Meet the Founder: Michele Sciabarrá

In Sicily in the early 70s, Michele Sciabarrà was eight years old and holding a digital clock for the first time. Fascinated, he wanted to play with it and adjust it for hours. How did it work? He figured it out patiently – without breaking open the shell. 50 years later, Michele’s approach to tech and the Cloud follows the pattern seeded as a kid in the early mass digital era : patience, curiosity and a focus on mastering the latest tools and toys available.?

By contrast with the deep tech solutions he crafts now with CF portfolio start-up Nuvolaris Inc , young Michele loved the light and the funny and adored humor. He devoured the comic Topolino, especially admiring? eccentric inventor bird and friend of Donald Duck, Gyro Gearloose, who appeared as Archimede Pitagorico. He soon found the early games machines. After acquiring a Commodore 64 his adolescent Sicilian summers were consumed with tapping, loading and self-teaching. Getting started on coding while still in high school, he used a single page of one video game magazine to learn Basic. He wrote his first code, found clients. Michele printed diagrams for a geologist and generated texts and effects for local TV.? University and ‘Computer Science’ naturally came next.??

The degree? ‘Informatica’ at Pisa was a little too heavy on math and theorems. His goal was “always to learn to code” and so he continued to teach himself. Similar to CF co-founder (and fellow Sicilian) Davide Calì, he was drawn like someone hypnotized to the early Internet, and was soon hired as a developer by an ISP company. It was time to encounter an early product and figure out its functioning.? “Netscape Navigator 2.0 was released.? Without knowing anything of Java to start, I just wrote a few applets with it.” This began a formative journey with that language. He wrote about Java, taught Java, trained Devs in Java across the country.?

?The start was promising – it was the dot.com boom.? At the millennium he was in charge of a new company, customers galore – then the bubble burst. It seemed to some like the hype around the web had been unjustified.??

Suddenly, “no one was interested in the Internet. For a few years after 2002 we were able to survive and build a few websites.” But they went back to being strange in the business world – tinkerers and eccentrics. Gyro Gearloose.? Curious projects came in the early 2000s, like making bespoke software for government, including anti-money-laundering and financial tracking programs for the Milan chamber of commerce. Interesting, but not especially profitable.?

?He learned the hard way that the best strategy would always be to build core products that can be used by anyone. “If you build software on demand, you have no margin. Your work is paid and the advantage all belongs to the customer. Not a great way to work.”?

A focus on strong core product development led to a long career in the U.K. and eventually to Nuvolaris. He pivoted from ECM coding to the Cloud, which was emerging in a big way. The complexity and pain points were apparent; he soon found a project,? Apache OpenWhisk. He became involved early, wrote a textbook and from there, moved to the heavyweight division of Cloud development.??

Nearly 30 years into his career, he is breaking new ground. What will be the big impact??

“Like when the web started, there was a DIY mentality, and that is how the Cloud is now. It is difficult and expensive.? When the web progressed,? a product like WordPress came out and people could build a website on that backbone.”??

A version of the ‘serverless’ option that does not (unlike existing formats) lock customers into dependency on the provider of the service, Nuvolaris is a ‘Wordpress’ for the Cloud. And what does the name mean??

Inspired by the Italian words for ‘new’ and ‘cloud’ and a racecar driver (Tazio Nuvolari, ‘The Flying Mantuan’) it seeks classic lineaments of Italian design: sleekness, speed, efficiency and a scalable form. It is being made to work, look good and last for the next generation of Cloud customers – the product of a half century of curiosity and respect for core design values. No one is laughing at Gyro the inventor – Archimede – anymore.?