I do not have one fall that can be turned into a neat story of failure and redemption. For me, the difficult moment returns whenever what I am doing stops feeling stimulating enough and the search for something new begins again.
That restlessness can be energy, but it has a cost. It pushes me to study, invest, start projects and meet people; it can also make it harder to recognise when to persist and when to stop. ShowMe was where I learned that distinction most clearly.
When conviction is not enough
For a long time we believed ShowMe could become a business. We understood it was not working shortly before ending that journey together and choosing another direction. The idea may have looked futuristic; that did not prove that the market, model and timing needed to sustain it already existed.
Startup Genome's research on premature scaling found signs of it in 70% of a dataset of more than 3,200 high-growth technology startups. This is a figure for that sample, not a universal failure rate, but it describes a risk I recognise: building and accelerating before there is enough evidence of a market.
The full project story is in ShowMe: what remains of a project that never became a company. The mentor's role is explored in Forward.
Bloxi: a more pragmatic restart
The next choice was to open Bloxi. We also wanted to monetise sooner: an agency could sell expertise and real projects while a startup still required time, capital and validation. It was not a clean passage from a mistake to a perfect solution. It was a decision closer to customers and to the possibility of generating revenue.
In Bloxi: from ideas to real clients I describe how that structure turned part of the earlier learning into concrete work.
Money invested in personal growth
I have committed personal resources to projects, education and investments. Education is often described automatically as an investment, but its return is unknown beforehand: you assess programmes, people and testimonials, then choose to trust. That too is risk, although different from a casual bet.
According to the OECD, between 2018 and 2022, 45% of young people in the European Union reported that fear of failure prevented them from starting a business; the stated figure for Italy was 58%. The numbers do not say fear should be ignored. They show that action always involves a relationship between perceived risk, skills and opportunity.
What I would do again
I would repeat those passages, not because every decision was right, but because they built skills and relationships that continue beyond individual projects. Some people I met then are still people I could work with today.
Restarting, then, is not the cinematic moment when everything works again. It is the ability not to discard what a project produced simply because it did not produce the expected outcome. You change shape, preserve what holds and try not to confuse conviction with validation again.
