was born in Southern Italy, the youngest of five children. My father, an applied electronics teacher, somehow spoiled the family with a Commodore 64, then an Intel 80486, then a Pentium II. As a kid, one thing was clear: my job would either be in front of a computer or in front of an audience, because I was involuntarily the comedian kid most of the time.
I started working at 18, straight after a computer-science high school. University itself was affordable in Italy; the luxury was the time. It would have kept me away from clients during their working hours, so for me it was a no-go.
I started small as a freelancer and became known around my town. On my 18th birthday, a random 50-year-old guy I had met a few times showed up at my parents' door — not kidding — saying he had returned from an exhibition in Rimini with a business idea that could save municipalities money. Then he realised I was getting dressed for my 18th birthday party and laughed his ass off because he thought I was much older.
I eventually said yes and found myself on the floor of a garage with a laptop, writing firmware and Python to make environmental machines communicate over the Internet. At one of the first city launches, the mayor told local media how important it was to rely on trustworthy companies that "know what they are doing". I was standing a few metres away thinking: I left school yesterday. I learned C and Python through hardware blowing up in my face and servers crashing. I changed clothes in the car after pushing the latest update to the machines you are inaugurating. I thought you people were the adults here.
A couple of years later, about half my phone book was made up of public officials. I was one of the cool kids with a BlackBerry and a busy phone schedule, and at the same time I was building one of the first Italian-made virtual sports platforms while the government was still drafting the specifications for how those products should work. I had amateur football players wearing a motion-capture suit that almost cost me a kidney, to record and extrapolate to animate the rigged 3D models of the football players; yeah, just like you see it done in the movies.
The jury is still out on whether 22-year-old me was brave or just a stunted fool. But those years gave me a 360° view of the business. I might have been the geek in the room, but every day I was forced into commercial, operational, regulatory and people decisions that had nothing to do with my background. Either I made them, or things did not move. I missed payroll. Twice. We got some decent satisfaction, but it could have gone better according to my young ambition.
I was surrounded by people telling me I was smart while I watched nerds on big stages shaping the world. I decided I had to learn how the big stuff was actually done. My boyish smile, improbable English and PHP skills somehow landed me a job at Sky Bet.
Their HQ was not in London, but in Leeds, West Yorkshire, where they make up words that do not exist in English just like we do in Napoli. Until then I had worked in big buildings like courts and town halls, but at Sky Bet I had an e-badge with my photo opening doors, some serious scalability shit I had never seen before, and a bunch of people who were looking at me like I came out of a videogame: "it's me, Francesco". I seemed to be the only Italian in Engineering. My poor colleagues: I think it took me months to speak a proper technical sentence.
Sky Bet gave me exactly what I needed: a large, regulated organisation where I could learn by doing meaningful things without the pressure of being the smartest person in the room — while also testing my adaptability to eggs and bacon for breakfast. As my seniority grew, so did my appetite for responsibility. I also wanted to travel around Europe and live more like a digital nomad. Before Covid, remote work was nowhere near as common as today, so the most obvious way to create that life was to build my own product.
By then I had assimilated enough industry experience to identify gaps in retail betting products across Europe and build around them. What I remember most is the heartbeat when I realised no VC was coming to save us and iGaming laboratory certification costs were entirely on us. I was used to investing my own money, but that never makes the decision easy. As we say back home, "we all live under the sky": anything can happen.
Then Covid happened. Did I say retail product? Retail betting shops were among the businesses hit hardest by shutdowns, and the product I had built around that physical world suddenly lost the world it depended on. Painful, yes. Educational, absolutely.
Having owned a team remotely for years, after Covid I was able to go after an international remote role as an employee. What is life without being "the guy with the weird working schedule" in the group? As Director of Engineering at CreateApe, their Pacific-Time 9-to-5 was roughly my 6pm-to-2am. My Friday nights were non-existent. Who am I kidding? I'm an ex-founder; my Friday nights barely existed for most of my adult life.
CreateApe taught me another kind of versatility: in the morning you speak with an executive who just got a budget approved; in the afternoon with a family who put mortgages on their houses to grow an e-commerce business. Every client is a human being with a backstory. Customer feedback was not an anonymous response in a tool; it was the client themselves evaluating your work with you, week after week.
Then I joined Remote. I led the payroll product engineering teams and later org-wide initiatives such as the biannual Hackathon — three days where engineers self-organised and shipped — and the Engineering Hiring strategy, working closely with the People team and the VP of Engineering. I have always been passionate about hiring: selecting the right people with pragmatic criteria is one of the foundations of what a company eventually becomes. Remote taught me that a leader should be empathetic and servant-minded, but firm enough to challenge the status quo when things are not working.
A company's values may stay the same forever — I do not expect us to evolve into another species different from humans anytime soon — but if its processes are not serving the people and the product, it should evolve. Remote also taught me more about diversity and the different ways people execute. I learned that putting a tiny checkbox next to a delegated task forces you to write down how you actually tick it and have people coming from different continents to agree on it. Around 80% of us were working in a second language, after all. It also improved my spidey senses for incident prevention and hard safeguards. In iGaming, people get angry when technical errors affect their bets. If you want to see somebody truly pissed off, mess up their payslip.
The reason I am a manager is that I understand people and processes as I understand computers, and I believe the modern engineering manager has to unlock people's full potential with AI. The reason I am still a software engineer is that people who obsess over details are needed if we want to build a world on foundational infrastructure that actually works.