9 learnings from his journey becoming an accomplished tech generalist.

Paolo Fornasini approaches business growth as a science. 

With a career spanning top-tier companies like Google and McKinsey, he has continually tackled tough challenges in the technology industry with a structured approach. 

Grounded in robust frameworks from his education at Wharton, Penn and WashU, Paolo began his tech career at German travel startup Gloveler as a general business hire. In his first full-time role at Google, he led mobile partnerships that enabled mobile app and game developers of all sizes to grow and monetize their businesses. Often inspired by Sheryl Sandberg, he spent a brief stint consulting at McKinsey, before moving on to found and advise various startups including Keye and Temelio.

Below are 9 key learnings Paolo picked up on his journey so far.

Washington University in St. Louis, undergraduate degree at a leading university
Bachelor of Science in Economics
St. Louis, MO
2011 – 2015

Lesson 1: Being a strong business operator is a science honed in the classroom and in real life.

“I had some world-class professors at WashU. Markus Baer, for example, whom I TA’d for in Organizational Behavior – I still carry some of those concepts around with me as I am building companies or when I was hiring and growing a team at Google. In the ‘real world’, I had leaders such as Kim Scott who built our organization at Google and made sure it was values-driven.

Being a solid operator can be as, if not more valuable, than technical skills if that is the career path you want to take. Some people might spend their weekends building an app or website on the side. I’d much rather spend that time thinking about how to hire and motivate a really smart team to get 10 times as much done.”

Lesson 2: Even in college, it pays to make a conscious effort to pursue your goals.

“What I loved about WashU was that it had the best influences from both ambitious East Coast and innovative West Coast culture, but rooted in the values of the Midwest. The downside of that is you never feel as connected to industry and recruiting as a student, so you have to make a conscious effort to build those bridges with employers. I was always trying to balance the comfort of WashU with pushing myself beyond those boundaries to connect with the tech industry, which was still much more nascent back in 2011.”

Gloveler GmbH, booking platform for private accommodations
Business Development
Karlsruhe, Germany
2014

Lesson 3: Working for startups can be a lot of fun.

“Anyone’s first time being in a hacker house environment can be really exciting. We were eight people in an old building in a mid-sized German town. Different nationalities all working towards one common goal.

Doing really hacky things like writing crawlers and sending out mailers. Trying five different things and seeing what sticks. Cooking lunch for ourselves. That kind of vibe as a 19-20 year old. Work can look like this too, and it’s really motivating.”

Google, builds products for everyone
BD Team Lead (Apps & Games), Manager (Mobile App Partnerships)
New York, NY | Mountain View, CA
2014 – 2021

Lesson 4: Even the biggest companies should build agile and nimble teams.

“I was lucky to join the Online Partnerships Group within Google that kind of felt like a start up and had a history of great leaders. Sheryl Sandberg founded the business org at Google in the early 2000s. Then Marissa Mayer (Yahoo), Kim Scott who wrote ‘Radical Candor,’ which I used a lot, and then Scott Sheffer, all were major influences in building the partnerships org within the broader sales team. 

I was able to thrive there. The team was just so strong and so high performing. I was constantly learning. Constantly felt like I was having an impact. A really strong culture of cohesion as a tight ship, not fluff or bureaucratic layers. Always room to drive your own initiatives and focus on wherever you think your attention needs to be.”

Lesson 5: Sales, too, can be a science and a numbers game. 

“Sales is ultimately about connecting with people and delivering value. Operationally, though, it helps to apply a more quantitative lens to allow what you are doing as a manager to scale.

I built my sales and BD chops – how to run a pipeline and Salesforce. Growth and sales should be operationalized. That’s ultimately how you generate wins and competitive advantage. It’s not necessarily going out and finding that one big partnership or that one one-off deal, but being rigorous and developing processes.”

The Wharton School and The Lauder Institute, leading dual-degree program at a top business school
MBA and MA in International Studies
Philadelphia, PA
2021 – 2023

Lesson 6: At business school, you are the business.

“You’re almost running a small business as yourself, and you can invest that time into class, extracurricular stuff, networking, building a company, working for another company, etc. What you’re really paying for is your two years of freedom and resources to do with whatever you want.

It jolted me awake after six years of being in the corporate world. I learned a more proactive way of living life and how to spend my time. It’s easy to fill up your time with busy work. I had to build my own structures of how I spend every day learning, connecting with people.”

McKinsey & Company, management consulting firm
Strategy / Corporate Development – TMT
New York, NY
2022

Lesson 7: McKinsey masters the science of answering hard questions.

“McKinsey was the last frontier in a way. One curtain that I wanted to pull back and see what it’s really about, that people say can make you such a strong business leader.

McKinsey is the most premium, rigorous version of what they do. It sucks when you’re in it working until 2:00 in the morning on slides and models, but they’re going to truly question every assumption, every number, every plan. Talk to every expert internally and externally, run surveys. 

At Google, annual planning and strategic initiatives was 10% of my role as a manager. My day-to-day was interacting with customers and my team. McKinsey was, ‘how do you approach these problems as a science? How do you break everything into an equation, into a story that makes sense? How do you vet it from every possible angle?’

The level of rigor you think you might have had at another organization, you can always push it higher. ”

Keye, AI helping private market investors with due diligence
Co-Founder, Advisor
Philadelphia, PA | New York, NY
2022 – present

Lesson 7: People are willing to help. 

“People are excited to talk to founders. If you reach out to 200 different VCs, have a great pitch deck, you’re great about following up, you’re on message during those meetings, and have a consistent approach to answering questions, that’s the formula for raising money. 

People are going to be willing to help. Some are going to be even really pushy about it. They’re going to tell you, ‘no, this is exactly what you should do.’ At the end of the day, it’s really on you to make that decision.”

Lesson 8: Decisions about how you spend your time are some of the biggest decisions. 

“At a startup, how you spend time and money is up to you. Come up with a plan and commit to it. If it’s not working, try something else. You have to be ready to commit possibly the next decade of your life. As a founder, you’re taking on the biggest costs, which is your opportunity cost. You could have been at McKinsey or Google – you might be constantly running that analysis.”

Lesson 9: Startups are 100 times harder than you think.

“How do you build something but then actually take it into the world? How do you build on the learnings and connections that you make with other people?

We pivoted, but really shut down the company and rebooted it in a totally different space. We started in media aggregation, then B2B data aggregation and unbundling, and then AI. Totally separate products.

As hard as you think it’s going to be, it’s going to be 100 times harder.”

All photos courtesy of Paolo Fornasini.