 100, 200 people at the time, close circle of friends, very social, these fraternities, they would all do it. And the day after, they would wake up with that notification too, it's time to be real. And they would have that FOMO effect of everybody posting, they can't see, they need to post in order to see. And that's how we started. We identified the winning strategy that we needed to scale. So now the difficult part was how do we scale that strategy times 1,000 and replicate those type of partnerships, collaborations all across the US? And because we didn't have a developed network in the US, we basically in the beginning we just did it like on the ground, literally stopping people, hey, are you part of a fraternity? And like that we got to meet the presidents. But then the difficult part is how do we connect with all the presidents in the US? And so that's why we structured this ambassador program where basically we hire the most popular person on campus and have them be our lead generator to create those warm intros with all of the presidents. So the ambassador wouldn't get the user, but they would only introduce us to the presidents who then would do the partnership and onboard their members, and that would be the conversion strategy. So we wouldn't directly do the conversion, we would delegate it to the president who would then pitch to their fraternity at their weekly meetings or at the party, before the party, to download BeReal, what BeReal stands for, and the mission of BeReal. And so in order to develop that network of ambassadors, we needed to identify the coolest person on campus. And basically we started reaching out on Instagram to all of the sororities, which is the female fraternity, and started DMing literally 100,000 people. We started renting out Instagram accounts because we were reaching the limit of how many DMs you could send per day on Instagram. I started using my account at first to test out the strategy. It wasn't working that well, but there were some signals that it was working. I thought, I thought like, okay, it's a male's account, let me use my sister's account. Asked my sister if I could use hers. The reply rate went from 5% to 30%. So like, okay, yes, it works, let me rent out her friends' accounts. And so I started renting out all of my sister's friends' accounts. And, uh, at peak we had like 15 Instagram accounts from these girls from Rome, uh, where my sister is from. And, um, reaching out to sorority girls to like pitch them, uh, an internship opportunity, ambassador opportunity, to work at BeReal, to be that warm that lead generator for us. And so we had that hiring, and that's how we penetrated these communities, starting with that ambassador. Then we would create a playbook for them to reach out to everybody with the right messaging and identify the coolest fraternities to kickstart the initial network inside of college communities. And like that, we were able to acquire literally similar to how many messages we sent actually, 100,000 individual true users that not only downloaded the app but became true users. Wow. And that was such a strong network that created that 10 million daily active users, the 30 million downloads. So only by acquiring one by one at these parties with these collaborations with student organizations, we were able to acquire the first layer of our network. And then from there, we started building more viral strategies. We started developing, executing on TikTok strategies. And the way that TikTok worked for us is that we had a power user that loved BeReal. He was like a amateur TikToker, and he reached out to us saying, hey, do you want to do a paid collaboration? We didn't reply. He did a video talking about BeReal, how much he loved it, went viral, got 2 million views, sent it to us, said like, you're welcome, it's for free. Like, okay, cool, let's talk. We onboarded him and he became the face of TikTok for us, the face of the brand. You might have seen him if you use TikTok and you're familiar with the BeReal brand. And with him, we started developing the TikTok strategy that at first didn't work very well. As we were building this underground strategy in the US, we started building the TikTok strategy, but it wasn't working at all. It was expensive. We didn't like hack that strategy. And so we kind of shifted and focusing only in Spain because it was a cheaper market. Our TikToker was from Spain and he would've been, it would've been easier to do the collaborations. And so we, after like 6 months of trying the US, we stopped doing the US. We started doing it in Spain. And with only €2,000 of collaborations where we would pay like €50 per video to all of these creators. We were able to get from 5,000 users to 200,000 users like in 3 weeks by paying only €2,000. So there we understood, okay, TikTok works, let's scale it. So we did it in the UK, and from there we started doing it across Europe and South America and expanding globally with TikTok, but in the US never touching TikTok because the retention was affected in terms of the quality of the user. So in the US with the ambassador program, because we were guiding the user in arriving to that aha moment, to that magical moment, the retention was 60%. And the way that people discovered about the app was through word of mouth. So people really knew that or were telling others like, you have to download, you have to add 5 friends, you have to post, you have to have notifications on. Whereas if you discover it from TikTok, the retention was 35%. So almost half, but still pretty good in terms of cost of acquisition. It was like cents compared to the $10, but the US user is much more valuable. And, but yeah, like that we started going viral. We started executing even more viral strategies on Twitter. And that's where BeReal became a cultural phenomenon and entered people's houses. From there, we started partnering with influencers, brands, and then leading up to, let's say, the acquisition last June. We sold for half a billion to another French company called Voodoo. It's essentially like the Zynga of Europe because BeReal wasn't growing anymore. We weren't able to ship new features because we were dealing with the massive growth and sort of like scaling the infrastructure. We didn't have the right talent. That was able to do all of that. Only after we solved all of that, it was too late. People stopped using BeReal. And so we decided, okay, you know what, we need to sell. And that kind of ended the journey also for me. I left the company after a month of selling BeReal, and I took like a 2-month break. But then I thought, you know what, this mission of making social media more authentic, it's not still completed. Yes, with BeReal, we kind of scratched the surface of what's possible there to make social media more authentic and started thinking about new ideas of making social media more authentic, but rather than just the pure entertainment part of social media, I started focusing on the professional social media. So taking a stab at LinkedIn. And right now I co-founded a new startup, it's called Peaks. It's a new AI professional social network where you have an AI companion you build in for your profile in private so that you can share much more in depth about your professional experiences without them being exposed on a LinkedIn profile. And like that, you're comfortable, you don't have the pressure of Having a polished profile, but like that, the AI does all of the matchmaking for you to serve to serve you job opportunities, connect you with the right people without exposing all of that sensitive information about yourself. And and yeah, and then I arrived today in the office. So that's kind of my journey from let's say studying in Italy to then arriving in the U.S. and entering the startup world. But I'd love to hear from you questions. This is just a short glimpse of. But yeah, happy to answer any questions and dive deeper into each experience, each twist and turns, and like strategies and stuff, and how to grow users. Yeah.

