Reply was born on 2 July 1996 in Turin, but having said that, you miss out on all the poetry. To understand it we have to start from the end, from the fact that Reply today is an Italian technological multinational that invoices much more than a billion euros, present in various European countries, listed on the Milan Stock Exchange, almost ten thousand employees, managed by a woman, Tatiana Rizzante , which has his brother Filippo as head of technology. The two are sons of the founder, Mario, Mario Rizzante who started as a worker. Not only in America it happens. The other day I saw Mario, with his beautiful face like a Cipputi, who told me that Reply was his second venture, not the first. The first dates back to 1981, do you know what the computer market was in 1981? And in Italy? Here, he was young, he was thirty years old, he understands that computers are about to enter the factory and someone has to let them in. He founds a company and calls it Mesarthim, like a binary star, and we mark it, among the founders there are three of the nine who will later found Reply.
“I’m a cautious one” Mario Rizzante told me. But to me he seemed like a madman. He was born into a working-class family, he is one of many with a doomed destiny, his people make immense sacrifices to get him to study by the Salesians, “it was not easy, my school was a start-up, only the children of the nobles took middle school”. But to take the exams they came from Olivetti and Fiat to choose the best technicians. Mario was good, “no, the school was beautiful”; the fact is that they hire him in Fiat. Electromechanical. “It wasn’t bad,” he thinks. It ends in Mirafiori, where they send it to the foundry, “a hellish mess”. He was in charge of the maintenance of thermal power plants. After a month he goes back to school, three years later he graduates, “it went well”, he thinks again. He asks to become a clerk but when they say no, he resigns. From Fiat. For a while he sells hairspray and hair products door to door. And at night he studies, he even enrolled in university, amazing how every time he found himself back to the wall, Mario Rizzante understood that the way out was to study. This time, learn how to program computers. And Fiat sums it up, as an electronic programmer.
Then he launches his first startup, that of the binary star, it is a company that develops software and understands a lot of things, above all it understands that this is a revolution, it is coming and whoever finds himself in the right place wins. He sells it to a French group. And in 1996 he founded Reply which was initially called Repli, a combination of letters that meant that the three of the first startup “Work Together” (the R stood for Rizzante).
Reply was immediately successful because it got the formula right: a network company, with many highly specialized partners. Mario at one point leaves the helm to his children. He takes a step to the side. The startupper worker who conquered the world by studying.
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