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Welcome to "Visionary Voices" the podcast where we dive into the minds of business owners, founders, executives, and everyone in between.
Each episode brings you face-to-face with the leading lights of industry and innovation.
Join us as we uncover the stories behind the success and the lessons learned along the way.
Whether you're climbing the corporate ladder or just starting your business journey, these are the conversations you need to hear - packed with visionary voices and insights.
Let's begin.
So Davide, thank you so much for taking the time to jump on this episode of Visionary
Voices.
Can you give us a top level view of what it is that you do right now and your journey so
far?
Thank you, Akil.
So the journey so far has been long.
What I do right now is we're building a platform for an app to help people in companies
interact and develop better relationships that helps them work better, be more creative,
feel safer.
happier at work and more productive across the whole board.
It's specific for teams and basically the idea is that we want everyone in a company to
have access to emotional intelligence micro learning and the platform allows everyone also
to have micro practices.
So to put all the tools in practice by themselves and with other people in the team.
It's gamified and it helps also, you you play with other people in the team or against
other teams in the company.
And it has AI analytics in the background that understand the team dynamics and where they
need strengthening.
what your strengths are, what your areas for development, particularly in emotional
intelligence.
So what do you need to grow?
And it puts people on learning paths.
So that's what we're doing right now.
Then if you ask me how I got here, that's a very long story.
But in short, basically, I'm a physicist.
worked for 20 years in engineering companies.
I had experiences where the team culture or the company culture was great.
I was flourishing.
I was learning.
was engaged.
And I was proud of my work there and very, very conscious of the quality of what I wanted
to deliver.
And there were other occasions where the
companies that I worked for where it was very different.
The experience was very different.
And then, and I wasn't happy.
I wasn't happy in the team.
I wasn't happy with my work.
I wasn't happy with myself.
The very last company I worked for basically went bankrupt because of team dynamics
problems.
There was no culture of admitting mistakes and asking for help.
And a large project that was draining lots of cash.
the person in charge of it kept trying to solve it by themselves.
They didn't even ask for help.
They didn't admit there was a problem until it was too late.
And basically the whole company went bankrupt.
And at that point, I had already been leading many teams.
I took many leadership and coaching courses myself.
And then I started doing executive coaching.
And for five years, we were running in-person programs with individuals or teams in
companies with great testimonials, great success in case studies.
And then it was actually our clients themselves that at the end of our programs, they
always say, we want more.
And they were always saying,
How can we share it with the rest of the company?
And that's when we started thinking of Nucleo, which is the app that we're developing.
all the toolkit that we developed and tested in the years that we were doing more
in-person programs is now on the platform.
The platform is called Nucleo and the company is called Wise Humanity.
Amazing.
mean, quite journey.
think there's a lot of things that we can really unpack.
I definitely want to talk more about the app and everything a little bit later, but
zooming in on your journey, how did you find that transition going from engineering to
then running a business and working in these corporate structures and everything?
Because it's quite a big difference, I guess, in terms of a career.
So how did you find that transition and what challenges did you have moving into business
itself?
So there's a, even when I was working for companies, I was always very entrepreneurial and
very much feeling responsible and for my work, autonomous in a way.
So that definitely helped.
It happened really, the transition happened very naturally.
So by the...
By the time of the transition, I had been working for 20 years.
I had already taken leadership courses myself and coaching, a coaching diploma myself to
be a better leader.
I was already in that environment.
And the first thing I did when I left corporations, I actually started working with a
professor of a leadership program that I had taken before.
So for a few years I worked with him and then I founded Wise Humanity, my company,
together with another person that was working with that professor as well.
And so there are moments where it feels, so now we have a larger team, we're still few,
we're still very few.
Yeah, less than 10 and we're all over the place.
Although now there are three, including myself in London.
But it feels lonely at times, which in a way helped me improve my networking.
Not necessarily the skills, because I mean, at the end of the day, when you network
yourself, but it made me want to network more, which is helpful.
But yeah, I think that the...
For me, the biggest problem every now and then is like the loneliness.
other than that, not having a large structure around me is also a massive difference.
There's so much that you need to do yourself when you're an entrepreneur.
But I like it, I like that.
I mean, I like the hands-on part.
I like to see my work.
create something right in front of my eyes.
So that's great.
Yeah, I completely agree.
I'm the same because when it comes down to building things and you can actually see the
impact you're having, I feel like, you whenever I've worked in a big company before, I was
doing all these tasks, but I can never really see the impact it was gonna have in the
company.