So I have a question. How did you choose the most popular person in different universities? What was the criteria and process?

So yeah, it was pretty standard in the sense of, okay, how do we define the most popular person? It's usually, okay, it starts with the most popular fraternities and sororities. So the ones who are the coolest, and you do have like a Greek life ranking in terms of who are the popular fraternities. Fraternities, the males on their Instagram, they're not very populated, so it's difficult to target the people. And so we targeted only sororities where they would post pictures of themselves and tag each other, like each other, and so it was easier to identify the right people. And so we targeted like the most popular sororities, which normally by name would be the same ones like Kappa Kappa Gamma, Phi Phi. these ones and just then put the name of the university and find the account there and start DMing all of the people tagged in the pictures or that follow the account or that like the pictures. And it was a numbers game. It's not that, okay, this person is better than that person from the picture. We will just reach out to everyone and then get on a call with them and tell them, okay, do you know these 10 presidents? If yes, you're hired. If no, you're not hired. Yeah.

So I think I have 2 main questions and many more actually, but let's give others a chance. First of all, about Peaks AI, how is it going right now? And how do you now use the strategy you learned from the past to grow?

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, the company just started. So I was able to close a pre-seed round for $1 million in December. And right now we're developing the product. We're actually gonna launch in the App Store this week. And so it's still very early on. We're still in this stage where we need to prove our theories that people wanna share more in depth about themselves as a way to unlock more opportunities. I assume many of you exactly are the target people that I try to onboard onto Peaks, but your LinkedIn profiles are not very representative of who you are in terms of skills, your life story. Yes, you can put the branded experiences of what you've done in the past, but they're not representative of your personality, your mindset. And that's kind of what I'm trying to extrapolate with giving this new environment where you can share things in full. And in terms of applying similar strategies, so Yeah, I mean, we built a suite of strategies at BeReal from these partnerships with fraternities, student organizations, to TikTok, to Twitter, and to influencers, to brand collaborations. So it's a step-by-step process. Right now, I'm not trying to get to a million users as soon as the app is on the App Store, but I'm trying to like place the app in the hands of the first 1,000, 5,000 users. And the way I do it is similarly to what we did in BeReal in the beginning by partnering with the business fraternities. So fraternities that focus only like on resume building workshops for your career guidance. So it's the right audience. So identifying the audience that would be more interested in testing out professional products rather than the fraternity at the party, right? Like they don't wanna put their CV or tell about their work experiences at the door at the party. They might take a picture with BeReal, but the right context and environment where they onboard is important. And so right now we're identifying just the right communities to target, but it's very similar to BeReal. And like that, we're able to get like the first 50,000 users. Like that's how much the expected market through these partnerships is. And understand then the numbers from there, understand whether we should scale with other digital strategies, start focusing on monetization by partnering with other companies and have job listings. But yeah, that's kind of a— How we're thinking about it right now. And it's just me and my co-founder right now.

