An unexpected journey.

Before any of this

I was born in Ravenna and spent my early childhood moving between there and Macerata, following the volleyball seasons that shaped my father's work. When we finally settled in Ravenna, I was eight and had to leave behind the school, friends and familiar places that had made up my world. I was already quiet and observant, and starting again among children who knew one another sent me further into my own imagination.

I filled it with Mickey Mouse comics, fantasy books and elaborate adventures involving toy soldiers. Treasure hunts and unfamiliar worlds were a large part of what interested me, while chess, card games and eventually competitive video games gave me somewhere to test myself. The more seriously I played, the more people I met who thought in ways I recognised, and some of those friendships have lasted much longer than the games themselves.

For a while, I considered trying to become a professional gamer. Letting that idea go left me without a clear replacement, and neither chemistry at school nor an internship in Wales offered much of an answer. In Wales, I cycled through the rain to a laboratory where part of my job was raising insects so they could be used in pesticide experiments. I had imagined making discoveries; breeding insects for pesticide trials gave me rather more time to reconsider that plan.

After school, I worked in hotel reception in Rimini and lived with my grandmother during that period. What I remember most fondly is the time with her, although the job gave me an early sense of how much of a person's life could be organised around work they did not particularly want to do. I eventually enrolled in Economics and Finance at the University of Bologna, hoping that something broad and practical would give me more possibilities to explore.

A raffle ticket and a pair of camping chairs

My roommate Matteo already knew there was a market for shoes that were difficult to buy in shops, and he pulled me into it. I was studying in Bologna when I spent about half an hour queueing for a raffle ticket that, without my knowing it, would shape the next six years of my life. The prize was the chance to buy the original Nike Air Presto collaboration with Off-White for around €200. Demand was high enough that I could sell the pair for €600, which covered my room rent. It was the first money I had made for myself in that way, and I wanted to find out whether I could do it again.

Before long, Matteo and I were leaving the house in the evening as soon as a release was announced, packing what we needed and arriving outside a shop with camping chairs folded under our arms. You met all sorts of people in those queues. There were friendships that lasted well beyond the release, and there were nights when the money at stake brought out a less charming side of the crowd. Arguments could become fights, and sometimes the police had to get involved.

That became part of my university life: nights outside shops, sometimes followed by an exam without any sleep in between. Rain, snow, summer heat; if there was a profitable release, I wanted to be there. The clothes, the people and the freedom of earning money that way all suited the person I was becoming. A side hustle was paying my rent and bills, but it had also given me a circle of friends and a reason to keep testing my own judgment.

The offer I turned down

By the time I graduated over a Zoom call during Covid, the queues outside shops had stopped. My customer list had grown, but I could no longer count on getting to the next release or winning another raffle. I had to work out how to make the income reliable and consistent. What had begun as a side hustle needed to become a business I could depend on.

I took a summer internship in financial consulting, helping people manage their investments while occasionally persuading the secretaries to print shipping labels for shoes I had sold. I liked the people and the working environment, and I was offered a job at the end.

The job was good. The future it offered wasn’t mine. I was questioning the idea of building my life around a conventional career, not just this particular office. I wanted to make decisions I believed in and be accountable for where they led. The suit and tie, the right impression in front of wealthy clients and the hours around which everything else would have to fit were part of a life I had spent the summer trying on. I kept wondering where the part that would surprise me was supposed to happen.

I was earning enough from my own customers to make the alternative more than a daydream. Turning down the offer meant giving up a good opportunity, but accepting it would have meant leaving something I genuinely wanted to explore on the margins of my life. I chose to give the business my full attention. Sneakers Daddy became the thing I was building, rather than the thing I did around university.

A life in Malta

After university, moving back home made me want an independent life of my own. Malta put the Mediterranean outside my door, offered a practical place to run a company and kept Italy close enough that leaving did not have to mean disappearing. I had started the business in Italy and continued developing it while living in Malta. Working across borders had already become normal, so choosing where to live began to feel like a decision I could make for myself too.