And, you know, you're just one small cog in the whole machine.
And so, yeah, I completely agree.
It's really cool seeing your work actually materialize and manifest into reality itself,
which is great.
But what you said about the loneliness.
side of the journey, I think that's so true.
And maybe it's something that's not spoken about that much within the entrepreneurial
community itself, because a lot of the times it is just you working.
And especially now, because we both have small teams which are global, which means that we
might not have, every day we're going into a big office and meeting everyone or anything
like that.
And we're just there kind of by ourselves, maybe on Zoom here and there.
And it's a big change, right?
And you've got to try and figure out a way to navigate that.
as an entrepreneur itself, but the networking piece is so great.
mean, for me, I remember when I started my first business and I wanted to be rich and
unknown was my whole thing when I started.
But then I learned, you I need to get out of there.
I need to network.
I need to speak to people.
And from speaking to those people, like now I've got some great friends within the
community.
I've got some mentors that I've found as well and also business partners and things like
that.
So the networking piece, very, very important.
I guess when it comes down to the app now and zooming into that, how has that been?
Because app development is one of those things which can be very, very tricky, like
building out apps, software, et cetera.
So how have you found, I guess, the transition from going from the leadership coaching to
then actually going into this app development side?
Because again, that's another big shift in the work you're doing.
So I've always wanted to scale.
And mostly this desire has been driven by impact.
Because I mean, I could see the impact that our programs were having on people.
And since the day we created Wise Humanity was the idea that we were creating something
that would outgrow
the founders and still exist in the future whenever we retire.
so the desire to make a bigger impact and give access to these powerful tools to more
people has always been there.
Now, if you run programs in person or on Zumba, if you run live programs, it's...
very complicated to scale, almost impossible to scale globally.
So there was always the idea of creating video courses, but I've always felt that it
wasn't doing justice to our methodology, which is very practical.
So what we really like and what we do is that every concept, even those, I don't know,
seemingly abstract ones like,
you need to find your happiness in yourself.
All right.
So that's everybody knows that everybody has heard that.
Yes.
Cause the cause I don't really have control on the things around me.
So it's important to find sources of happiness inside myself.
What does that mean in practice?
What does this mean at the workplace?
So, so what, what we did was humanity.
We, created habits and practices for every concept, even the most abstract and how you can
put it into, into action.
in your life and at work.
So the video program, the video course wouldn't do it justice.
And then in 2023, when AI started becoming more popular, I thought, okay, this is
different.
This creates like an interaction and an interface that is, even if it's more digital, it's
actually more human, can be more human.
Yeah.
So we can maybe create something that integrates the personalized experience that AI can
give you and a video course wouldn't give you because it's more standard and more linear.
So that's the moment when I started thinking, okay, this can be a tool that does justice
to wise humanity, to our toolbox.
And that's when I started working initially with a client.
She's a multi-entrepreneur, 20 years in entrepreneurship.
Esther is now a teacher of entrepreneurship, a professor of entrepreneurship at Hull
University in Boston.
She was two-time client of Wise Humanity.
And because she's an entrepreneur, I started work...
asking her, involving her, etc.
and the idea.
And then the two of us worked for several months, almost a year, to create the project.
Because, I mean, both of us, we also had our normal work going on in the background.
To create the project, the business plan, the vision, run some numbers, some interviews to
our clients, and, you know, if there was interest in such a thing.
And then we launched the idea, and that's actually the moment you were saying, when we
need to put ourselves out there.
And that's the moment when I started telling this story to many more people in my network
and expanding the network, looking for other co-founders.
Because of course, the skills that you need when you run a training company are different
from the skills that you need when you run a tech company.
There was a pivotal moment there, also talking about the experience of the transition from
corporations to startups.
There was a moment where I realized I don't need to have all the answers.
And I don't even need to look for someone to answer the question.
I just need to ask the question to the world.
And then someone who has the answer will materialize.
And so that was a pivotal moment because until then, the vision of nuclear was there, it
was amazing, it was inspiring, but I was also...
stuck or a little bit frozen because I was thinking I don't have the skills to do this.
I don't have the knowledge, I don't have the energy, the time to do all this.
And then there was this pivotal moment when I thought, okay, I don't need to have the
answers.
I just need to ask the questions.
And in that moment, it gave me a lot of courage and a lot of...
energy motivation to just go out there and talk about the idea.
