You have to really believe that what you're doing it's needed because you're going to question yourself so many times.
You ultimately need to have a very strong belief in what you're doing, who you're doing it with, and who you're doing it for.
Vento Meets builders, believers, wave makers. For this episode of Vento Meets, I have the pleasure of sitting here with two very special guests. But before we dive in, I want to give you three facts about each of them. One is the CEO of Exor and chairman of both Ferrari and Stellantis, steering some of Europe's most recognizable industrial and luxury names. In 2023, he founded Lingotto, a long-term investment firm, and in 2025, he joined the board of Meta. And among the many things he chairs, he's also the chairman of Vento. The other is the co-founder and CEO of Kong, the API and AI connectivity platform that originated from a previous startup Mashape, the first API marketplace founded in a garage in Milan, and then moved to San Francisco. Kong grew into a company valued at over 2.1 billion in 2024 and a global market leader operating in 28 countries. Before that, at 19, he built Memebox, one of the first European cloud services for storing sensitive personal documents. In 2017, the same year Mashape was acquired by RapidAPI, Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 list. I'm Fernanda Ferreira, and today on Vento Meets, I'm joined by John Elkann and Augusto Marietti. Let's get the conversation started.
So, I would like to start by talking about the early days. So, both of you took on huge responsibilities and risks when you were in your 20s. John was 21 when he joined the board of Fiat. The same age that his grandfather, Gianni Agnelli, had been when he first joined in 1943. Augusto started his first startup, Memebox, when he was still in high school. And then at 21, left for San Francisco to get funding for Mashape, now Kong, which became a global leader in API and AI connectivity. So, your stories are particularly inspiring to me. I wanted you to tell us about the early days. How did you feel?
Well, there's some magic at 21. Sounds like it. Look, the early days it's like driving a car in the fog. It's just a lot of fog and you have very little visibility. Not that now you don't have fog. We still have fog, but it's a little bit more down. So, the way you feel is you kind of know directionally where you're going and you have beliefs, but you don't really have visibility much. So, you kind of go like meter by meter in a way or day by day in a startup, really. Like you go daily. Now is a different horizon, but when you are there, you go on a daily horizon, weekly horizon. Sometimes you have to survive by 24 hours. So, those are kind of what I have as a memory of early days other than the struggle of, you know, you couldn't eat and blah blah blah, but maybe those are for closed doors. But that's how really I would kind of characterize it, really. Driving a car in the fog with very little visibility.
The good thing at 21 is that you're fine being in the fog. And I think that that's a very important state of mind that you have when you don't really have much experience. And you're comfortable with knowing that you know very little. And so, your eagerness is really on one side to try and solve problems and at the same time be able to absorb and learn as much as you can. And I think that what has been helpful is that I was able to have the very experienced and wise people that I could rely on or I could ask for advice back then. And that is something that despite you get through the fog as Augusto was saying, it always needs to be there. Think what you have at that young age is really the absolute certainty of knowing very little and that's very helpful in many ways. Because the more you get to know things, the more you inevitably constrain yourself in what is actually possible. So, I have been encouraging myself each year to try and remain that same person I was at 21.
Yes, it's true that you're a student by default at 21. When you grow up more and more, you lose the student piece. You want to be more of a teacher but you always have to never forget to be a student of the game as you grow. The good thing is about 21 you can do a lot of mistakes. You have a lot of time. And that helps to learning. You have runway so that helps a lot by being student and learning.
Going back to a point that you mentioned John, I would like to talk about the importance of being surrounded by outstanding people and mentors. Those can be family members, mentors or like in your case the most remarkable leaders and entrepreneurs of our times. And there is this quote that I really like, which is that you are the sum of the five people that you surround yourself with. And I think here in Vento, we are really privileged to be part of the momentum that they are creating in Italy for the entrepreneur ecosystem. Because it enables us to access leaders like you and like-minded people like the founders in this room. So, talking about the importance of role models, can you tell us one important lesson that someone taught you and that you carry still today?
I always found that the more you were clear about what you needed, the better advice you'd get. So, if you had a very specific area that you wanted to learn about or you had a very specific question, that's where advice was very valuable. The more you got into generic questions or really important questions, the more you have to rely on yourself. And so, in some ways, the best advice I got on what was really important was people that were asking me questions rather than giving me answers. And I don't know if you've had similar experience.
That's so true. Questioning is probably the best way to coach people. Whether it's your direct report or I don't like, you know, they say don't show the way, but question the ways and people will figure out on their own. Because it's kind of coming from the inner you, you feel it's yours. And that's probably the best way to grow.
I think that we got lucky to have unbelievable people taking us under their wings when we came to US barely speaking English. And I don't know, but was a lot of luck. You need a lot of luck. But I think the advice is a bit like music where sometimes you just want to listen to Mozart, sometimes you want to go pure rock and roll. Like there's no favorite music, depends of the state of the soul in that point. And advice is the same. We can go from, you know, one of the best advice I got on business very early: Jeff Bezos invested in us in 2011. And one of the things he said back then was, 'Don't let anybody flying under you.' That's it. And what he meant, obviously, with Amazon experience was you don't want to have your margins as my opportunity. You don't want to have a huge ROI margin business because you can take a people under margin. But for us, he created all this company that if for example, he never went only enterprise, he also went SMB. So we could take the whole market and not just fly high and then somebody flying under you, because if somebody fly under you, they can only go up and then they take you out from the bottom. It's much harder from the top to go down market. It's much easier to go up market from down market. So I took that advice and we built a company. We took out a lot of competitors by being both small company and enterprise, which is very complicated because you lose focus. But we kind of took the market that way. So that was like an advice needed for that and we took it over.
On the other side, I have like my dad advice used to be he always see me busy, you know, you are at home, but your head is somewhere else, even when I used to come to Italy to visit him. And he was like, 'Don't forget to live the present.' Live the present. So sometime like you had to just drop everything, you know, whether you're with your kids or with your mom, whatever it is, just for a moment once a week, fully leave the present. So, those are very like different advice, but I thought that they teach me a lot over time. There's a hundreds of those that I could use, right? So, that's how I think about advice.
We have a phenomenal board. They're all operators. They have multi-billion dollar outcomes directly or indirectly as a personal operator or investors. And that board, I can't probably replicate the same board today if I restart. We got very lucky to get this board. And that board was phenomenal during the hard times, because a bad board can really kill the company. The one of the thing of the board just don't screw it up. Like the And that was very strong operator, which means you have empathy, you have seen this movie before. And to John, they don't tell you exactly what to do, but they know the guardrails of a good directions, and they make sure that you are directionally in the right direction. Direction is more important than speed. And so, they'll make sure to advise and operating experience to make sure we're going the right directions. That there were a lot of advice during those time from our board members as well and many others. So, to summarize, I think it's advice should thinks you're going to have thousand advice from great people. Think about music, which one to use at the right point in time. And if you one day will give advice to someone, yeah, probably the questioning versus the answering is probably the best way.
