The Rise of Starting Finance as Italy's Leading Financial Education Hub
Discover how Starting Finance revolutionized financial literacy in Italy, growing into the nation’s top educational community for finance enthusiasts.
Ciao,
After three years, this newsletter is undergoing a significant transformation. Instead of being solely a platform where I share my projects, it will now embrace a broader perspective, focusing on innovation, entrepreneurship, and product management. At the heart of these topics lies curiosity, the thread that binds them together.
Curiosity is the starting point of every discovery, invention, and innovation. It embodies the eagerness to learn, understand, and observe. This relentless pursuit of new questions drives us to challenge the status quo, venture into the uncharted, and envision novel possibilities.
This newsletter celebrates curiosity's role in shaping my professional and personal life. I hope you continue to find it valuable and feel inspired to comment and share it with others.
Nicola
Table on Contents
The Journey of Starting Finance and Its Impact on Financial Education
ChatGPT as a nutritionist assistant
Book. The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything
The Journey of Starting Finance and Its Impact on Financial Education
In the final lecture of my Digital Product Design course at Roma Tre University’s Faculty of Economics and Management, I had the pleasure of inviting Marco Scioli. A former student turned entrepreneur, Marco founded Starting Finance, now Italy’s most significant financial education community. It has a million followers across various social platforms, with over 400,000 on Instagram. Additionally, Starting Finance encompasses 35 university clubs. These clubs provide a dynamic environment for students to discuss finance, engage in business games, and tackle financial challenges. This interactive approach fills a gap often left by traditional academic courses.
Marco Scioli and his partner Edoardo Di Lella established Starting Finance with two primary objectives. The first was to produce content that enhances financial literacy in Italy. The second goal was to assist young individuals in navigating the investing world. Their efforts have successfully created an influential platform that educates and empowers the next generation in finance.
Marco and Edoardo initially dedicated half a million euros and two years to develop a stock market simulator. This mobile app was designed to enable students to invest virtual money in real markets. However, the app performed differently than anticipated. Despite a promising launch, active users plateaued at just three thousand. Marco reflected, “We realized that people weren’t as interested in what was essentially fantasy soccer for finance, so we had to pivot.”
Seeking an alternative approach, they launched a Facebook page and began organizing university events. Their first event at Luiss Guido Carli University was a turning point. Expecting a modest turnout of about thirty people, they were astounded when over three hundred attendees showed up. This overwhelming response marked a significant shift in their strategy, indicating a strong interest in financial education beyond the confines of a mobile app.
In 2018, Starting Finance launched its Instagram profile and quickly gathered followers. Concurrently, the company focused on raising capital. Despite challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic, it grew, consolidating revenues that surpassed 1 million euros by the end of 2023. Recently, the company completed a new investment round with Cassa Depositi e Prestiti and now operates two primary business lines: earning revenue through sponsorships on social channels and selling educational courses.
Marco elaborated on their educational offerings: “Our course portfolio includes master classes on software like Excel and Python. We also provide training in presentation skills and the basics of finance, helping users to diversify their investment portfolios. Furthermore, we’re developing more extensive, professional courses targeted at those aiming for careers in the finance sector.”
Starting Finance’s business model is centered around community building and engagement, mainly aimed at a young audience under 35. Marco added, “Our strategy involves creating content that is not only interesting and relevant but also makes financial and economic information accessible and comprehensible, all while upholding accuracy and impartiality.”
Writing the first issue of Radical Curiosity, I reached Marco again to ask two questions:
What piques your curiosity?
My curiosity is sparked by everything around me - life, the world, every field and area. An excellent example of my innate curiosity is how I interact with cabs. I never spend a cab ride in silence, whether in Rome, my hometown or in new cities I visit for work or tourism. I have always wanted to learn as much as possible about the place. This boundless curiosity led to the creation of Starting Finance. I’ve always been intrigued to understand the economic logic behind anything, be it a multinational company, an individual’s shopping habits, or a family purchasing a table. I believe that this curiosity would also engage our community members.
How do you exercise your curiosity?
I engage in a variety of activities in my daily life, from reading and staying informed to listening. This helps me increase my knowledge of many topics across various fields. Given my professional background, my favorite areas of curiosity are economics, finance, and innovation. When I was nine, I was in a long line at Disneyland. To pass the time, I began counting the number of visitors in the park. Curious, I asked my father about the ticket cost per person. With that information, I started calculating mentally, trying to estimate how much revenue Walt Disney had made that day.
