I was in my lawyer's office in 2019. Trying to explain why taking a year off to go to Stanford, and then coming back to the family business, PPM Spa, would be good for me. He looked at me exactly like Arnold from "Different Strokes."

The truth? I didn’t need a year off. I needed a wake-up call. A slap. That kick in the ass I was too afraid to give myself.

The answer to that feeling of inadequacy and fake rebellion — which had turned into frustration — wasn’t taking a break. It was selling the house in Milan, packing everything up, and leaving with my wife Ale and our three kids for Silicon Valley. With very few certainties, but one clear truth: my time in the family business was over. Caput.

Let’s step back a second — Michael Jordan-style.

After bouncing around a bit — a small renewable energy VC fund, a year in consulting — I spent ten years in our industrial SME, PPM Spa. Technical adhesive tape. 120 people, 55 countries, hardcore product and process know-how. Built as a physical extension of my father.

And I believed in it. I worked in finance, ops, international growth, led 300 people across Italy, the UK, and India. India was my first real Champions League game: a 25M greenfield plant in the middle of nowhere in Gujarat. Italy + India? Nuclear fusion, believe me.

It was a ride. We grew to 400 people and 80M in revenue. But I always had that chip on my shoulder. Like I was raising someone else's kid. And worse — I felt like a privileged guy who hadn’t really earned the badges on his chest.

So I said: enough.

I asked Ale — my wife — if she’d be willing to put her career on hold for a few years to help me chase mine. She said yes. And if she hadn’t, none of this would’ve happened.

From 2020 to 2023, it was: Italy goes to America.

Stanford didn’t teach me anything I couldn’t maybe have learned by myself. But it gave me a ticket to ride. A bus I would’ve taken twenty years to catch alone. It plugged me straight into startup culture and its ecosystem.

From there, the rollercoaster kicked in. Living between Palo Alto and San Francisco, sharing an apartment with a 24-year-old Italian founder — basically a younger brother — and studying a world I was completely obsessed with: music.

Also, yes. I did a week at Burning Man. How else would I be a legit tech founder?

But beyond the psychedelia and pitch decks, Silicon Valley gave me something less sexy but way more powerful: space.

The kind of space where you stop reacting and start observing.

Curiosity kicks in and pulls you into unexpected places. You start studying — because nothing deep comes without time and information.

I dove into two parallel rabbit holes, both exploding between 2020 and 2022: Crypto & Blockchain on one side, the Creator Economy on the other. Two tectonic shifts reshaping everything.

And that’s when the idea hit me: wait a minute — look at the insane amount of content and music flooding streaming platforms.

130,000 new tracks per day. What the actual fuck?

That’s when the seed for Fankee started growing. (But more on that soon — we’ve got time.)

Then came the choice: US or Italy?

And also — why the hell do we always assume you can only build great things in the US?

I followed the advice of my professor Jeffrey Pfeffer (from Path to Power):

Be bold. Break rules. But play where you’ve got leverage.

In Italy, I had more weapons but, most importantly, the idea of building something in my own country — something real, something that gives space to young talent — fires me up more than anything else.

There’s something powerful about belonging.

Too often, we chase success in someone else’s playground — Silicon Valley, London, Berlin. And it makes sense: the math is better, the system’s oiled.

But what if you did it here?

What if you built something global from Italy — not in spite of it, but because of it?

Imagine the edge you could carve out by playing your game, on your turf, with your rules.

At this point you’re probably wondering: why the hell is this guy telling me his life story?

Well, because I’m not a founder with multiple exits. I didn’t study computer science. And no, I don’t have silver bullets or magic pills to fix your morning routine and make you successful.

But I’ve taken a non-linear path. I’m a generalist, an outsider. And I landed in the music industry with no legacy, no dogmas, no baggage.

That’s where OFFTRACK comes from. OFFTRACK is about telling music stories from the people who build it, not the ones who manage it.

It’s a radically different point of view. Not from label execs. Not from nostalgic boomers. But from the inside-out.

To deconstruct models. To expose the unwritten rules. To inspire others to try.

To shed light on an industry that’s still obscure as hell — labels, artists, rights, data.

And why not, to share the journey of building Fankee: the sleepless nights, the fundraise, the first MVP, the punches in the face, the rejections, the metrics that don’t make sense, the users that don’t get it — and the tiny yeses that keep you alive.

And above all, to inject real music into it: playlists, flavors, tracks to build to, dream to, or tear it all down to.

OFFTRACK is for the builders, the dreamers, the deconstructors. With headphones always on.

Because in the end, if there’s no music, what the fuck are we even doing here?