And the second question was, sorry, you believe to be a jack of all trades, and you were an accountant, right? You did deep stuff, accounting, marketing. So of the boring skills, what was the most useful in your startup journey right now? Besides networking and talking.

Yeah, I guess like the mindset of like not knowing and like I need to learn one thing that I don't know how to do. So it's like kind of benchmarking. That's why for me benchmarking is very important. So I guess that was the most important thing. So like understanding who are the competitors, benchmark from them what they're doing, and then improve their strategies. So I'd say like that mindset of like, okay, I don't stop at not knowing, but I overcome that hurdle by learning what's happening around me and coming up with different solutions and iterations from other successful strategies.

Yeah, if the customer acquisition strategy in the US was so successful, especially in customer retention, Since why did you then shift to TikTok rather like broader approach than in the other countries?

So yeah, so in the US, for example, just as a comparison, for here at Berkeley they have 2,000 student organizations. So that's the market, let's say that's how much opportunity we have for partnerships to then enter the community. At Oxford, great university, only 200. So that's kind of the market. And also like different languages, it's not that easy to There's no sorority system, it's difficult to penetrate those markets. And also the value of the user is inferior. So it was much more worth investing time and more efforts and a higher price, paying a higher price to acquire users here in the US than in Europe. And also because in Europe TikTok was working and it was fine. And the only market that really counts is the US. It's just the most profitable or the most valuable market. So as a comparison, for example, A user in the US would be valued $100 per year. In Europe, it would be valued around $50. And yeah, like in South America, like $10, something like that. So it's like the expected value that you can have through the ads, people clicking on ads, spending, all that kind of stuff. Oh yeah, maybe, sorry.

I might be wrong, but as far as I know, BeReal was not producing any revenue. So my question is, how did you convince investors to give you money?

So yeah, basically with consumer social, actually revenue is not the most important thing. Growth and retention are the 2 key factors to raise money with a social media app. And so the retention was what's considered in the industry god-tier retention metrics. And having a 60% retention is comparable to Snapchat, for example. With those metrics, those are kind of the metrics that you present, and then also the growth, like how exponential the growth was in the first markets. That's how we were able to raise money. In total, we raised around like $90 million.

Yes, so speaking about metrics, what are the core metrics or signals to focus on when evaluating sustainable growth, and which ones do you think should Which ones should be maximized and which ones should be minimized?

Yeah, so I think it depends also on the nature of the product, right? It depends if you have a fintech app, you have a food app, you have a social media app. So retention is always the most important thing, cuz it's people coming back to the app and repeating that core loop of the app. Growth is also the second most important. So if there's organic growth, if people talk about it, and the app grows even without paying, so it grows by itself. But retention, so definitely that, and also the engagement. So if people come back on the app like multiple times throughout one day, retention if they come back over a course of a month, and if they repeat that core metric. For example, BeReal, if they repeat taking a picture over 30 days, that's the metric that we would figure out. Oh, for example, with me right now that I'm launching this professional social network with Peaks, is user updating their profiles and opening the app. It's still early, but also as you launch, you understand all of the data and you understand what is that repeatable metric that everybody's doing that makes them have a high retention.

Thanks.

You talk about the authentic part of the social media. What do you think is like the future? So I mean, what is your prediction for the next like 5 years of social media?

So yeah, I think like there's a different course because there's like a trajectory where Uh, there's gonna— social media is going into like entertainment, and so that's gonna be the new television. Everybody— I don't even have a television at home. Like, I mean, I watch videos on YouTube, um, or TikToks. And so like the trajectory is going to maximize the entertainment part to have you be locked in inside the app. But also there's this trend of going back to the roots and being anti-traditional. So BeReal is that trend, kind of like to going back to the roots, so still being connected and make it purely social. Rather than entertainment. So I see there's those two parts, and then there's a lot of AI with all of the content generation, but that kind of fuels all of that entertainment part of social media.

Yeah. Do you think there'll be like developments of the social media to almost like another way to look at an authentic way and not more content and not more consuming?

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's going to be like a lot of like filters in terms of identifying if content is authentic, and I think people will crave authentic content. People are getting kind of fed up and bored of all of the content. So even the type of creators, the ones who are the most organic and natural in the type of content that they produce, are the most engaging ones because it feels relatable instead of just seeing people who are doing unnatural things, let's say.