And in two, three months, we got the first round of investors and two new co-founders that
joined the team.
And by the way, Esther, person was our client, she also became our head of operations.
So she also joined the team.
So yeah.
Very cool, very cool.
And I love what you said there about asking the question.
And you can see that with the process you've gone down, right?
Because you've, instead of just going straight away and building the tech, you know,
software straight away is you actually took the time to ask the questions to the right
people, you know, in your network or your friends or whatever it looks like, you know,
your clients to figure out, okay, what do they actually need?
Does this make sense?
You know, maybe what feature do they need?
All these different things.
Cause I think one of the biggest...
problems entrepreneurs face is where they start building something they think clients
need, but don't actually ask the clients.
And then they build it and they release it and they don't actually want it because you've
not asked the right questions.
So I think that's a very key learning experience that I think sharing to everyone is very
important because if you just ask the right questions, you're gonna find out the things
you need to find out.
Especially if you're looking to start a new venture or start a business, build a service
is...
ask those right questions to those right people and then you can understand what it is
that you need to build out rather than what you just might think they need.
So I think that's a really important lesson there.
And we're still at the beginning.
There's so many questions that we still need to ask and so much feedback that we're still
collecting.
But yeah, that's really super important to talk and to not be afraid of even receiving
embarrassing answers sometimes.
If I wait...
This is actually one of the tools that we also use.
If I wait for my solution to be perfect, it may take an extremely long time and it may be
wrong.
It might be wrong.
So yeah, so now going out there, even when you almost feel embarrassed of, you know, for
what you have created so far is important.
Yeah, being able to handle the criticism as well.
I'm very much a perfectionist in lot of things I do.
And so when I did get criticism before in the past, it really stung.
I was personally hurt by some criticism or whatever it's going to be.
But ultimately you get to a stage where the criticism is just great feedback.
I mean, something that I've implemented into the process when I'm working with clients is
every phase of the project or whatever that looks like is asking
for feedback, like straight up, you know, what the friction points you've had so far
during the process, all these different things.
And although you get a criticism sometimes, it's made the service become even better than
it could ever be because of that constant feedback loop.
yeah, I think that's very, very important.
And then I guess when it comes down to some of the technical knowledge you might've
uncovered from speaking to these teams and everything, what some of the biggest problems
teams face, right?
When they're trying to...
Become more efficient and work together better.
What what's on the common pitfalls?
People might go down when it comes down to building that out
How much time do we have?
So a very typical one is creating an artificial harmony and we want to be nice to people
and it comes from a good place so we want to be nice with people, we want to have good
relationships with the people around us, in our team.
And then maybe we don't have those difficult conversations or hot topics that are very
important for the business.
But we are afraid to hurt someone and or to criticize someone's work or someone's ideas.
Or we are afraid to hurt someone, the boss.
Yeah.
And so the other bit is egos.
Egos are a large component of who we are.
And again, this is also one of the tools that we teach.
And the difference between being passionate about something, an idea, or identifying
yourself with it.
And when you identify yourself with it, that's when you put your ego in it.
And then, like you were saying, it's important to get criticism.
If I identify myself with my idea, with my vision, anyone who criticizes it is criticizing
me.
And this connection doesn't actually help me maintain my clarity and openness and then
receive feedback, receive criticism and learn from it and grow.
Because if I attach my ego...
to that idea, then if someone criticizes it, then my first reaction would be to protect
myself and protect the idea or be aggressive, which also happens in conversations, a
typical team meeting where there are egos fighting instead of having open conversations.
So that's another one.
So another one is...
Well, the one I mentioned before, psychological safety.
The ability to be able to admit mistakes.
The culture around mistakes is also really complex in a way because theoretically
everybody knows, team leaders know that they need to allow mistakes to happen because
otherwise, A, if there's a big problem, people will not.
will not face it, they'll try to hide it.
And be also, if you don't allow mistakes, people are not creative then.
They're afraid of sharing different ideas or trying new things.
then the work becomes very process oriented, but not creative.
So everybody knows that we need to allow a culture of mistakes.
But obviously nobody wants to make mistakes.
Of course, I don't want to make mistakes.
I don't want my team to make mistakes.
So it's difficult.
That's another thing.
So what is our mental map about mistakes and what other mental maps are more powerful and
allow people to take responsibility for what they're doing, but at the same time also it
becomes okay.
to have made a mistake and to work on it, to correct it.