ChatGPT as a nutritionist assistant
In my product management courses, I often challenge students with a practical exercise: design and prototype a product. A few years ago, the assignment focused on analyzing their eating habits, evaluating food waste, and conceptualizing solutions to minimize it.
The insights from the students were fascinating. They delved into food purchasing, consumption patterns, sharing living spaces with other students, and managing their refrigerators and pantries. They also discussed social dining experiences. Interestingly, several teams came up with the idea of a mobile app that suggests recipes based on available ingredients at home. Creating such an app would have been daunting just a few months ago. However, this task has become significantly more straightforward with the advent of generative AI.
The advent of multimodal large language models, such as ChatGPT, has opened up numerous possibilities in this field. ChatGPT can generate or alter recipes to suit the user’s dietary preferences or restrictions. As an example, I once gave it a list of ingredients. I asked for a low FODMAP recipe, a diet typically recommended for those with irritable bowel syndrome to reduce intake of fermentable foods. Here’s how ChatGPT responded:
You can make a low FODMAP recipe with the ingredients you have: pasta, tomato sauce, garlic, onion, olive oil, olives, capers, and tuna. A suitable recipe would be a modified version of Tuna Puttanesca. Traditional Puttanesca sauce includes ingredients like garlic and onions, which are high in FODMAPs, but you can make adjustments to fit a low FODMAP diet.
Low FODMAP Tuna Puttanesca Recipe
Gluten-free pasta (your preferred type)
Canned tuna (preferably in olive oil for added flavor)
1 can of low FODMAP tomato sauce (look for one without garlic or onions)
1 tablespoon garlic-infused olive oil (for low FODMAP, ensure no garlic pieces are in the oil)
1/4 cup sliced green onion tops (the green part is low FODMAP)
1/4 cup chopped olives (green or black)
2 tablespoons capers
Salt and pepper to taste
Optional: chili flakes for some heat
What’s remarkable is how a simple interaction with ChatGPT can effectively assist in managing diets with extensive restrictions. Users can inquire whether specific foods are permissible in their diet or request tailored recipes. It’s important to note, however, that while ChatGPT is a valuable tool, it cannot yet replace the expertise of a doctor or a nutritionist. But it’s incredibly convenient for quickly finding information and suggestions that might otherwise involve a tedious search through Google, navigating through paid advertisements, and SEO-optimized content.
The potential for a scientific study to evaluate the accuracy and usefulness of the responses provided by ChatGPT, Bard, and similar AI applications is an intriguing prospect. What are your thoughts on this? Are you concerned about safety? I’d love to hear about it in the comments and discuss it further.
The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything
The Element (affiliate link) is a book I often gift to young adults contemplating their future careers and life paths. Sir Ken Robinson was a global authority on creativity, education, and human potential. Celebrated for his transformative TED Talk, Do Schools Kill Creativity, he collaborated with world leaders, educators, and organizations to champion the role of creativity (and curiosity) in learning and life.
Below is a concise overview of the book's key concepts, summarized with Blinkist’s assistance.
Your element has two important features: aptitude and passion. Aptitude is what most people call “talent.” It’s the natural and intuitive ability to accomplish something. However, there are limits to how far aptitude can get you. You also need passion. After all, you can do something with extreme proficiency and still not feel moved by it. Being in your element requires feeling a certain pleasure and delight in what you’re doing.
Intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinctive. Most people have a relatively limited perception of intelligence. They think of it as a score on a test, a grade in school, or a knack for words and numbers. But a different perspective is required. Every single person has a unique intelligence, like a fingerprint. That means there are no two people who use their intelligence in precisely the same way.
Finding the people you naturally gravitate toward will help you discover your element. Finding your element is much easier if you first find your tribe. This group could consist of just about anybody. It might be people you work with or even your competitors. What makes your tribe unique is committing to what feels most natural to you.
Personal and social barriers are par for the course on your way to your element. Have you ever felt like you couldn’t do something? Whether it was running a marathon, finishing college, or painting a beautiful picture, there was probably some goal that you felt you could never achieve. This is normal. Everybody is faced with self-doubt some of the time, especially when searching for your element; you’re bound to run into certain barriers, some of which will be particularly personal.
If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.
Sir Ken Robinson
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Thanks for taking the time to read this episode of my newsletter. I hope I’ve been helpful. If you think my sketchbook might interest someone else, I’d be glad if you shared it on social media and forwarded it to your friends and colleagues.
Nicola