Translating Love to Success with Isabelle Andrieu

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Full Transcript:

Note: This is an original transcript–edited for sense, length, and clarity.  If you have any questions or concerns, please email our host, Doria Lavagnino, at doria@sheventurespodcast.com.

Note: This is an original transcript–edited for sense, length, and clarity.  If you have any questions or concerns, please email our host, Doria Lavagnino, at doria@sheventurespodcast.com.

Doria Lavagnino:

Imagine having the vision for an AI-based translation company more than 20 years ago. Today, Translated.com, the company she co-founded, translates in 193 –– almost 200 languages –– in 40 areas of expertise. Translated.com works with startups as well as some companies you may have heard of: Google, Expedia, IBM, and also nonprofits –– which really speak to the integrity of their work –– World Health Organization, the EU Court of Justice. She is also the CEO of the tech incubator, Pi School, which has a venture arm and an education arm, which she will tell us about later. They have invested in 58 companies to date, and she has done this all in Rome, Italy, which I can’t imagine how amazing that must be and this is where both are headquartered. Isabelle Andrieu, welcome to SheVentures.

01:24.97

Isabelle Andrieu:

Thank you so much, Doria, for welcoming me so much. I’m super happy to take part in this podcast and thank you for the opportunity.

01:34.86

Doria:

Absolutely. So Translated.com was established in 1999 by a linguist (yourself) and a computer scientist, who is your husband. One of the things that you say in your story is that you started with an investment of about $100, which was used to purchase the internet domain and some online advertising. I was wondering if you could take listeners back to the beginning and maybe a glimpse of how you were both able to recognize a gap in the market and sort of seize the business opportunity, if you will.

02:18.52

Isabelle:

I don’t want to disappoint listeners but this is a love story. This is not a story about planning, growth, and focusing on a market need. It was a story of me and coming to Italy to follow my heart and to follow my future husband, Marco, and establishing together and deciding to spend more time together and just create something, a project that would unify our skills –– me being a linguist him being a computer scientist –– and we said, “Okay, what do we need to do to make that work?” I love translating and there is no service available that tells you exactly how much it costs to translate and in how much time you can get it. So why don’t we build that? So that was the main idea. Because I had experiences, when I arrived in Italy, you arrive with your two suitcases, you need to make that work, you need to set up your nest. The work I found was very far away from where we decided to establish our nest, let’s say. The main reason was really to spend more time together and do something.

04:11.17

Doria:

That’s so interesting and so many couples that I know would never choose to work together. But so you’re saying that that was the fundamental driver for starting Translated.com.

04:25.67

Isabelle: 

Yeah, absolutely. I was raised financially responsible so I left all my family — my family is originally from France, I have no relatives in Italy — so I just left everything behind and followed my heart with my two suitcases. And within a month I just started seeking job opportunities, and there was not much. So I ended up doing French teaching in some companies, and then after some months I ended up being a marketing assistant very far away from where we were. And it made no sense because I just left France to be with Marco and so that was the main point. And when we decided that we wanted to found the company, we had to make that work because we had no other parachutes, let’s say. We were very hungry to make things work, and I think it was one of the main drivers of the success of the company to be hungry.

05:47.22

Doria:

Yes I was wondering if you both had jobs but did you decide to make the transition at once or was it more a step at a time looking at the opportunity, making sure you had a income for your family while you’re figuring it out, or did you just dive in and say, “We know this is a market opportunity. Let’s make it work.”

06:19.60

Isabelle:

I think we were very fast in deciding. So we tested the market a little bit in summer. After three months, I just called my dad and said to my dad, “Okay listen I’m going to quit my job with my revenue and start a company.”

06:52.22

Doria:

What did your dad say?

06:56.25

Isabelle:

My dad was an entrepreneur so he was the most supportive person ever and I can’t be blessed enough to have him because he was just really, really supportive of me embarking on this journey and I think it was a relief for me to understand that my parents were supporting me –– not financially.

07:03.93

Doria:

Your husband, Marco, has a degree in or is a computer scientist, an AI engineer, correct?