So that's another complicated...
Yeah.
How do you go about actually changing that mindset within a team?
Because it seems like quite a, it's quite a big thing to try and shift and transform
within an organization or within a team setting.
So how do you go about breaking that down and rewiring them to start thinking in this, in
this new light?
So that's how Wise Humanity, our methodology works in our trainings in person and also on
nuclear on the app.
Micro habits.
So you need to create.
Normally when you go through a culture change or a leadership program, you go to the
program, you learn something new, then you go back to your team and you're alone.
And maybe, yeah, you will retain something of what you learned, but definitely not the
power of everything you learned.
So with Nucleo, with the app, what it does, it continuously gives you prompts on, you
know,
creating micro habits.
for, I don't know, for a week, 10 days, you work on understanding people's different
perspectives.
you know, like a micro habit that you can create there is at the beginning of a meeting,
sharing everybody's perspectives and acknowledging the value.
of this diversity and then you run the meeting.
But you start from a different place of acknowledgement.
Another one is, well, there's another.
critical aspect of personal leadership and team leadership is control.
So what do we have control over?
What is outside of control?
another micro habit is to, whenever you start a new project, to list two different
columns.
What are the things that me and my team, can control?
And what are those that are outside of control?
And then you focus all your actions on what you can really make an impact of.
And on the other ones, you create contingency plans.
But then all your actions, all your emotional and mental energy is focused on what you can
do.
And with the awareness that certain things will never be in your control, you need to
acknowledge them.
why, different scenarios, et cetera, but they're not in your control.
yeah.
control the controllables, right?
Is what you need to really think about.
But I love what you said there about the micro habits.
Because sometimes when people think about, I need to change an organization, I need to
change the team.
You're hoping to do this big transformation straight away and everyone can start thinking
the same way and everyone's aligned.
But realistically, that's just not the way you're going to transform the team.
It's going to come from those micro changes on a personal level.
And then over time, you're going to start to see that shift across to seeing the
transformation.
Is that right in the way you're working it?
Absolutely, absolutely.
Because the big step, I don't know if you've ever seen, there's a drawing, a famous
drawing of two ladders and one has all the steps and the other one has like the steps are
very far from each other.
And you know, if you take small steps you can go high and taking bigger steps is a lot
more difficult and it can kill the journey.
Yes.
from the very beginning.
There's a recommendation, for example, that when someone talks to me, I always give them.
If you want to change, first of all, if you want to change, you need to change your
behavior.
That's what change is.
Change is about changing your behavior.
So how can you change your behavior?
Create a different habit.
So think of a bad day.
If you want to change something like...
I don't know, you want to do some meditation, right?
For example, how many minutes can you meditate on a really bad day?
Two.
Okay, then that is your target.
Meditate two minutes every day, start from there.
so, and that is reachable, that's achievable.
That's what you can do on a bad day.
Yeah.
So give yourself that as an objective, but then do it consistently.
Yeah, so don't say, okay, I'm going to meditate for 60 minutes every day.
Because you might do two days and you have a bad day and you stop.
you know, set the bar low when it comes down to that just to build up the routine and
consistency for it.
Well, as you said, right, even on the bad days, you can still achieve what it is that
you're setting out to achieve.
I think that's really great.
And something that people can adopt just in terms of their day to day life, right, is when
you're trying to change your habits or change your behaviors is break it down, chunk it
down into those very small
easily done tasks.
And then once you build up that consistency, you can maybe increase the duration of
whatever that habit is going to be.
So I think it's really cool.
guess switching gears a little bit, I'd love to learn some of the lessons you've had from
the entrepreneurial journey itself.
Because like a lot of people listen to the podcast, they're starting their business or
they're starting scaling up their business.
So what lessons do you have, do you think from your whole few years of being an
entrepreneur, like what lessons have you taken from there that we can maybe give to
the next generation of entrepreneurs coming through.
Being able to be fast is important.
and
So.
something wrong that we did.
We wanted to test a different sales strategy and we invested a lot of money and time on
the strategy and it didn't work.
Now, the problem was that the way we had set up this new strategy and the investment, we
only learned that it wasn't working very far down into the process.
So we had already invested a lot of money and a lot of time.
Time is really precious when you're a startup.
mean, money is super precious as well, because you don't have a lot, but time...
time is even more important.