Sneakers Daddy grew into an international business with suppliers and customers across Europe and the United States. Bigger orders meant more moving parts and more money exposed when something went wrong. Between fraudulent bankruptcies, unpaid invoices and supplier scams, I lost enough to have bought an Audi R8. I barely drive and usually take an Uber or Grab, but even I can think of a better use for that money.

The losses were painful, and they sharpened my sense of whom I could trust. I had chosen a business in which taking risks was part of how you made money, and learning to live with the consequences mattered as much as spotting the next opportunity. Malta also became a home in a way I had not anticipated: people I saw often, friendships that deepened through ordinary evenings together, and a familiar life around the work.

The business that needed less of me

Sneakers Daddy was doing well, but an order could still send me back and forth between a supplier, a customer and a shipping carrier. I was the person keeping the pieces connected, which meant the business followed me into whatever else I wanted to do. I could afford a different kind of day; I just had to find a way to stop spending so much of it holding the operation together.

I hired a software house in New Delhi with very little understanding of what the work would involve. Having decided that the business needed less of my time, I promptly gave myself another job. Over the next nine months, I learned how much gets lost between knowing how a business works and explaining it clearly enough for someone else to turn it into software. I had become a product manager before I knew there was a name for what I was doing.

The result was Argus, a fully custom business-management system, or ERP. It connected our customer and supplier records with stock, orders and shipping carriers, so the information an order needed no longer had to travel through me at every step. Nine months is long enough to bring a human into the world. I had an inventory dashboard, but it was about to make me considerably less busy.

Once it worked, I could run the business in a couple of hours a day from my phone, wherever I happened to be. After months spent trying to explain and build the system, I finally experienced the life I had been describing to the developers. That changed what I expected from a business. I had seen that it could support me without requiring most of my waking attention, and I could not forget that possibility when I began thinking about what to build next.

Across the world, from home

At the peak of Sneakers Daddy, one of my best customers, a store in Spain, came to me with a request from an investor building a private collection. He wanted the Louis Vuitton and Nike Air Force 1 by Virgil Abloh, the edition that came in an orange pilot case. This was an unusually difficult pair to find, but I knew a collector in Japan who had one. The sale came to $102,000.

We had done enough business together that my customer trusted me to find the right person and make the deal happen. He went to Japan to collect the pair himself, while I coordinated the transaction from home. By then, the business was running well enough that even a deal on that scale could fit around the life it was supporting, rather than become something I had to organise my entire life around.

I remember doing surprisingly little celebrating. At the time, I was used to finishing a deal and moving on; looking back, what strikes me is how far the work had travelled from those nights outside shops. The number was extraordinary, but having room in my day was the part I had been trying to make ordinary.

The next thing I wanted to understand

As more shoes entered the market and some of the exclusivity faded, I could feel my own interests moving away from it too. I had learned to operate the business, but I was increasingly drawn to the systems underneath it. Argus had shown me something I wanted to understand much more deeply, and I no longer wanted the possibilities ahead of me to depend on the next pair of shoes.

I tried ChatGPT when it first appeared, powered by GPT-3.5, and came away thinking it might have a few useful niches. GPT-4 changed that almost immediately. I could begin to imagine agents carrying work forward on their own, even though conventional code-based automations were often much more reliable at the time. There was a large distance between what I could see becoming possible and what the tools could consistently do, and I wanted to learn how to work across it.

I was already looking for another direction. AI could become the business itself, or make a different kind of business work better. With GPT-4, it felt to me as though something on the scale of the internet was beginning again, and I wanted to be involved while people were still figuring out what to build. I taught myself, experimented and began putting that work into King of Automation, helping other businesses connect their processes, software and information.

Around the same period, friends were moving away from Malta and the life that had made the island feel like home was changing. I wanted to travel, and the company I was starting did not require me to stay in one place. I began through South America and then Southeast Asia. Building while moving was not always comfortable, but I wanted the experience of both, rather than keep postponing one until the other was finished.