07:17.26

Isabelle:

Not really. Marco hasn’t finished his studies. Marco is a physician but a computer geek interested in computers since the age of 12 so it was very ––

07:22.74

Doria:

Self-taught?

07:36.12

Isabelle:

Yeah, absolutely.

07:36.55

Doria:

It sounds like a lot of the people who succeed with computers are often self-taught. You and Marco today run one of the world’s largest translation platforms. What does language and translation mean to you personally?

08:07.50

Isabelle:

Diversity. I’m a very curious person and I think language is an enabler to diversity. This is really profound and you can be yourself only if you speak your native language, I would say, and that’s really important to share culture, knowledge among other people.

08:49.89

Doria:

How does Translated.com work? I was on the site and I saw that, as a small business owner myself, if I wanted to I could get a quote but you also have a lot of other things going on with that company. So could you speak to the different business segments of the company?

09:14.52

Isabelle:

The main idea is to have a major impact in the language industry by serving as many customer types as possible. So we started by offering a platform where it was very easy to understand how much a translation would cost and in how much time it would be delivered. So we attracted, since the very beginning, private people, small enterprises, by translating every kind of support from websites to documentation, legal translation, software, so on and so forth. We also attracted larger clients. The larger clients sector has become more and more important in the company because we are able to provide some sort of technology to them and connectors to enable them in their expansions. Now we have three pillars that we –– let’s say –– explore that are still private customers. Let’s say 20 percent of the revenue is from smaller or medium enterprises, 40 percent and the rest being large accounts such as Airbnb and you mentioned some.

10:56.27

Doria:

The idea, and I’m not sure if you saw this initially when you started the company to have that kind of foresight, but that’s really the scalable part of your venture is these larger opportunities, as you say, as well as helping the small and medium-sized businesses. Incredibly cool. Now, AI is an interesting topic for many people. Explain the relationship between human translators and AI and how they coexist.

11:35.50

Isabelle:

As I said Marco and I started the company, the two of us in our very small flat in Rome next to the sea watching The Simpsons on TV and trying to make things work. It was tough. We understood that we needed to be faster and we understood that translators also needed to improve their skills. So how two people could, let’s say, introduce more technology to allow themselves to increase the business. Translated is a tech-savvy company using a symbiosis of AI combined with humans. We are very picky whenever it comes to repetitive tasks. How can we improve that? How can we enhance translators’ work by giving them the opportunity to avoid repetitions in their translations and support them from a technology standpoint to improve their work and let them concentrate more on what’s the beauty of translating creativity, I would say. We came out with a lot of technology since the very beginning because we understood what clients wanted in terms of speed. They wanted us to improve the speed of the translation, so we decided, okay, how can we do that? It’s a matter of sitting next to a translator and understanding why it takes him or her this amount of time to translate a document. And at that time within the industry we were translating the same way since decades ago: You take your piece of paper and you start translating handwriting and then transcribe it into the computer. So we said, “Okay, how can we improve that?” And it was a mindset, always trying to improve the technology for the translator for a better work approach and the same way for clients. How can we serve clients in a more rapid way and a more efficient way? 

14:24.48

Doria:

Yeah, efficient and I would imagine accurate goes without saying. You alluded to some of the challenges but what would you say, today, are the key challenges that the translation industry is facing, if any? Maybe you’ve solved them all I don’t know.

14:50.29

Isabelle:

No, no, no. The main challenges to me are the amount of work; the amount of documentation that needs to be translated is enormous. We need a lot of technology. You’re not going to translate everything with professional people because you have not so much time, and the amount of content is so large that you need to bring more and more technology. The more the technology is accurate, the more you are able to translate a larger amount of content.

16:01.25

Doria:

That makes so much sense. I was thinking about legal or technical documentation that, to your point, not just anyone can translate that; it requires some level of expertise. And then I would imagine with the AI that it continues to learn as it’s being fed information and so is that kind of what you’re talking to?