How did you validate the relevance of your problem right now with people?

So I'm still in the validation phase. It's not fully validated. But there's early signals of validations by talking to all of the presidents of these organizations. And the rate of success of closing the partnership is much higher than BeReal. So that's an early indicator, which makes me believe that things are working. The positioning, the way I pitch the app to the students, to the presidents, is also working. And it's something that is useful, is valuable for them, that they might find valuable. Then now the conversion still needs to happen in terms of acquiring the user, and then the data will speak by itself after the user's on the app. And if they can continue using the app, that's going to be the ultimate validation. But there's different validations. Can I get them at the door at the app with a good storytelling and pitching and positioning of the company? And which is not always easy. And then can I get them to complete the first loop of the app? And can I make them come back and repeat the core loop? infinitely essentially. And so there's different validations, but the first one to test out is bring them at the door and then have them do that first core loop. What inspired Peaks? Yeah, so one of the first ideas of Peaks for the way I started iterating on this vision is because by doing all of these partnerships with student organizations, I started not only understanding that, okay, we're having to do all of these different strategies, hire an ambassador, reach out on Instagram, understand who is the coolest one, and then from there we got reached out. And these organizations, the president, everybody's fundraising, everybody's looking to do partnerships with companies. And so there I started thinking like, okay, there isn't like a platform where you do like a pure partnership model. There's a company on one side, presidents on the other who's looking to fundraise. They fundraise not only for parties but also for weekly pizza for their meetings. Fundraiser for charitable events. So it's a constant demand of theirs to seek out companies. And then companies, I mean, it's such a great way to target students in a very granular way by knowing exactly who that user is instead of doing just Facebook ads where, yes, you target well, but you don't really know who that user is or if they convert inside the app. Like this, you can really guide them and educate them and have the brand present on campus. And from there, seeing also that a lot of these presidents manage multiple thousands of budgets, raised multiple millions as well for their charitable causes, but they don't put it on LinkedIn. They don't put on LinkedIn that they manage $100,000 budgets a year, $1 million budgets a year. And so I started questioning, why don't you put something so valuable to know who you are, what your experiences are, what your skills are to manage $1 million? I mean, at 20 years old, that seems a lot, right? And so there I started investigating more around that and started understanding that users don't feel comfortable in sharing that they're part of a fraternity. And they might even not think about uploading that on LinkedIn because they feel it's too raw and there's too much pressure in having a polished profile. It's not very professional. But still, managing $1 million, that's a great skill to know. And so because they don't put it, they miss out. And that's what I started thinking about, like, okay, how can I build a new environment where they're willing to upload that information without having that revealed that they're part of a fraternity, but still highlighting that they managed that million-dollar budget.

Which are the key factors that make you understand when an idea has value when you want to be a founder?

Yeah, so there's this thing that also, I was lucky enough that I was able to raise with a PowerPoint and just pitching investors. And before a product. But if I wasn't able to do that, the thing I would have done is also just having Facebook ads with a waiting list or a waiting list on a website and having people submit their emails. And that's an early indication, and you can do that with $500, $1,000. Also, there's this thing that's TikTok market fit. So having videos go viral on TikTok, understand if there's enough engagement around the problem and issue that you talk about during that video. Or wouldn't it be nice to have that kind of solution and you have a creator do that? If it goes viral, then it means that people are craving that kind of solution and so you can build around that. So that's a great way to understand if there's an early indication of success with your vision. But it also depends if you're building a B2B SaaS and there's a gap in the market, there's an inefficiency, or if you're purely building a novel idea, Um, yeah, you can do like TikTok marketing for it.

Um, how do you build a community? What are the key points to build a community inside a platform? Maybe B2B, but I think it's general. Like, can you have a chat inside the platform? That's too easy, I think. Which are the other options that you have to build a real community that will get that user back and keep him, that retention rate?

Yeah, absolutely. I think like, uh, the ability to consume content within the community and connecting with the community through similarities. For example, everyone was sharing pictures with each other, and that's how you form that community connections and seeing what your friends are up to. But yeah, every platform has its own community building strategies. Notion has its own communities, and it really depends on, okay, who's your target audience? And from there, You understand how do I form that target audience that would find useful the tool that your platform does and would be real. The tool was taking a picture, let's say, and sharing within the friend group or even at Notion and creating those templates and having creators create those templates for those templates to be used by everybody in the community. So identifying these creators of templates, for example. So it really depends. But yeah, the first thing is about identifying who will be the target audience of that community. What

was the best strategy for getting the restaurants back then in your first startup?

