When I was a little girl, I dreamed about becoming an inventor. The idea of creating new things really caught my attention and enthusiasm. Not long after in life, I was able to decode that what being an inventor truly meant to me was having the power to redefine and create new realities on a regular basis.
That’s why I decided to study Industrial Design, which seemed to me at the moment the more direct way to learn all the abilities needed to create new things and I was thrilled by the idea of these things being created to make people life’s better; then ended up adding Textile Design as a way to meet the same objective but with a textile knowledge basis, and finished my two carrier paths.
The road to organizational innovation and creativity engines, started on a tough context, within a well established “taylorian” model textile industry, where men and machines hardly differ to each other only by the possibility to move autonomously. But I gave the battle and found some advocates. After almost two years of fighting for innovation in a hostile world, when I was told the innovation program would be canceled due to the new president’s arrival, I decided to leave the security of payroll and to go bet for a new career path as an innovation and creativity consultant.
I got into my first co-founding venture of 6 people at 28 and started building Katharsis, a consultancy firm that helps companies and individuals Discover their creative potential for innovation.
Here I learned how to facilitate all sorts of creative processes with groups from 2 to 300 and within a wide variety of industries and companies sizes. Immersed in this context got obsessed with the process of opportunity finding through planned and enjoyable observations of the world around us, and created the Creative Opportunities Detection business unit, that began teaching our clients how to do the magic and turn into regular practitioners of opportunity finding.
I became addicted to observation and business idea generation, thinking about new business ideas on a regular basis and in every situation.
This helped me start in 2013 a food business with my husband and two chef friends, that sadly had to be closed after a year for lack of planning and structure when I went on maternity leave (lesson learned, I hope!), and also helped various friends and family with their own ventures, always as an appreciated advisor and problem solving thinker.
I left Katharsis in May 2019, after surviving a period of intimacy with sadness and confusion that followed the tragic suicide of my business partner, mentor, and friend; the one I used to dream this dream with.
He gave up under high levels of anxiety and insomnia, and a long period of unconscious non stop working life, which in part I witnessed and shared. I decided to commit my life to further learning and being able to teach and guide others on how to be successful entrepreneurs, but only after guaranteeing that you are successful in taking care of your self and handling your personal life — putting humans first and foremost.
I truly believe that being able to unlock the creative power within can bring lots of joy and colors to life, and I’m committed to keeping passing on the wisdom I learned and been practicing for years, but adding a most needed and critical piece of balance, values and purpose to the mix for achieving career growth and entrepreneurial growth without extreme sacrifices of health and personal life. I believe the entrepreneurial model that has been sold to us is just one model, but not quite “the right one” to all; not quite the ONLY possibility to create a business… I sense there is much pain derived from this belief.
So I have traveled a mostly empirical road to entrepreneurship, reinforced by a recent master of arts from a top business school in Europe; my wish is to put all this experience and knowledge in service to other individuals that like me have a dream of building a company, but are not willing to risk their lives while doing it.