16:33.90

Isabelle:

Exactly, and we have our proprietary technology which is called ModernMT. That was named by AI gurus, the closest to human machine translation, that helps. It’s the technology that recognizes the style that you want to give to your translation, the style of a client, for instance, Airbnb doesn’t have the same style as another client. The same style of Mario as a translator is not the same as Michael because each of them want to use words that are different because they are used to expressing themselves in different ways. ModernMT helps a lot with that.

17:25.50

Doria:

I want to just take a step back if you don’t mind for a second and just ask you a little bit about you. You mentioned that you’re French or you are originally from France, tell us just a little bit about your early childhood and how did it shape the vision, if at all, of what you’re trying to do today? Is it that you were always hopeful of finding a love story? Was it that you envisioned yourself a translator?

18:06.40

Isabelle:

Both my parents were madly in love with each other so I grew up surrounded by love, and I think I was fortunate enough to experience that from a young age. So I think it set the foundation of every other relationship that I had in my life. On the other side, I was the firstborn of three, with two brothers, and I was immediately assigned the leading position in the family. As you know, I had to expose my brothers and fight for the decisions, let’s say, with my parents and we have to fight for your rights, as we say. As a child I was very independent being the only female in the family with my mother and with two younger brothers and I just loved traveling and I was very, very curious. My curiosity of diversity and what the world could offer me was teased by all the travel that I did from a very young age. My parents would bring me to summer camps at the age of 7, and at 12 and 11 I was abroad for three weeks in the U.K. and then the U.S.. My parents would do everything to bring me to different places every holiday, and at 20 I went to China to do a work experience as an interpreter for one month. It’s not a big surprise that I moved with my two suitcases at the age of 22. I was just very curious about different cultures and languages. So I studied languages at the university and I envisioned myself for sure being part of the language industry as an interpreter, a translator. But my father being also an entrepreneur, I had this seed of being independent and doing my y things and doing them my own way, the way I wanted it to be.

20:34.81

Doria:

You mentioned that you were the oldest and you were the only girl and you were independent and I noticed that within your company, one of the things that I read is that you’re a big believer in mentoring women: 80 percent of the project managers are women. I also read some women who are now directors at Translated.com, they started as interns years ago, which is wonderful and I think something that really has been lost in America. I don’t know if in Italy but certainly in America, in this day and age, it’s really unheard of to be able to grow in one place for so long. But getting back to the point of women, can you give our listeners tangible ways that they can make their companies places where women can advance and feel comfortable staying and maybe talk about how you’ve personally implemented them at Translated.com?

21:53.94

Isabelle:

I think women are fantastic and absolutely 100 percent skilled to become leaders, and the more they behave as women with empathy, with communication, with all the skills that characterize them, the more they become great leaders. Becoming a leader doesn’t mean being bossy, and I think we have to talk about that also because we are surrounded by our culture that shows us images of managers that are bossy the way we used to to understand and see from our fathers and grandfathers and I think we really need to avoid that. It’s a little bit by chance that we had so many women in our company at the beginning because a lot of women are in the language industry for sure so we were hiring them. But we understood from an early stage that they were more keen at covering certain types of positions than men and we had cases of campaign managers and project managers, very rare cases of men being in that position and it didn’t really work. We actually have very few male project managers and male account managers.

24:04.49

Doria:

That’s exciting and so women have been able to find their place at Translated.com, and why do you think they feel supported? For example, in the U.S., there are not many benefits for women, particularly in terms of paid maternity leave, it doesn’t exist in the U.S.. So I was just wondering if there are any such policies that you wanted to underscore.

25:11.68

Isabelle:

The company offers some benefits and tries to support them as much as possible for maternity leaves. For instance, we understand that the first years of the newborn are very critical and we want them to decide whether they want to focus on their career. The company needs to provide a support system that allows them to do so. By that I mean supporting them financially by raising the salary, for instance, because they are able to pay for a babysitter because they want to stay in the office longer. Or a different kind of support system: If they want to work at home the first year of the newborn, they are allowed to and we try to facilitate that and it’s a matter of letting them understand that everybody is different, every woman is different. For instance, I have three babies so three children. I am different from all my colleagues and no one has had the same approach and I know that I was just dying to come back to the office after three months.

