Female startuppers? Lack of role models
Two women starter-uppers who are revolutionizing the world of information by adapting it to the new generations. Bianca Arrighini is CEO of the media company Factanza, which she co-founded with her friend and colleague Livia Viganò. Together they’ve compiled a daily report on what’s happening in the world with a social media twist, starting with Instagram.
Arrighini says: “After high school I was undecided between economics and engineering, although I knew I wanted to do something creative. I have to say that studying at Bocconi was good advice from my family, because it gave me an approach and a method that are very useful today, being a starter-upper.”
In her resumé we can read about her first internship at Accenture, followed by a Masters in Management in Madrid. “The start-up may have been an outlet for my passions, my creative side. With Livia, we would discuss what we were reading the newspapers, and the question came up: but how is it possible that people our age don’t care?”
The answer is that information is not meant for young people, so they came up with a way to change things, to shake up the sector. “At first,” says Arrighini, “we didn’t think it would be a start-up, partly because we were both thinking of more traditional careers, maybe in consulting. That’s what everyone was doing. Media was a huge passion and something we needed. But in 2020, with the pandemic, the need for fast, reliable, condensed information grew massively. So, after meeting with an investment fund, we took off.”
As for the lack of female starter-uppers, Arrighini stresses that the absence of role models is also a factor. “Business founders are almost all men, and when I think of the business manuals I studied, they talked about businesses run by men, and even the case studies were all written by men. The female perspective is missing, as are investors who value it and see you as trustworthy,” she adds. Arrighini describes how hard it was at first, and tells of classic prejudices. In her words: “When we were presenting our business plan, the audience complimented one of our interns, thinking he was the founder.”
Prejudices aside, the start-up is growing and now has around fifteen people producing content and graphics. Arrighini describes herself as an empathetic leader who works in a non-hierarchical structure, the opposite of big traditional newspapers. “What I like most about this job is that I work on several fronts: the content, the management and the network. I have to say that Italian starter-uppers are very supportive of each other, perhaps because we all have
to face the same challenges.”
Factanza’s mission today is to become the go-to news source for under-35s, forging a generation that’s informed on what is happening in the world. Arrighini’s message to her peers is, “Be very curious, read a lot, and not just books at university. In the digital world, the skills you learn at school today will be obsolete tomorrow. Curiosity is the antidote to keep up to date.”
