Marco Magnocavallo

At 21 I skipped most university lectures and opened a tiny shop that imported performance parts for the original Mini Cooper. We restored cars, tuned engines, and even filled the Monza racetrack with 150 Minis for a rally weekend. Those three years were my MBA in inventory, margins, and the brutal honesty of a cash register.

While fax machines still screeched, my brother called from the U.S. raving about this thing called the Internet. We launched one of Italy's first web agencies and ended up building intranets for Poste Italiane, McKinsey, Daimler-Chrysler and others. When the dot-com bubble burst our monthly revenue halved overnight, but we stayed alive long enough to sell the company to a venture-backed startup in 2001.

I became a VC partner at Principia SGR, writing €2–5 million tickets into four start-ups. The job taught me pattern recognition, but I missed the smell of the engine and the risk of blowing it up myself.

While running Tannico I backed a handful of founders I wish I'd had when I was 25: Iubenda (privacy SaaS), Cortilia (fresh-food delivery), Velasca (direct-to-consumer shoes), Milkman (last-mile logistics), Robot.com (AI-powered chatbots) and about a dozen more.

Retirement lasted three months. I bought Geppo 1981, a thin-crust Roman pizzeria that has been feeding the Morgagni district since cassette tapes. In 2024 Juliette – my co-founder at Tannico – and I revived Rosticceria Palazzi, a 1992 comfort-food counter in Porta Venezia that serves lasagna and roast chicken without the buzzwords.

Adventure called again. With a small crew we relaunched Selvatiq, a gin house that harvests wild botanicals by hand: Himalayan juniper at 4,000m, desert sage in Utah, myrtle on Sardinia's cliffs. Three gins, one idea – let the place speak louder than the recipe.