26:43.95

Doria:

Yes, me too, I understand.

26:50.96

Isabelle:

Not that I don’t love my kids absolutely, but I really need to find the balance between my working life and my private life. Everybody’s different so as long as they are giving back to the company in terms of –– you know we have women that started at a very early age, very young like 20, 22. They gave so much to the company. We try to be as much a startup as possible with this sort of mentality. So they give a lot and at a certain point they decide to raise a family. They’ve given so much. You have to understand that they have so much knowledge that they can share, and it doesn’t mean that they are not 100 percent at work because they had their first baby. It would be a loss for the company if you don’t provide that kind of support to allow them to give back, I don’t know if it makes sense.

28:11.61

Doria:

It does make so much sense and I really love what you said about it being an individual choice, to your point, some women don’t have the luxury –– in the U.S. anyway –– of taking time off because it’s just not paid and they’re in a dual work household. But if you do have that choice some women decide that they want to do child-raising full time and that is an incredibly difficult job and I think we all agree, yet there are women like you and myself who, for me after 11 weeks, and my daughters are my world but after 11 weeks with my first baby I was absolutely ready to go back to work and I know that for me, personally, finding a work/life balance allowed me to be both a better mother and a better worker.

29:14.71

Isabelle:

Exactly, and what you develop as skills when you become a parent can definitely be used in the working environment like patience, multitasking — there are so many skills that you develop when you become a parent and the company has to understand that and it’s not a taboo to become a parent. You are not putting your professionalism into parentheses because you are raising your child. No, you have to embrace everything and find the perfect balance between the two things.

29:57.57

Doria:

Let’s talk about Pi School, and I understand there’s a venture arm and also a school arm and businesses are also involved. I was just hoping you could give us a high level of what this entity does and its different parts.

30:18.37

Isabelle:

Translated.com was becoming profitable. We’ve been profitable since the very beginning, and after some years we decided that it was time for us to diversify a little bit the money, and why not invest into the young generation of people. We started it by investing into startups that would use applied AI to several sectors because AI was something that we would understand very well. The driver would be AI. We created Pi Campus. That is a venture with now 58 investments in startups, early stage, that do AI in transportation, medicine, food delivery. We have a rich space. We have so many sectors and they are located worldwide in the U.S., in Italy because we also wanted to invest in the young generation of entrepreneurs locally because Italy was a little bit behind and we hosted them in the campus. We have these beautiful villas where we host the startups together with the headquarters of Translated.

32:10.71

Doria:

Would you say that it’s like an incubator model?

32:15.27

Isabelle:

So it’s an early stage investment and we invest from $50 to $500K per startup. They need to have a product already that has traction. We have an advisory board; we negotiate from 1 to 10 percent of the ownership of the startup. It’s not like an incubator because it’s a little bit afterward but we try to accompany them and make their first exit. 

33:03.53

Doria:

It’s kind of maybe like a seed round? 

33:12.35

Isabelle:

Exactly.

Doria:

Have any of the companies exited? I know it has only been five years. 

33:19.79

Isabelle:

Yes, so it’s a long-term investment for sure but we have two exits so far. It’s going well and we’re investing mostly on the recent investments. We’re in airspace for sure, cleaning the space with satellites, balloons who would send satellites into space, it’s kind of crazy but it’s very interesting. There is also one investment that is called Boom that we made with Richard Branson, and it’s the next generation of supersonic airplanes trying to replace the Concorde.

34:08.33

Doria:

I do remember the Concorde. I never flew it, but my father did once; he said it was amazing. A long time ago. Very exciting and so that’s the venture arm. 