Yeah, so the best restaurant, there's different ones. So, word of mouth, sorry, door-to-door was very effective. I mean, we got like 20-30% door-to-door. Even Groupon had that strategy, to be honest, in having merchants, shops onboard onto Groupon. And it's very effective, it's time-consuming, but it works well. Cold calling is another effective one to then meet in person. LinkedIn to reach out to the chains. Email as well. There's a combination, but yeah, I would say like door-to-door, cold calling, LinkedIn, email, then referral of course as well, like getting referred by other restaurants. And yeah, combinations of these ones would be the most effective

ones. If I would be a restaurant owner, how would you approach me in general?

So yeah, I would, uh, well, knock and say hi, uh, but I would come there with an iPad to showcase the product. Say like, hey, sorry, do you have like 2 minutes? I just want to show you, uh, and have like a 1-sentence, 2-sentence elevator pitch. A platform that can help you sell more, something like that. Like, so you get their attention because restaurant owners are, um, they're not very business-friendly. Let's say they're like the restaurant owners, they cook, so like it was difficult to get their attention and walk them through the efficiency of why using the platform would be better. So you kind of have to be friendly and have that human touch to it. But then yeah, you would showcase the product like, look, it's super simple. Making it simple, definitely pitching them a simple product was key. And showcasing it on the iPad as well, showing it in action was definitely important as well.

What is the best way to In other words, how I went to choose to hire people, like how did BeReal do that as it got bigger? What is the best strategy

to hire people inside the company?

Exactly, like when to hire people, like when they have 100, 200 people, start hiring. What are the metrics that indicate that you need to?

Yeah, so yeah, BeReal had this weird obsession of like being small, like trying to benchmark the WhatsApp team that with the people at 20, uh, 25 they were able to sell for more than $20 billion. But let's say that created a lot of difficulties in then solving the technical problems that we were facing in scaling infrastructure. And also BeReal had this thing about being located and headquartered in Paris and in the beginning being focused on only hiring in Paris or only hiring talent that would move to Paris. And so that would limit a lot the quality of talent that we would be able to attract. And so only when we started focusing also opening up to the US market, And hiring a remote team in the US, people that had already done the job, we were able to solve all of our infrastructural problems. But then it was too late to start shipping new features to entertain users and to retain them even longer. But I'd say it's like, yeah, okay, we needed to hire because the infrastructure was breaking, but it was breaking even before we were growing. And so that was already a need. So it's kind of like depending on the need on if your resources also are able to cope with the productivity and execute on launching new features. But it's kind of like a metaphor could be, it's like a baby when it grows. When do you buy new clothes? As the size of the baby grows, you need to buy new clothes. That's kind of the metaphor that you should use. After quitting Brial, why didn't you come back to your old idea of the startup with restaurants? So yeah, I kind of like played around with it, but I felt too traumatized. It was a traumatizing journey for me, like really going into debt, dealing with Italian investors, just the dynamic also of that stage I was in life kind of traumatized me, and I never wanted to work in Italy again. And also dealing with restaurants, a restaurant owner, it's painful, like it's complicated. They're not super business-friendly. Like I said, they're amazing people, but you've got to connect with them on the human level. Rather than on the business level. But I definitely think that now after COVID, it could definitely be an idea that works pretty well. Well, the company that I copied from in the US is still running here in the US. So also I thought, yes, applying the same model in Europe, like in Italy, where if Milan would work well, where do I launch? Turin, Florence, Rome? But the markets are so small, people don't spend that much, that the amount of time that I invest in putting hours to make something work in Europe, the return is way smaller compared to putting that amount of hours into a project here in the US in terms of economic return. And just, I think it's much cooler to work in a country where if it works well in San Francisco, Seattle, or Los Angeles, I can expand to other 100 big cities where people spend without caring. So that's why I kind of moved on. But if you want to do it, happy to chat about it.

What is the biggest mistake in a startup?

I don't know, there's a lot of mistakes that startups do, but I feel— What was

your personal journey?

