Startupper is born

“I fell in love with technology when I was a little girl. I went my father’s office, he was a software entrepreneur, and for the first time I saw the desk with the computer and the swivel chair. That was when I realized that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, to start things from scratch.” 

And Benedetta Arese Lucini, one of the best-known starter-uppers on the Italian scene, has done just that. Her latest idea is called Otter Finance, a platform that allows people to get cash loans at very low interest rates and without installments by putting up their investments as collateral instead of disinvesting. But beyond her most recent endeavor, her CV reads Rocket Internet and above all Uber, where she was Country Manager for Italy and Regional Manager for Europe, hired directly by the company’s founder, Travis Kalanick.

Her great passion for mathematics inspired her studies at Bocconi. She says: “I chose to study finance because it allowed me to apply mathematics in an all-encompassing way. I began my journey in investment banking, working day and night with colleagues from all different countries. There were some who knew they would do this job and some who knew they would leave. 
I was in the second group.”

So Arese Lucini decided to continue her studies with an MBA in New York. “Those were the years of the Lehman Brothers crisis, and I remember the panic of my classmates who had studied all their lives to enter the world of finance,” she adds. But even this experience turned out to be an asset. “Having seen the scale of that crisis, I am less afraid today, I’ve seen the US market recover and many opportunities arise after that disaster.” Just to mention one: the emergence of the fintech market.

It was love at first sight with the start-up world when she got to San Francisco. Here Arese Lucini, as a member of Credit Suisse’s Technology Investment Banking team, met founders and got an up-close look at projects, ideas and start-ups.  “For example, I worked on Facebook’s IPO in 2012, and with many American start-ups that were taking their first steps right after the crisis. These included Dropbox and Airbnb,” he adds. It was during these years that she met Oliver Samwer, who was launching Rocket Internet on the Southeast Asian market. 

“I packed my bags and went to work in Malaysia to develop e-commerce at a time when card payments didn’t even exist in Asia. It was a challenge, no doubt, but I learned a lot.” From Kuala Lumpur, she returned to her native Milan to embark on a new adventure, Uber, in 2013. “We went from covering ten cities to 450 when I left three years later. I went from managing two people to 100,” she adds. A challenge also in terms of leadership. “I think I made a lot of mistakes, especially in the beginning, partly because I came from a very traditional banking world. I realized over time that you have to delegate instead; value people, and trust them: American empowerment.”

In 2016, she decided to “stop doing start-ups for other people and do one for myself.” With the idea of making finance accessible to everyone, she founded Oval Money in London, a platform for automatic savings and investments, starting with one euro. She raised capital, but after a few years she was forced to sell her company. “That failure became my biggest lesson learned. Today, I try to mentor others to prevent them from making my mistakes,” she adds. One of the most valuable lessons learned is knowing how to ask for help, which is an act of strength, never weakness. “In fact, I realized that mistakes, the big ones – you have to have the courage to make them, because it means that by trying to innovate, you gave it everything you’ve got.”