34:22.96

Isabelle:

That’s the venture, and at Pi School so we saw in the investments that there is a need for more AI engineers in the world to help a little bit to help the transition for companies into digitalization. So we need more AI engineers and we need to form them and train them. We decided to create Pi School. Pi School has two programs: Pi School of AI and education programs on creativity. So Pi School of AI is a program of eight weeks. We take challenges from the industry, for instance, stakeholders, companies that have an idea of improving AI in their company. We make a selection of engineers worldwide. Engineers don’t pay because it’s a giveback that we want to do to the world. We train them with mentors and with coaches in an eight-week hands-on program and we work on the challenge of the company.

35:55.29

Doria:

Exciting and does one have to pay to enroll or can they get scholarships?

36:04.19

Isabelle:

It’s a free scholarship for students for engineers. The contribution is taken from the stakeholders so the sponsors that are companies, as I said, that’s how it works. We’ve done more or less 60 projects, 57 projects so far training 160 engineers, turning them into AI experts, which is impactful.

36:40.39

Doria:

That’s phenomenal, and I imagine they come from across the globe?

36:46.41

Isabelle:

Absolutely, they come across the globe. Originally the program was physical so we would host them on campus, they would do like a bootcamp, eight weeks being hosted by us and it was really, really fun. With COVID we put everything remote. We are now doing session number 10 and it’s ending at the beginning of May with the opportunity for the students to come physically again for the last week and pitch their hands-on projects to the stakeholders and people that we want to invite for the event, and it’s going to be really fun.

37:41.96

Doria:

Oh yes, and it’s been a few years. I would imagine.

37:43.92

Isabelle:

After two years, we finally have them back physically so we are super excited and it’s going really well. Also the AI market in Italy is growing more and more. We have a lot of companies that decided to trust the process. And this session number 10 is very exciting because we have more projects than before and I’m seeing a trend here.

38:23.52

Doria:

That’s exciting and I wanted to ask, I read somewhere –– and that’s the thing when I start researching then I can’t remember where I read it –– the number of men to women students. I think there have been many more men and maybe a handful of female students, is that right?

38:44.77

Isabelle:

Yes, unfortunately yes. We try to balance the gap and we always try to have at least two or three females out of 12 students. In the current batch, I think we have three out of 14 people.

39:10.23

Doria:

Why do you think that is, because you’ve watched AI develop over the last 21 years? Why are women not either choosing or better represented in the field?

39:30.10

Isabelle:

To be honest, within Translated, I’m seeing a lot more interest in putting your hands into the code by females. Things that maybe before I would have not noticed. I’m very pleased to see that, actually. I don’t really know why there are so few females in engineering schools. But we’re seeing more and more, and I think it’s changing a little bit. It’s slow, but it’s changing a little bit. In the last batches, we were hopefully able to have more females. But I remember some batches where it was absolutely 100 percent men and we were really struggling in finding some women. I don’t really know. 

40:24.45

Doria:

What about race? Is there diversity in race or is that also difficult?

40:35.85

Isabelle:

In the school of AI, you mean?

40:39.30

Doria:

Yeah, or in general from what you’ve seen with AI, with your classes.

40:46.76

Isabelle:

So with AI, I think there is a lot of diversity and we receive CVs from all around the world. We had Brazilians, we had Australian, European people, very, very diverse. I would not say that AI precludes any kind of culture. We’ve seen a lot of Indian, Pakistan people who were really willing to increase their skills in AI. It’s been a trend lately. But we try to really measure the diversity within each batch to allow every single person coming from different cultures, including also Italy because we are in Italy and we want to have an impact also locally.

41:48.31

Doria:

You and your husband have never taken venture capital and as you know today if you just read about Silicon Valley it’s a little bit, I don’t want to say it’s crazy, but it does it does feel kind of crazy when you hear about companies having an IPO and valuation of several billion dollars but they’ve never actually turned a profit. What are your thoughts about that, if any?

