Valentina, Who Has Never Stopped Checking Boxes in Her Career

In any professional career, there may be the desire and the need to start over again from scratch. You may want to reposition yourself and experience a moment of rupture and discontinuity with respect to the work roles you have experienced up to that moment: it can be healthy and useful. Even more so if you are considering undertaking a path as an entrepreneur and found your own startup. “Creating your own company is a long journey, certainly a lot more complex than I thought. For this reason, I think it is essential to define in advance and with great clarity what you want to do and where you want to go. It took me six months just to fully understand this,” says Valentina Cerolini. She is Co-Founder and CEO of Deesup, a marketplace launched in 2018 that specializes in second-hand furniture according to a business model based on the circular economy. “Founding a startup is an experience that leads you to change even the most consolidated aspects of your professional personality. My advice is to always maintain a high level of flexibility, which becomes a key skill, valuable for being able to adapt to the dynamics of every single market, and thus seize all the opportunities.”

After all, Cerolini has internalized self-awareness and flexibility throughout various stages of her career until the final moment in which the entrepreneurial spirit she says she always had inside her finally prevailed. She therefore follows “that path with the drive to build something of my own” with Deesup and her co-founder Daniele Ena, who is also her husband and a Bocconi alumnus (in fact, they met in the classroom). What is it like working with her husband? “Wonderful, a unique adventure. I feel lucky, we know how to separate our private lives from the professional dimension, we have a common vision.” Cerolini’s professional path, after her four-year degree in Business Economics at Bocconi University, immediately took her to New York to the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce where the alumna caught the cosmopolitan virus. It is no coincidence that she subsequently continued to work abroad, in London, in banking and then in private equity. “I wanted to test myself in the banking sector but I listened to myself and, after changing, I understood that the experience in private equity stimulated me more. I was the link between the fund and investment decisions, so I had to closely follow the definition of corporate strategies.” Cerolini continues. “It was a kind of training that taught me to take the investors’ perspective and was very useful when I later found myself having to manage fundraising with Deesup.” 

But before creating the marketplace dedicated to used furniture, the future entrepreneur had a turning point: “It was 2008 and the financial crisis broke out in London. I had already decided to change track and, in that context of uncertainty, the time had come to do my MBA, which I did at the IE Business School,” Cerolini recalls. “It was my make-or-break point because I felt that, after my new studies, I wanted to return to work with a managerial role in the corporate sector. And so I did and, perhaps, it was no coincidence that I got my job abroad again. This time I left from Brussels.” However, even in Belgium, the manager did not stop “putting the elements of the career puzzle together” and that is how she came to feel ready personally and professionally to become an entrepreneur. “There was a period of adaptation to a new line of trade that lasted a few months before embarking on the current journey with Deesup. Even today I can say I continue to become an entrepreneur every day,” concludes Cerolini. “The inspiration for Deesup? The purchase of my home. I wanted to change the furniture but needed to buy and sell them easily and quickly.”