And I'm thinking if I could go back and I want to try a different sales strategy or any
strategy actually, build feedback in it from, you need to have points where you can verify
if it's working or not very soon in the process.
Very, very soon.
so that you can change.
Yeah, yeah, no, I love that.
think that's very, very key because the amount of times when I first got started is again,
right where I would build out this whole service, whole new thing or whatever it's gonna
be, had no feedback points throughout that process.
And I got to the very end, I spent all this time, money, as you said, building out this
thing.
I go to launch it and it fails because I didn't get the feedback early on.
And so having in those points of feedback, yeah, very, very key.
And as you said, when you're starting out,
know, time and money, they're the biggest things you need to leverage in the most
efficient ways, And the smartest ways.
And I think the biggest thing that I've learned recently as well, you know, because I am
more of a perfectionist and I love getting things to 110%, you know, before launching it
is sometimes you need to get it to like 70%, right?
Or 60 % and then start launching it, start getting the feedback because then ultimately
that final, you know, 30, 40 % you're trying to close, that might shift and change from
the feedback you're getting, right?
And so,
You need to launch as soon as you can and get that feedback loop coming back to you.
Another big change that we went through and it's a similar lesson though.
We first started building our platform with external developers.
Mm.
And there, I heard everything from investors or other entrepreneurs.
Some say that it's okay.
It can be okay.
Some say, no, no, you need to have an in-house developer.
We didn't have it at the beginning and we decided to start with the external developers.
And then we realized that it was going too slow, particularly, yeah, particularly the part
where, okay, we want to change something.
and it would take a month to change a simple thing.
So we had to change deeply.
We also had to change our team so that we could have a developer in house, which we do
have now.
And things are moving a lot faster.
So again, I heard stories where you, even if you're a tech.
company, you don't necessarily need to have a developer in house immediately.
For us, it's been a big change to have one in the team.
So yeah, that was another thing where we needed to change a lot and change fast.
Hmm.
Yeah, I guess it's one of those things where when you're starting up, it's okay, we need
to maybe maybe save money, right?
So on on staffing and recruiting, so like, I'm not going to hire, we'll just go to an
external agency.
But then at the same time, as you said, is you want to iterate as quick as you can, and
change things as quick as you can.
And if it's in house, you can do that if it's not, then you know, it's up to them.
So yeah, it's quite interesting that that conflicting
thing there, right, is do you go external?
Do you bring it in house straight away?
But I think for app development itself is maybe for like the MVP, right, is go external.
And that's something that we did as well.
But then when it came to developing it further and taking it to the point of the finished
product is we brought that in house then and it made things move much, much smoothly
overall.
Yeah, for the prototype, for the first prototype and the upgrade of the prototype, we went
external, but for the MVP now we are internal.
Talking about loneliness again, another lesson, but in that one I was lucky from the
beginning, I feel, I was lucky from beginning, from immediately, even when we had...
you know, immediately after the first round of investment, we had a lot of cash and we
could have hired someone.
But I've always been adamant that I didn't want employees.
I wanted co-founders at the beginning.
I mean, in a way, we're still at the beginning.
I mean, we're not exactly at the very beginning, but we're still early stages.
I want co-founders for key roles.
I want co-founders.
don't want...
employees.
So that's a different type of search then, because it's, because in a way, I don't know,
maybe it is more complicated, because you need to look for two things, you need to look
for the skills, the technical skills that you need, and an alignment of values, passion,
vision, and which is
more complicated to find.
yeah, that for that also networking and you know, going out and telling your story to
everyone so that people can, you know, you may be talking to someone that is not the
person that is going to be your next co-founder, but they know someone, which is partly
what happened.
So yeah.
No, it's an interesting take, isn't it?
Instead of just trying to hire just employees itself, it's find people who are buying into
the mission, right?
And buying into the values that you have as a company.
And I think when you're starting out, I think that's very important actually, because then
you have more of that network, that support network around you, and they're all building
towards the same goal.
And they're not just all relying on one person who's the founder to make all these
decisions and everything.
You can kind of share that burden, let's say.
So I think that's a really interesting way of doing it.
So where can people find you if they're interested in either the app or interested in
working with you in any way?
Where can they find you?
So, well, our website is washumanity.com, www.washumanity.com.
And I'm davide at washumanity.com.
That's my email or LinkedIn.
Yeah, and I always reply.
Amazing, amazing.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to jump on this podcast.
I've really enjoyed it myself.
Thank you very much again.