42:27.12

Isabelle:

So to be honest as a business owner, I think it’s better to keep 100 percent of your shares within the company; if the company grows more than 20 percent, that’s for sure a rule. It’s a funny fact because when we started in 1999, we were genuinely not aware of venture capital. We didn’t really know what it was and we were just trying to do our things. When we started dealing with Google, Google reached out as a client, Marco went to California and he talked to the CEO and you realize that the company was founded in more or less the same year as we started and raised a lot of money so he understood that there was this opportunity. But our company has been profitable mostly from day one, so we never really thought of raising capital and it was just last year, just exactly last year it was April 2021, that we decided to receive a $25 million investment from Ardian, one of the largest private investment firms here in Europe. The investment was made mainly because we were not courageous anymore enough to really push the company to its full potential. We were making decisions that were a little bit, “Okay, we have all of our family money in the company so maybe if we have another investor it will help us really push the company to its full potential.” So that’s the main reason. The second reason is we’ve done a lot of research in AI, and we understand what we need to do to reach the singularity within the transition industry and by that I mean how can we improve the machine translation to a point that is as equal as a human translation because we’ve talked about how there’s so much content to be translated even automatically. We know how much it takes in terms of technological effort and it’s very costly. So we said, okay with some investment we can go a little bit faster because if we do that by ourselves it will take ages and we want to accelerate that.

45:30.20

Doria:

And so by accelerating that is it also because there are more competitors in the market today?

45:42.30

Isabelle:

Yes and no. To be honest, and I am repeating my husband’s words and what I’ve heard also from other partners, I don’t want to be seen as a “she knows it all.” But what I’ve heard is that there are very few companies in the localization industry that really have a vision of what is needed to improve the localization industry to a point. The vision is really what makes the difference, I would say, and I’m repeating my husband’s words.

46:32.70

Doria:

But it is a really distinguishing factor and when I looked at your business I was so impressed. Yes, it took 20, 22 years but, my goodness, you and your husband and your team have built an incredible company.

46:50.50

Isabelle:

Yes, and I think we have to praise the team a lot because we haven’t talked about the team so far. And it’s an incredible team of people that we’ve built that we’re surrounded with, and without an incredible team you can’t do what you need to do and this is for sure what distinguished us also. And this is also my passion, I would say. How can you make sure that your team thrives and grows not only professionally, but also personally? And a happy team is the key to the success of the company so we really try to bring them what they need to be happy and to be stimulated in the right way. 

48:09.56

Doria:

That they want to stay right because they’re content?

48:13.72

Isabelle:

Exactly that they want to stay and that they give back and they contribute to a point that the company can flourish and they can flourish themselves.

48:23.75

Doria:

This kind of leads into my next question, and we’re almost at the end of the hour. One of your strengths is obviously in team-building and recognizing the importance of empathic leadership. My question is being in a business now for more than two decades, one of your successes certainly is that and you may have others, but I wondered if you could share with listeners one success and one lesson learned, something that you wish you had done differently.

49:11.49

Isabelle:

I think as an entrepreneur, I see the success as the number of people I try to impact. Being in the position of leading a company that serves 185,000 clients, that works with 255,000 translators worldwide, it’s really rewarding as an entrepreneur and having an impact also on the team. Translated’s team is 140 people that we treat not as employees but as elites. We want to nourish their minds, body, and spirit, which is why they’re working at Translated. To give you examples, we try to develop personal projects for each team member. We expose them to challenging experiences. They have kickboxing classes. Training is part of their daily routine. We’re also talking about taking part in the round the world regatta with no technology on board, I don’t know if you heard about that. 

50:45.97

Doria:

No, please tell us.

51:01.12

Isabelle:

So Translated is going to participate in the 50th anniversary of the Ocean Globe race, it’s an around the world regatta in 2023. It’s a regatta with four legs, with no technology. Our slogan is “We believe in humans,” because Translated uses inestsive technology but is really a symbiosis between the human and the machine so “We believe in humans.” It was a no-brainer for us to participate in this regatta because only the human skills will bring us to win or participate in this regatta so that’s why we decided. So they are exposed to these kinds of challenging experiences.

51:46.95

Doria:

Yes and team-building, right?