In my personal journey, so yes, so there were different mistakes in different companies. So the electric scooter company, for example, one of the biggest mistakes is not focusing on the value of the service that they were providing, but focusing only on the image that the company would have publicly, on newspapers or online. And then one of the problems and mistakes that let's say I had during my first startup, I'd say just being naive also in terms of launching, being obsessive, rushing into launching. And during COVID instead of waiting or stepping back saying, you know what, it's not a great time to launch, maybe I shouldn't focus on this idea and be so obsessed about it. And with BeReal, it was definitely lack of hiring in the beginning. So the people part, and I'd say the people is definitely one of the biggest problems in startups. So hiring the right people, having the right culture as well when it comes to hiring, that's kind of one of the biggest mistakes because in the end, a company is formed by people. So it's more about the who rather than the what. And it's around like, who are those people, what mentality and mindset they have. Rather than what services that company has that makes it successful.

Which kind of profiles did you miss back then? Who would you have hired?

Well, we had so many incredible talents like the CTO of Superhuman, some amazing AWS engineers that knew exactly how to scale the infrastructures. But the management team was so obsessed in moving this talent to Paris, making them relocate when they have families here, and it made it super hard for these people To take that decision instead of them thinking like, you know what? Let's not be too French and close ourselves into this mentality of making the biggest French company. But let's become a global company and open a second HQ in the US where everybody is. Even Spotify, which would be one of the greatest examples in the US, also open offices in Europe.

And how did you get those people in the early stage when you was like used to what you was the six? Yeah. And how did you reach the others in real estate in which you do not have that community around you?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think in the beginning, well, we definitely raised money, so we had investors and they were able to connect us with a Rolodex of talent that they have. But also we started partnering with recruiting agencies, we started hiring internal recruiters. That took some time. But yeah, the first thing is partnering with recruiting agencies and then having a full-time recruiters that would do that people hunt every day. And so that's how we identified people.

Do you think that bootstrapping will be harder to find good talent?

Well, bootstrapping, it depends, right? But yeah, it depends the network that people have, or also the success of the company and how you position the company in a pool of talent. So I know companies that are bootstrapping. Gumtree is a good example where they are bootstrapped, but they're attracting great talent. So it's really about positioning the company well and understanding what are those channels of acquisition for talent that you can tap into and then have a process to hire great talent.

I would ask, what would be your first post in the social media that you are creating?

The first post, huh? Yeah. So yeah, it's more than a first post. Like, the way that you update your app is through this conversational AI companion. So it's mainly like a voice note that you share, but it's shared just to build your profile. So it's not shared to be released publicly outside of your profile, and it serves mainly to help you get the matchmaking web jobs rather than being on a public feed. Still exploring a public feed. opportunity. But yeah, I think that would be secondary.

You have a business background, right?

Yes.

Then what would you recommend someone with a business background who wants to be active in the startup scene or even potentially become a founder one day? What kind of skills or mindset the person should adopt next to his business background?

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the first things I would say, be very active on Twitter and start finding the right people on Twitter just so that you absorb the right mindset of all the people in tech and everybody in tech is on Twitter. But just being very curious about the technology, the services that are out there, things that are working. There's many solutions right now for non-technical people to start building and just start having a first idea to visualize your vision with Replit and Lovable. These are 2 great services that you can just prompt Hey, I'm thinking about building this new restaurant app and it kind of does it by itself. So it's a great way to do it. But yeah, I'd say read a lot as well. Read the books that people recommend reading around tech and just absorbing that mindset to problem solving essentially, so that you never stop at the problem, but you're always curious to solve the problem and find that problem. Yeah.

Do you plan to come back to Italy at some point?

Yeah, no, definitely. Look, I go back a lot, so I am lucky that I have the passports, both Italian and American. So I'm free to even go now to the airport and go back to Italy if I want. I don't see going back to Italy as a thing where it's like on the other side of the world. It's just 10 hours away. So it's like I sleep and I arrive, you know? So I go back often. But right now, let's say, to be a bit locked in and work, I've been focusing here, but I go back for Christmas. I will definitely never work in Italy. My work, even if I'm working remotely from Italy, will always be US-based and focusing on the US because I feel the mindset, the cultural mindset for working, Silicon Valley's mindset, is the best one and it's the most efficient one, down to business. And I like to operate with this kind of mentality. And in fact, you see the great companies that are outside Silicon Valley have that mindset, the Silicon Valley mindset. But yeah, for me, it would be very hard to work in Italy, in Europe, just because it's a slower-paced environment, I'd say, even though there's great companies in Europe.

