Talent Garden react to COVID19: will be a difficult semester but we see bright future

When together with Lorenzo Maternini, Rasa Strumskyte and our investors, we opened the first Talent Garden, we had a dream in our minds: create a physical space where digital and tech innovators could work, learn and connect, making their business thrive. 

We made mistakes, we learnt from them and we used our failures to succeed and expand our business. However, not even in the worst scenario planning, or in our nightmares, we could expect what we are living these days. 

Nothing similar happened in the last 100 years, at least that someone remembers: we are all closed in our homes and we still don’t know the impact on the economy and on our lives on a medium-long term. This is something that is touching us personally, our friends, families, loved ones. And there isn’t anyone we can blame for it. This makes the situation even tougher.

I am not a virologist, nor a politician or an economist. So I don’t want to enter these topics that have been over-discussed on our social media feeds for weeks.

What I want to share is how we are approaching this crisis at Talent Garden, keeping in mind our mission and adapting our business.

1. Since the very beginning of this crisis, our first priority has been the safety of our teams and of our community. On Feb 22nd we released an internal website gathering all the official information for Health Organizations in the countries where we operate: it is key to have reliable information and avoid the spreading of fake news. We have been following very closely what authorities were saying: we knew that our decisions about our campuses could impact not only us but also our members; among us, in fact, we have startups that needed their office to work for businesses with a strong social impact. Now, all our team is working remotely, and we invited all our members to do the same but the campuses remain accessible for those who really must go there and work. 
2. We could witness something unique: we saw how the community hosted in our campus could really impact our countries. All the community, including us at Talent Garden, has been pushing themselves to put our capabilities to support our countries in this crisis. Let me do some examples: Fablab in Milan and Brescia has been working to create amazing valves for hospital in 3D; WeSchool, members in Milan, supported Italian public instruction to make an incredible progress on digitalization of traditional school; AkaraRobotics, members in Talent Garden Dublin, has created a robot that emitting ultraviolet light (UVC) has the ability to disinfect hospitals and get rid of the Covid-19 virus. This is how digital and tech can change the world and even in such a dramatic context and we could experience how much our mission of creating this digital and tech ecosystem is true and relevant.
3. Speaking about us, we have been trying to digitize our business that, for its nature, was born and run offline. All our students are continuing their programs online: they can continue to learn online, with a new redesigned experience. This for us was a key objective we could not compromise on: learning digital and tech is more important than ever, to be ready for the new challenges we will face after the crisis and to work in a world that will be very different. The work of the Talent Garden Innovation School team makes me really proud because they overturned our learning experience in a few days, sharing the same values, and having the future of our students in their minds. But we didn’t stop: we are bringing all our community activities online, our members need to share ideas and knowledge more than before! Last but not least, we have launched ANTEA, a platform to help traditional companies on smart working. For us, at this point, it isn’t only about making business, it’s supporting our extended community in this difficult moment to get ready for the end of the health crisis.
4. Let’s go to business, costs and revenues that are the pillars of how a company works as everybody knows. Our business went down in one week, as never happened before and I am sure there are tons of similar situations not only for startups but also for corporates, SMEs and freelancers (probably among the most affected group). In this context, we can survive only if we help each other, not only as Talent Garden but as an overall system. For this reason, we asked all our partners, suppliers, landlord and shareholders for help on payments. We also created a crisis committee to manage our cash flow and a product committee to work on new products and solutions to innovate our business during and after COVID19.
5. Last but not least, we asked our team for big support, as never before, using all the different government social support, to reduce cash expenditure as much as we could. I decided to give a clear message to all the company, suspending my salary for the next quarter and I am proud that the top managers around me have proposed similar actions for themselves before asking people for a sacrifice.

We did all this because we don’t know what will happen in the next few weeks, when the health crisis will end, neither we know when the economy will start again. I personally believe that the next 6-9 month, after resolving the sanitary emergency, will be difficult for everyone on the economical side.

However, in the last 10 days we made more for Europe digitalization than in the last 10 years: I believe that this big jump will help to develop new industries, products and solutions for the new world that we’ll explore. I believe that we are demonstrating how innovation and the startup ecosystem are key for our countries: we didn’t stop, despite the challenges, the fear and the anxiety that is keeping all of us awake during the night.

I don’t know what the future holds, but I know that supporting each other, we will be able to face it, as a unique community.