How Silvio Memme Went From Ferrari and Alfa Romeo to Venture Capital

• Former engineer Silvio Memme has had a non-regular route into undertaking money. 
• Just before he invested in startups, he lived in Italy building engines for Ferrari and Alfa Romeo.  
• Memme claims his technical encounter as an engineer has been very beneficial for his get the job done as a VC.

It was 2017 and Silvio Memme felt like some thing in his job was missing. 

Memme was excelling as a mechanical engineer, developing engines for Italian luxurious automobile business Alfa Romeo. 

In simple fact, he had always imagined of himself as a mechanical engineer, graduating at the prime of his engineering course at the College of Toronto and then acquiring his initially career at Ferrari appropriate out of graduate university. 

But as Memme invested much more time as an engineer, he began to sense like there was a little something else that he could go after.

“I loved what I did,” Memme reported. “I also was hoping to be able to think a minor little bit far more strategically, and it’s possible not only emphasis on a single specific merchandise, but have the possibility to impression a large amount of different systems.” 

Additionally, he was drained of getting to consistently travel between Italy and Detroit, Michigan, the house of Alfa Romeo’s dad or mum corporation, Fiat Chrysler. He missed staying in Toronto, his hometown. 

But when he was seeking for new jobs at home, he couldn’t obtain any in the car business that interested him. So he known as up 1 of his mentors from Alfa Romeo, who advised on the lookout into MBA systems. 

For Memme, it appeared like the ideal way to find a new career route. He had constantly excelled in school, so it was no shock when he bought his acceptance letter to Harvard Small business School. 

Just after graduating from Harvard, he acquired accepted into a operate-study program at OMERS Ventures, the venture investing arm of the Canadian pension fund. There was no promise of a career later on, but Memme took the fellowship anyway, keen to check out his hand at investing.

He turned out to be a pure. Memme assisted with special investment decision assignments related to climate tech, strength, artificial intelligence, and of program, transportation, and uncovered all of his professional knowledge transferred above seamlessly to the part. 

“As an engineer, you are typically analyzing information, you are trying to dissect problems, and break them into bite sized pieces to come across the root result in of points,” he mentioned.”I think that believed approach is transferable to dissecting troubles in just companies or chances within just businesses. Furthermore, becoming capable to converse the same language as the people who are building people systems has established to be pretty beneficial.” 

Right after a number of months working on a venture by job basis at OMERS Ventures, Memme was in a position to “persuade ample men and women on the group” that he understood what he was accomplishing, and landed a complete-time trader position last November. 

So much, he is found that the mixture of his specialized abilities and his willingness to find out new items has been the key to his good results in enterprise money. 

His a single piece of tips for aspiring VCs that will not come from a finance track record: “I consider with time you begin to understand that even if you are a generalist, getting a minor bit much more strategic in phrases of how you source bargains and who you speak to is important,” he said.