When it ends, we will celebrate 2021 as the best year for Italian startups: investments have doubled and are not far from the fateful two billion euros. And there have been important growth stories, which bode well.
And yet we continue to make mistakes. A few days ago at a major industry event I heard the representative of Confindustria to define startups as “a drive belt”, something that can help large companies innovate. But startups are much more: today the great report on the state of technology in Europe is released. He basically says that investments in startups are close to 100 billion dollars (in 2015 they were 10), he says that in the cities that were in the lead (London, Berlin, Stockholm, Munich and Paris) they have tripled (and therefore the gap with us is increased), says that a unicorn is born every day in Europe, or a startup valued at one billion dollars, to the point that if 6 years ago one had to bring together European unicorns, a dining room would have been enough, while today an auditorium would be needed (and no one would speak Italian).
It also says there are 26 European tech companies with decacorn status, worth over 10 billion dollars, and one, Adyen, a Dutch payment platform, which is crossing the 100 billion mark. They are companies that earn, that hire (startups create jobs like no other, the data say), that change the reference markets by improving services and making the host countries more prosperous. They are not drive belts to keep existing big companies alive. It is no coincidence that Italy does not exist in this report. Not out of nastiness, but because our scale is still too small. And so when at the end of the year we celebrate the best year for Italian startups, let’s remember that we still do too little, too late and above all with the wrong look. We talk about transmission belt with the past, elsewhere they are the engine of the future.
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