Do you also improvise a lot, or do you plan really step by step and think about it a lot before you execute?

So it's, yeah, the metaphor is like throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks. And then you see what sticks, and then you analyze that. So like at BeReal, in the beginning, it's like, okay, we applied 50 different strategies. and see what's the best one. And then from there, okay, let's do it again. Let's see if we can build a process where we can scale, put people running it. And yeah, so it's kind of like just go and test it, see if it works, bring the results, evaluate the results.

So if someone wants to become a founder, would it be more worthwhile for them to immediately get into it or kind of build some of the skills such as like a master's?

Well, yeah, definitely, yeah, go into it, but not maybe as a founder, but you can go into it as an early employee. For example, for me, the most successful startup I've done was as an early employee at BeReal. I was employee number 5, and where I developed the most successful strategies that now I use again. And it's definitely nicer also in the beginning when you learn through that company, the founding experience, the startup experience. But yeah, I definitely think that as a founder you learn much more. It's more difficult. So maybe as a way in, it's better to be an early employee to get to see better overview of what the startup life is and then create your conviction of an idea that you want to launch and just go super bullish around there because mainly that's the driver and motivation of launching your own company. It's the conviction around that vision, the idea, that thesis that you want to prove, and the solution that you're building.

So regarding the ideas and the projects that you had before founding all your projects, when talking to users, when talking to investors, when talking to future collaborators, do you present them in the same way?

So no, so with investors you talk differently to how you would talk to friends or family or colleagues or managers in other companies to get their reaction. But it's kind of similar, like the elevator pitch is kind of similar, but the way you present it, because with investors it's kind of like dating, so you want to act cool, you don't want to seem demanding, and so there's like that dynamic involved. But in terms of idea in the early stage, you could, yeah, I'd say it depends also if you're doing exploration interviews to understand if people would like that. It's a different, you'd share different things, you'd ask different questions depending on who you're talking to.

So what are the main differences between doing business or startup in Europa and the US?

So like, how much is it actually difficult to do business in Europe?

Well, it depends. It's just like, it's so much easier in the US, like opening a company. It's like one click in one day, you pay $500 and it's done. There's no people involved. There's services like Clerky that you can use. I've used it now to form the company and the company is done. And then you can operate in a market of more than 300 million people, the biggest economy in the world, that speak the same language, that have the same culture. So for example, even the universities, there's like, okay, if we make it at UCLA, then we can target 100 colleges and it's the same exact environment compared to launching in Oxford. Sorry. Where are those 100 universities? Like, yes, there's Bocconi or there's the polytechnic schools, but they're all different environments, different, cultures, languages, so it's more difficult in terms of expansion. But one thing about Italy or Europe in general, or even outside of the US, it's a great way to start in a cheaper way for certain things. So I'd start the company legally in the US, but maybe as a launch market it could be Europe. For example, in the US, like for B-Real, we launched Spain with $2,000, so that's super cheap, right? And you have immediate validation. And so you could test that, but as soon as you have some validation, focus only on the US, 'cause that's where you make money. In the other countries, you don't make that much money, but then it depends, right? Depends if you're selling B2B services, if it's localized, if you're serving a certain type of industry. But yeah, generally as a mindset, I'd say America first, and the other ones are more like test markets. Yeah, well, you start it. Yeah, because,

you know, talking about evaluating your idea, you said before that using, for example, TikTok would be a great way. But I think maybe for some companies, the target couldn't be reached on TikTok. So what other strategies would you suggest to validate your idea?

Yeah, absolutely. So talk to the potential customer. So like one thing that I did, for example, I started talking to these fraternity members that were managing $1 million budgets. And asking them, why don't you put it on LinkedIn? And so from there, I started understanding the feelings, emotions that they would have, the problems, the issues that they had with LinkedIn, and start shaping a better validation around the product that I can build for them to solve their problems. And so even if you're building like a B2B company or a fintech company, it's talking to customers and saying, hey, would you like to use a service that does X, Y, and Z? Or what are your problems right now in this industry, or when you do groceries? Like, what would you like to happen? More than what would you like to have or to use is like, what problems do you have? And understanding the problems helps you— that they have currently helps you shape a solution around that. And users don't know the solution. You need to come up with the solution. But by understanding the problems, the feelings, the way that they react to a potential solution as well, you can understand whether something you're building could be valuable.

