There are aseptic press releases that hide a fairy tale but if you know how to find it, between the lines, you discover a moral that sounds like this: an Italian guy, even with very little help, can be able to make a company of global success by staying here. It is a comforting morality. Those who believed in startups in recent years have not wasted a life chasing impossible dreams. The press release, in English, only says that Iubenda now joins forces with Team.Blue, one of the leading companies in Europe for the provision of web services. Technically, those of Team Blue have taken over the shares of those who invested in Iubenda eleven years ago. This process is called “exit”, and for those who make venture capital it is the signal that that money has been invested well because it has come back multiplied by three or four times.
Iubenda is a company that supplies privacy policy turnkey for those who open a website. Without wasting time and money, go to the Iubenda website, click on the characteristics of your company and in a few seconds your rules for managing cookies and personal data are ready. Andrea Giannangelo already told it like this back then in 2010, when Iubenda was just a pdf presentation and he was an economics student in Bologna with a passion for the web. He was born in Abruzzo, in a family where the computer connected to the network was at home, but his parents had never made him a playstation for video games and then at the age of eleven he had started studying to understand how he could transform that computer into a console. Only then he realized that that world, the world of coding, it was much more fun than video games. And he had become good. He knew how to make websites and even more.
In 2010 Telecom Italia had launched a project to support digital startups called Working Capital: in those days such a project was a black swan. After the end of dot.com, in 2000, only one significant startup was born in Italy, Yoox; otherwise there had been the great escape from a world that had deluded many, enriched very few and made everyone else lose money. But what in Silicon Valley was a pause of a few years, in Italy had become an infinite desert. But then Facebook and the iPhone arrived to remind us that innovation does not stop and also to give itself a tone Telecom had launched “WCap” by recruiting as talent scout Gianluca Dettori, also protagonist of the boom in the 90s and then reconverted in venture capitalists.
Dettori was the first to intercept Giannangelo who had come to the Bologna leg of Working Capital but only to see what the air was like. Here, with that fierce determination we would have appreciated later, he hooked Dettori and told him this story of automated privacy policy, made easy. Now it must be understood that at that moment privacy seemed a dead and buried thing. With the birth of social networks it was time for sharing: we wanted to share everything, every moment of our life, regardless of the fate of our personal data. We didn’t even ask ourselves the problem of user profiling, of the power we were giving to algorithms to manipulate us. At one point Mark Zuckerberg himself, when he was at the height of popularity, made this concept quite clear: privacy is dead. Here, more or less, Andrea Giannangelo tells Dettori about his idea and thunders him down. Not so much for the idea itself: no, Andrea thunders him. He says today Dettori: “Every so often in life you meet the special ones, you listen to them and you know they will go far”. Dettori immediately tells a couple of investor friends, Andrea Di Camillo and Marco Magnocavallo: the three of them put 69 thousand euros. Not a big sum “but it is also true that at the time I only had a pdf with an idea”. This money is enough to leave. Indeed no, it is the money to pay the first salaries of the chief technology officerDomenico Vele, whom Andrea has convinced to give up his job but promising him a salary (while Giannangelo will not take it for the first three years, supporting himself with other jobs related to digital).
These are the years of “bread and onion” recalls Giannagelo. Vele develops the first version of Iubenda which debuts in 2011 and works. The European cookie law, which came into force in Italy in 2012, creates a market that wasn’t there: when companies open a website they need to have a privacy policy quickly and cheaply. And so Iubenda grows, slowly but growing. And in 2014 Giannangelo wonders if it is not the case to accelerate, find money to make the big leap. He takes a tour of major investors but the offers are laughable and he decides to go it alone. He hires developers all over the world but doesn’t bring them to Italy, he leaves them to work where they are. In fact, Iubenda has an office in Milan but does not have a real headquarters, it is the classic Californian company where the remote working: its approximately one hundred employees are spread over every corner of the globe. “Three are in Russia”, says Giannangelo, “one lives in Ibiza, bathes every day, and is happier, so he works better”.
In 2018 with the definitive approval of the GDPR, the general regulation on the protection of personal data in Europe, the privacy market explodes, new startups are born everywhere, only they do not start like Giannangelo with 69 thousand euros but supported by millionaire investments. Giannangelo realizes he is at a crossroads: to sell, cashing in a lot of money, or to find a partner and try to become number one. He decides to try to win everything. Join the European group of Team Blue, two and a half million customers worldwide who can now ask to have Iubenda’s privacy services. Technically for Iubenda it means growing ten or twenty times.
Giannangelo says he didn’t celebrate, “it’s not my character”, but he repeats one thing proudly: “Nobody believed in it”. In reality, someone believed in it from the first moment, from the first meeting, during a break from the works of Working Capital in Bologna: Gianluca Dettori. This with Iubenda is not the first success of the Dpixel investment fund that he launched many years ago, but it is perhaps the most exciting. It’s not just about the money returned to investors. It is a method, a way of looking at innovation that has been successful: “I finally know that I have not thrown away ten years of my life and that this whole tortuous path in the end made sense. It made sense, it makes sense, to continue betting on the talent of young people. It makes sense to do this even if they only have a pdf and an idea because some of them, you understand right away, will go a long way. And you cannot afford, we cannot afford as a country, to turn our backs on them ”.