20 years in the room.

The story

I run Britemind, and I'm co-founder and COO of Black Belt Consulting — a boutique consultancy placing senior talent in data and AI, cloud and full-stack engineering, and programme and product management. At Britemind I work with a small number of CTOs, CPOs, VPs and Heads of Engineering and Product who are figuring out the parts of the job nobody prepared them for. Black Belt I founded with two others; in three years it has grown to €8M in revenue and 50 consultants.

I also still take the seat myself. Right now I'm CTO for a client; before that, eighteen months as CPO at a listed scale-up, reporting to the CEO and sitting in the management team. I'm not a coach who only coaches — I'm still doing the work I coach people on.

I'm a certified business coach, trained in ML and product management through Stanford Online — but the coaching started well before the certificate. I've coached dozens of people inside the companies I've worked for: direct reports, and peers with no reporting line at all. I still do it today, inside my own client. I've never been only a CTO or a CPO.

"I started a mentoring journey with Stefano during an important transitional phase in my career, from developer to CTO. He stands out for his strong grounding in reality and practical approach, combined with a distinctive emotional intelligence and understanding of the IT context. A rare yet effective mix, and I owe him a great deal for what he shared with me."

Before all this: I grew up in Italy, studied engineering in Rome, and ended up in Finland in 2005 — joining Nokia just in time for the last great mobile revolution. I spent seven years there, starting as a system administrator and growing into an IT manager, building the team from just me to fifteen people supporting a two-thousand-strong organisation of Linux specialists. I contributed to seven mobile devices, including the Nokia N9.

In 2011 I co-founded Jolla and spent five years as CTO and board member, building Sailfish OS from scratch — ramping an R&D organisation from zero to 80 people in a single year, raising $50M, and learning more about leadership under pressure than any course could teach. It was the hardest job I've ever done, and the one that propelled my career forward.

Then Elisa, Finland's largest telco, where I led the Digital Services unit behind more than €200M a year in revenue before moving into a transformation role reporting to the EVP of Technology. Then Utopia Music, a hypergrowth music-tech scale-up, where I built the Financial Services engineering unit from zero engineers to MVP in nine months while keeping the older platform running.

Somewhere in there I was awarded the title of Knight by the President of the Italian Republic, for connecting the Italian and Finnish startup ecosystems. I compete in Ironman 70.3 triathlons as an age grouper — while running two businesses — which is perhaps the most honest signal of how I think about preparation, sustained effort, and performance under pressure. I host the Nordic Leaders Podcast, and speak Italian, English, and Spanish fluently, am conversational in Finnish, and have basic French.