What was worth carrying

Working in sneakers meant spending years among things people wanted to own and wear. I enjoyed that world, including the attention I gave to clothes and my own appearance. As I moved further away from it, I became more interested in what I could do with my life than in what I could add to it. Two years travelling with a backpack have made me quite good at deciding what deserves to come along.

The same instinct follows me into work. An extra device, subscription or app can quietly become another responsibility. Keeping software and information on remote servers, in the cloud, means I can reach them without carrying and maintaining all the equipment myself. Taking an Uber or Grab gives me the journey without another vehicle to own. I choose those dependencies deliberately, knowing there are tradeoffs, because they leave more attention for the responsibilities I actually want.

That does not make the shortest route to an outcome the most appealing one to me. A difficult problem can be worth taking on for what solving it makes me learn, and sometimes I care about the way I get there almost as much as the result. I need to believe in the work before I can put myself into it. The appeal of building something capable enough to last is difficult to replace with a faster way to make money.

I want to be able to tell the real story of how I earned my living and feel proud of it, whether I am telling someone I love or thinking about the child I used to be. That is part of what I mean by a sovereign minimalist: keeping enough freedom to choose my commitments, and choosing things that are worth committing to.

The world outside the work

My parents used to show me wildlife documentaries, and I grew up wondering whether I would ever see those animals and places with my own eyes. Years later, I found myself diving with sharks, climbing mountains and volcanoes, exploring temples, crossing jungles and entering caves I had once only read about. Some of those moments felt less like visiting a place than finally stepping into a world I had carried around in my imagination for years.

On Komodo Island, that feeling was particularly strong. I had first seen the dragons in a biology book as a child, and now there they were in front of me. I have always been more of a shark, crocodile or tiger person than a dog or cat person; the unfamiliar creatures are the ones that make me want to pay attention. A landscape would lose something essential without the lives unfolding inside it, and I would hate for my future children to know those animals only from old documentaries because we had let them disappear.

The ocean is where I feel most at home. I have dived around the Maldives, Sipadan, Richelieu Rock, Malapascua and the wrecks of the Maltese Islands, among other places, and I still have a long list I want to see. The more I encounter, the more I care about what is left to protect. I am interested in how science and technology can help conservation, just as I am interested in what they can make possible in my own life.

There is a cost to moving around, too. I miss familiar places, old friendships and the kind of closeness that grows when you keep showing up in one another's lives. Adventure is richer with people you want beside you, and independence does not remove the desire to belong. Finding a way to keep both has become as important to me as finding the next place.

What I am building now

Agent Chakra brings much of this together. I am building it so that someone who is not a software engineer can give a team of AI agents meaningful, ongoing work, then guide that work through their own judgment, feedback and taste. The person should be able to explain what they want to achieve and understand what happened, rather than spend the day moving instructions and information between disconnected tools.

The website you are reading is one result of that approach. Agents built it under my art direction, drawing on the material I had shared about my life and the way I write. I supplied the feedback, corrected the details and kept refining what did not feel like me. The result is something I can read, use and keep improving, rather than another description of what AI might eventually make possible.

At the moment, I am in a quieter period of building, putting time into the infrastructure I want the next part of my life to run on. Making something that works and produces real-world benefits can be an adventure of its own. There is a problem I do not yet understand, an outcome I care about and a risk that my first attempt will fail. I have to go beyond what is familiar, just as I do when I travel. I want the work and the life it supports to come closer together, while enjoying the challenge along the way.

One day, I would like to take a small crew of people who understand one another out on a vessel, keep our businesses running from wherever we drop anchor, and explore places we have not yet imagined. There is something of a pirate in that picture, although the work would mostly travel through an internet connection. I have always liked the idea of a compass that points towards what you want most. Mine keeps changing its mind about the destination, but it has been remarkably consistent about why I want to go.