51:55.44

Isabelle:

Absolutely. The impact that we have on people, to me, is the success. We try also to have an impact overall. So sustainability is also something we try to focus on. And we recently bought a watermill to be 100 percent sustainable because when you do AI you have this huge carbon footprint and you need to pay attention to what you’re doing so we said, “Okay, how can we change that a little bit?” We had a friend who worked in the energy environment and it just came like this and we decided to invest in the watermill, which is the watermill that was designed by Einstein’s father in early centuries.

52:59.18

Doria:

Oh, you know it’s funny you mentioned that. I think I saw a picture of you and your husband somewhere online about this. Isn’t it also –– maybe I’m getting this confused with something else –– is it going to provide energy for other people?

53:22.64

Isabelle:

No, so it’s going to provide energy for the entire campus. These are the successes and I can mention others. The lesson learned, I would say, what would I have done differently? You’re never really prepared for the journey of entrepreneurship, I would say. I would have done so many things differently, but it’s part of the process I guess, especially since we’ve learned so much from our errors that I cannot say. I would have redone so many things but I think you really have to trust the process,and it takes time to build a successful company. It took us 20 years and sometimes you have this misconception of these unicorns that raise in very few years. I think we have to rebalance that a little bit because I think it takes really a lot of time to build successful companies. 

54:45.41

Doria:

Absolutely sustainable ones. 

54:51.31

Isabelle:

Sustainable ones, exactly. If you go too fast it’s not really good. You really have to find the balance between what you’re doing, caring about the people, the impact you’re having in the business, the footprint, everything, it’s a round-the-world impact.

55:09.10

Doria:

Before I ask you to tell us where listeners can find out more about Translated and Pi School, I just wanted to ask one more question, which is about Italy. Not being an entrepreneur in Italy, is the government supporting of entrepreneurship? Just curious about your views on that, I honestly don’t know.55:39.37

Isabelle:

If I may be 100 percent honest, I’m French, so I’m seeing what the French government is doing for entrepreneurial projects, and I think they are doing really great to support young talents. I think it’s good to start a business in Italy for so many reasons, not for the government I would say because there are a lot of taxes but for the human factor. There are so many skills that you can find in Italy, a very diverse community of makers. There are a lot of talents and we need to attract them even more and try not to let them go too far. So that’s what we are trying to do. We try to surround ourselves with the great talents in Italy, not exclusively of course; we have talents everywhere.

56:52.29

Doria:

I understand what you’re saying, though, I’ve always wondered and had the impression, rightly or wrongly, that because there’s such a heavy taxation that it’s very difficult to grow a business.

57:03.34

Isabelle:

But we compensate that with the lifestyle balance. Italy’s absolutely incredible in terms of the network of people, the food, the weather, which is incredible, and the cultural environment. We are in Rome, the ancient city. It’s amazing, you are surrounded by so many inspirational buildings and so that’s amazing. I think it compensates a little bit for the craziness and the non-supportive governments that we have. But overall I think it’s a really great choice and we’ve seen a lot of young talents and friends that decided to come back at a certain point of their career and give back to the young generation of tenants.

58:08.97

Doria:

Bravissimi. Where can listeners learn more about Translated and Pi School or anything else that you would like to tell them?

58:25.12

Isabelle:

Translated you can find us on www.translated.com. On social media, we have channels on Instagram, YouTube, and Linkedin. We publish a lot of articles.We have Imminent, which is our research center about languages that is very, very rich in terms of how we can support companies to decide in which language they are willing to invest. We are doing a lot of research about languages with Imminent, and then the next magazine is going to be published within a month in June I think. You can go on www.translated.com/imminent to find more about the project and that’s pretty much it.

59:20.95

Doria:

And Pi School?

59:21.21

Isabelle:

Yeah, it’s www.picampus-school.com and there you can find everything about Pi School.

01:00:04.34

Doria:

Thank you so much for sharing your love story, your business story, and your journey with SheVentures today.

01:00:14.47

Isabelle:

Thank you, Doria! Thank you for the opportunity. It was my pleasure.