My name is Marco Giberti. First of all, thank you for having me. It's great being here. And I started my career with technology at Apple. And after that, I was always dreaming with my own ventures, and I started an events company, a B2B media company and an e-commerce company. And I was able to start those companies from scratch to exit. And I spent almost 25 years around live events, which was my main activity. And I started with technology events, and I ran a portfolio at the end of more than 50 annual trade shows across the Americas. And when I exit that company, I decided that I wanted to go back to my geeky roots, and I started investing in early stage technology startups, mostly around live events technology, marketing technology, education technology and media technology. And the name of the company is Vesuvio Ventures, and I'm doing that for almost 10 years. And I work with early stage companies, but also with later stage and growth companies, hopefully trying to help entrepreneurs as an entrepreneur thinking as they do and hopefully adding value.
Look, I think that the most important thing is that finally events are ready for a change, for a deep and serious change. I'm talking about this idea for almost 10 years. And it was always changing reasonably fast, but we learned that COVID was a massive accelerator, and now the live events industry is ready for a serious change. And I see this as a tremendous opportunity for those event organizers who are ready to embrace technology, innovation and change, and create a new generation of events that could bring a complete different return on investment and valuable position to the industry.
My main frustration with events was always the fact that you come to the event for a couple of days and it's gone. And I hate those big banners, "We'll see you next year." And I was always thinking, "This should be way longer than two or three days," the investment, resources, energy, money that companies invest should be way longer than that. With technology, we're allowing to extend the event impact hopefully all year long. And that's what we discuss as part of our book and our thesis is that events should exist more as platforms and not just as a couple of days. And that digital platform should stay alive as long as the community needs it. And the community should engage before, during and after the event and exchange value, and hopefully facilitate the face-to-face connection on a way more productive way. If you start that conversation before the event, during the event the meetings are gonna be more productive, the return on investment is gonna be way bigger. And hopefully, the conversation could continue after the event is done.
I like the example of remote work and how remote work is accelerating during these days, and companies and employees are realizing that you can be productive from a different angle. If you think on that way, or if you think that now every single big tech company is working on what they call "Solutions for the hybrid world," events should follow that trend, and events should think from a different angle. It's no longer about just, as I said before, two or three days. It's about a hybrid model that you can interact face-to-face plus digital, and the whole idea and experience should stay longer than that. I don't think that the conversation is about hybrid events. I think that the conversation is about a hybrid world. And the hybrid world is moving into that direction with remote work, with Telemedicine, with many industries that they are reinventing themselves. And events are no longer gonna be isolated from that.
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