From a beach in Rimini to running a country on AI

Where the engine was built

Rimini is the smell of the sea and a beer under the beach umbrella at sunset with friends. My mother taught math and physics in high school, and I was good at both, but I also liked how companies worked. Management engineering in Bologna was the compromise between the two.

I thought I'd live within an hour of that beach forever.

The leap that scared me straight home

Ducati was the first company to bet on me: they sent me to China at 24, my first time abroad. I still remember the first week in a hotel near Jing'an Temple, scared and alone for the first time, yet strangely thrilled by the skyscrapers rising over the old houses.

In the end it was too much for me. When they offered me a role as Area Manager in China, at my dream company, I said no and went home.

I could not have been more wrong.

Where I learned to sell

Back in Bologna I had a good job and a desk that felt too small. China had changed me, and I found out late. So I left for Dubai, where I sold gate barriers at three times the competitors' price, which teaches you how to sell anything to anyone.

Then Ducati called, and you don't say no twice to your first love.

Five years, three continents

For five years I ran distributor networks across the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe, opening flagship stores in Dubai, Prague and Istanbul. We brought the Ducati Riding Experience to Yas Marina with our UAE and Bahrain importers, the first time in the region and never repeated since. Those years taught me budgets, sales planning and how a brand behaves when it is loved.

Two bags

In January 2020 Redona and I landed in the United States with two bags, and then the world closed. Three years passed without seeing Italy. It was the hardest chapter and the richest one: I learned direct-to-consumer marketing, studied finance at Cornell and finished an MBA at night.

And we became four: Sophia in 2022, Victoria in 2025.

The math that didn't work

In October 2025 I learned I would be promoted to run an entire country. I did the math on the hours and it didn't work.

So every morning from 3 to 7, before breakfast with my daughters, which stays non negotiable, I studied and built. On January 14 I stopped watching videos and created a folder, the way managers organize everything, with one deadline: be ready for Q2, when the new job would arrive.

It was ready when the job arrived. Exactly as planned.

Redona's version: "supportive, but he works too much."

Where the story is today, and one promise

In April 2026 we moved to Canada, four people and moving pods where six years earlier there had been two bags. Today, 191 days after that first folder, the AI agents I built run half my workload while I run Ducati's business in Canada, and I write about how it all works.

One thing you should know before you read anything I publish: I am not a software engineer, and what looks easy to me now was not easy to learn. That is why I only share what I actually ran and tested.

If I haven't done it, I won't teach it.