Yeah. I didn't know if you had technical skills, etc., because how do you build a social without technical skills? And in case when you find a co-founder, like when I was 16, I thought about a social idea for a startup, but the fact is that if they can build it alone, why would they need you?

Yeah, because a lot of technical people, I mean, it's hard to talk to a lot of people, for example, these partnerships. Technical people maybe don't want to talk to all these people, or identifying they don't have a mindset of growth. And so also it's always better in a team, and there's limited hours in a day, so I'm sure it's difficult to build a product without getting users. So maybe somebody's super good at building the product, but they don't know how to get users. So usually there's always the technical person or the person that sells. That's kind of like a good founding team. But there's always somebody who's selling. And yeah, there could be one founder who sells as well. But I mean, you've got to be good at selling the vision and the mission to that technical person. And yeah, the way you found a technical person is there's a lot of co-founder matchmaking platforms. Y Combinator has one, but it's connecting in the community first. Don't start looking at founder right away. Start connecting with people in the communities and then just developing those relationships to then ultimately pitch an idea and see who likes it the most to then form the company.

You're someone who knows the US and the European ecosystem. What would you say are the main factors that Europe is kind of lacking in order to have the same amount of great startups that are produced?

Yeah, there's a different series of factors, but I'd say there's too much bureaucracy to open a startup in Italy. I need to put $10K for social capital, pay like a notary $3K. And so just that, like the initial capital to start is a burden for the creation of new startups. Here I can create it for like, I can create the startup for $300 and have the company right away, have a bank account right away, only for $300 without needing people and in one day. And so yeah, I'd say Having less bureaucracy helps, then definitely access to capital. Having people that would bet and invest in crazy ideas definitely helps. So having more people like that, but Europe is developing more of that kind of ecosystem of investors. But the US, Silicon Valley is definitely the pioneer and the leader for investments and also talent, right? People that know how to actually build all of that. Because at BeReal, one of the problems is that we didn't have that many European engineers that knew how to solve that technical challenge, challenges that we were having to scale a platform from 1 to 100 million of the infrastructure. And who did it before? People that worked at Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and other companies. And in Europe, there weren't that many companies that went from 1 to 100 million users.

Okay, maybe just one quick follow-on. Is there any other factors related to talent that you see where you say, there's that still like difference, and that's maybe something where Europe can kind of evolve?

Yeah, I guess education. I mean, here also, because like I see it a lot in these American universities, is just the entrepreneurship spirit. Yeah, entrepreneurial spirit that it's running inside the schools to really give you the tools, the necessary environment to build your own startup. People are always building startups. Like, people here pursue being a founder as part of their career. Like, 20% of the students, let's say, to put a number, compared to Europe that I know in my— I went to a business school and me and other less than 10 people in my year are founders. Less, like 5. So like, and it was a business school. Like, so that's kind of weird. Like, why does everybody want to go into banking and to consulting or a big corporate world because I think the aspirations also are different. People have done it before here. People then when they see other people doing it, they believe in it. Whereas in Europe, because nobody does it, you don't believe in it. And so this creates this loop of not believing that you're capable of doing it because other people who've done the similar trajectory as you did it. And so it kind of builds this mindset of believing that you can do it. And that really is something, a huge factor, I'd say.

What was the most difficult part about scaling and expanding worldwide? Yeah,

I'd say the most difficult part is really identifying those key leaders to then break through the community. That was the most difficult part. But once you form that system to identify the key leaders, then that's just an execution play. So understanding, okay, how do we, if we wanna launch in Argentina and Brazil tomorrow, how do we do that? And so understanding that kind of framework could be replicated in all of the other countries. And it took some time to figure out that framework. Like I said, in the US with TikTok, it didn't work. Spain it did, in the UK it did. And so from there we started developing this playbook to then execute in other parts of the world.

What were the factors that convinced you in joining Mirio?

Yeah, so definitely a great opportunity to— I wanted to be a founder as well, even before— after failing the company, my idea was, okay, I have $150K of debts, I need to repay these debts, let me get a job at Uber Eats. They pay me like $6K, $7K a month here in the US. I put money aside, repay the debts, by my free time I continue building ideas. with the financial security. And so I started developing other projects, and BeReal fell early enough to feel that I'm still part of that founder mentality. And also, yeah, the fact that they wanted to expand in the US, I wanted to go back to the US. And great recommendation from my investor friend who told me that I should join BeReal. And if an investor friend tells you that, yeah, maybe you should accept that invite.