In recent years, the world of tech startups has been characterized by crazy valuations. Not always confirmed by the facts: for example Clubhouse, the audio social network was valued at four billion dollars last April, but today many consider it a flop; WeWork, a coworking (workspace sharing) startup received a $ 47 billion valuation in 2019, and today it has dropped to $ 9 billion.
Italian Tech Week 2021, Saeed Amidi: the story of Plug and Play, one of the largest startup accelerators
Is the next speculative bubble ready to burst? “I have lived in Silicon Valley for forty years and I am very familiar with the dotcom bubble of 1999 and subsequent ones”, explains Saeed Amidi, founder of Plug and Play, one of the largest startup accelerators in the world, guest of the Italian Tech Week. «Certainly there are incredible valuations, which even reach 40/50 billion dollars, like for Snowflake or Databricks. The point, however, is that technology is everything today: Is Tesla a tech company or an automobile company? Are fintech startups involved in finance or technology? Every sector, including food and agriculture, is facing a digital transformation and this is why we are witnessing such assessments and the proliferation of unicorns (startups valued at least one billion dollars, ed). There may be a correction, but I don’t think we will see collapses as in the past ».
A trust that is not surprising, on the part of those who came to the United States from Iran a few years before the Ayatollah Khomeini revolution, started in the field of packaging and crossed the world of technology almost by chance. In fact, Amidi’s career as an investor began by renting the building he purchased in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, to the tech startups that were starting to come out of the legendary garages.
The beginnings
“The first startup I hosted, and in which I made my first investment, was PayPal”, continues Amidi, who will be in Italy on the occasion of the Italian Tech Week on 23 and 24 September. “Seeing people like Peter Thiel or my friend Pierluigi Zappacosta, founder of Logitech, transforming these realities into giants has allowed me to have a front row seat on the expansion of the technological world“.
The founders of Google, Dropbox and others have also passed through that building. And it is following these experiences that, in 2006, Saeed Amidi decides to make the big leap and found Plug and Play, an accelerator and innovation platform from which a thousand startups pass every year, in the United States alone.
Over time it opens offices in Asia and Europe: from Munich, Frankfurt and Stuttgart in Germany, to Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona and from 2019 also Milan (to which the Modena hub has been added more recently).
Where the presence of Plug and Play is instead smaller is in areas of the world such as Africa, where it still has offices in Ben Guerir (Morocco) and Johannesburg (South Africa).
New geographies
Is it possible that Africa keeps its promises and becomes the new frontier of startups? “The first thing to consider is that, unfortunately, Africa is still twenty years behind Europe,” explains Amidi. “But there are huge opportunities: five years ago we invested in a fintech company called Flutterwave, which specializes in digital payments and which is now used for small payments as well as for business-to-business transactions. If you have the right idea, there is enormous potential in Africa, because innovation gives the possibility to skip current technologies, such as credit cards, and go directly to digital payments. But on this continent we also focus on sustainability and agriculture ».
Looking to the future, what will be the most important innovations? «Robotics will become a fundamental aid in the agricultural field and more generally it will be of great support to an aging population and in need of support at home. Finally, I am very fascinated by cryptocurrencies: I believe that their infrastructure can become the basis of every transaction and every contract », concludes Amidi.
And for Italy – where the partner companies include Stellantis, Lavazza, Unicredit, Nexi and others – Amidi has very specific plans: “We are active in fintech, mobility and the internet of things, but we also want to be involved in the clean energy and food innovation. I believe that in Italy there are incredibly talented engineers and entrepreneurs, I hope to connect them with the global market and perhaps allow some of them to give life to the next Facebook or Google ». Then the promise: «We will invest in 20 Italian startups every year».
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