INNOVACTION STORIES: ENRICO BRUSCHINI, COO AT PICK1, “THIS IS HOW INNLAB PREPARED ME FOR SAN FRANCISCO”

Novembre 5, 2014
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Enrico Bruschini attended InnovAction Lab in 2012. Today he is the COO at Pick1, an Italian-American startup based out of San Francisco that after doing Startup Chile raised 1,8 million dollars in the USA from funds such as 500Startups and angel investors such as Jim Pallotta, founder of Raptor Ventures, Oliver Flogel, former CEO at Telefonica Chile, Wilson Pais, head of innovation at Microsoft and Gonzalo Begazo, former finance manager at Google. This is the story of his experience.

Today I am the COO at Pick1task to coordinate a team of 16 people in four different nations. My everyday life is made of fundraising with top investors from the Silicon Valley, partnerships with giants in the tech industry, acquisition of different-sized clients, recruiting and of course small business management operations.

I am one of many young ambitious Italians hungry for knowledge. Before doing InnovAction Lab I was studying management and economics, specializing in financial markets. Following that experience I started working at Energie Etiche, a startup among the best 28 in Europe in the field of clean technologies. My duty was business development for the company. Then I went to San Francisco to attend a Master’s in International Business. There I put myself to the test with coding courses at Stanford and helping a startup building a growth hacking system, able to bring more than 100,000 new unique visits per month to their website. During my Master’s year I was also in charge of the entrepreneurship association at the business school, where I organized a competition among students.

In such a highly competitive environment like San Francisco it was crucial to show your skills in order to gain the trust from the people you know. During my Master’s year I got back in touch with Paolo Privitera, whom I had met by chance in Rome at the LUISS ENLABS accelerators some years before. Paolo and I immediately clicked and we discovered that we were complementary. From there to being involved with Pick1, it was but a short step.

InnovAction Lab gave me a profound knowledge of the tech startup world, and once I got to San Francisco I discovered that my knowledge was much more complete than many other people here in the Bay Area. Names, players, “customs and traditions” of this industry are a huge cultural baggage that allowed me to get to a place such as San Francisco and immediately build my own network , launch new activities and build a new future.

Written by:

ENRICO BRUSCHINI